{"id":315192,"date":"2026-03-06T01:54:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T01:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/315192\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T01:54:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T01:54:14","slug":"squeeze-trixies-review-finally-completed-first-album-proves-teenage-dreams-are-hard-to-beat-squeeze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/315192\/","title":{"rendered":"Squeeze: Trixies review \u2013 finally completed first album proves teenage dreams are hard to beat | Squeeze"},"content":{"rendered":"

In interviews to promote their 16th album, Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook have been upfront about the reason for its existence. After the world shrugged at The Knowledge in 2017, someone told Tilbrook: \u201c\u2018Nobody is interested in a Squeeze<\/a> record. What matters is Squeeze\u2019s story.\u2019 That stayed with me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

So not only does Trixies contain a story \u2013 it\u2019s a concept-album-cum-musical about a fictional nightclub \u2013 but there\u2019s also a great tale around the album. It was written when Difford and Tilbrook were teenagers in 1974 but left unrecorded because they couldn\u2019t properly play the songs they had written. It\u2019s both a new record and something for the fans who always want the old stuff.<\/p>\n

Album artwork. Photograph: PA<\/p>\n

You can certainly hear the 1974 in it: The Place We Call Mars doesn\u2019t just borrow a planet from David Bowie, it appropriates a vocal intonation and a squealing, Mick Ronson-esque guitar solo. Hell on Earth has more than a little of Sparks in its staccato keyboards (Difford said he originally wrote the music on an RMI piano, as used by Ron Mael). Might the hard-rock tango of Why Don\u2019t You owe a debt to the Sensational Alex Harvey Band\u2019s version of Next, from 1973?<\/p>\n

It really sounds like a musical. There is a lot of description of what is happening, and plenty of archetypes: the brassy stomper, the rock\u2019n\u2019roll song, the wistful ballad and so on. You can picture them being performed from the front of the stage by a character gazing up at the gods while behind them dancers act out the scenarios. It\u2019s been described as Runyonesque, which is true in the sense that Oasis are Beatlesesque, but the lyrics are written by a teenager \u2013 a precocious teenager, yes, but still someone writing about things he had never experienced. Hence the lyrics being a clever arrangement of cliches but not much more, albeit the intricate internal rhymes are already present.<\/p>\n

They\u2019d all be diverting with a staging behind them, but they lack the drama and hooks for a standalone album. There are great bits where you can hear what the band Squeeze would become, but they\u2019re bits. Fun and a good idea, but you won\u2019t be throwing out East Side Story to make room for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In interviews to promote their 16th album, Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook have been upfront about the reason…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-315192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}