![\"Glenn](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1789557489_765_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nFor more than 50 years, with a few breaks in between, Squeeze has been making memorable tunes by marrying infectious pop melodies with sophisticated and literate lyrics, often about the complexity of relationships. Now, the English band, known for such classics as \u201cTempted,\u201d \u201cBlack Coffee in Bed\u201d and \u201cHourglass,\u201d is finally preparing to grab its biggest headlining gig in L.A. to date. <\/p>\n
Squeeze brings its current nine-member lineup to the Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 19 with support acts Adam Ant and the English Beat.<\/p>\n
We sat down with Squeeze\u2019s main men, singer-songwriter-guitarists Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, during separate Zoom interviews. Tilbrook, 69, was at home in London, while Difford, 71, was holed up in Nashville for production meetings in advance of the band\u2019s North American tour in support of \u201cTrixies,\u201d the group\u2019s acclaimed album released earlier this year. <\/p>\n
Congratulations on headlining the Hollywood Bowl. I believe that\u2019s your biggest headlining gig ever in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Tilbrook: I think so, yeah. It\u2019s quite something. Perhaps that\u2019s another statistic we should have \u2014 how long can you be touring before you get to play the Hollywood Bowl as a headliner? Well, 50 years, is it?<\/p>\n
You did play the Hollywood Bowl once before, opening for Sting in 1991. Do you remember?<\/p>\n
Difford: I do. I\u2019m friends with Sting, and I really appreciate the kindness that he\u2019s shown to Squeeze over the years. He\u2019s a lovely man, and he\u2019s always got a suitcase in the hall. He\u2019s always off on tour, and I admire that about him. I\u2019m not sure that I could do that for the rest of my life, but he certainly can.<\/p>\n
Tilbrook: \u200aNo \u2026 I did go with [Police drummer] Stewart Copeland to see Sting when he was with his last band. Stewart asked me if I\u2019d come along to see what I thought of him and I recommended that he didn\u2019t get him, \u2018cause he was too jazzy and weird. So he didn\u2019t take my advice, and the rest is history, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
How did Squeeze\u2019s nine-member lineup come about?<\/p>\n
Difford: I think Glenn had seen Brian Wilson, and Brian had this massive band behind him that supported the instrumentation of the music that Brian had been involved in all of his life. That really inspired Glenn. I brought my friend Melvin Duffy, the pedal steel player, to the band, and then Glenn brought Steve Smith, the percussionist. And then Glenn brought his son [Leon] to the band.<\/p>\n
Tilbrook: It came about gradually. We were doing \u201cTrixies\u201d with [producer\/bassist and former Roots member] Owen [Biddle]. He was great to work with. He and his partner, Danica Dora, live in Nashville. We were doing some vocals for \u201cTrixies\u201d and Danica did some vocals for it too. And I thought, this is crazy. I think we should get Danica into the band because she\u2019s got a great voice. \u2026 Suddenly we\u2019re a bigger band. The big thing is that we\u2019ve got a lot of strong singers now, so we can deliver harmony, and we\u2019re working a lot on vocals, and that\u2019s significantly changed the way that we sound in a good way.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze<\/p>\n
(Barry Brecheisen)<\/p>\n
It\u2019s mind-blowing that you wrote the songs on \u201cTrixies,\u201d about this fictional nightclub, when you were teenagers in 1974, within a year of meeting each other. It\u2019s so fully formed and adult.<\/p>\n
Difford: As young songwriters, we were ambitious, and we would spend every day of the week writing songs, going off in different directions and being influenced by all sorts of music, from Sparks to Paul McCartney and Lou Reed. All sorts of people would sort of fill our day. The original lyrical idea for this came from me reading Damon Runyon books, short stories based in the \u201830s and \u201840s. And I just loved the idea of there being a nightclub full of perverted people that maybe one day I would grow up to attend.<\/p>\n
Tilbrook: When Chris and I met, he was already writing songs. I was already writing songs, but when we met, he gave me a lyric and I straightaway put a tune to it, and we didn\u2019t even discuss that. That was just the way it happened, and that\u2019s the way it kept on happening. We wrote tons of stuff in the first two years, and \u201cTrixies\u201d was just some of it. Every now and then a \u201cTrixies\u201d lyric would pop up, and I\u2019d do something for it. That\u2019s all we had to do. We had a band called Squeeze, but we didn\u2019t have any gigs. All we did was rehearse every now and then. We auditioned for record companies and got turned down by Polydor, by Island, by CBS and RCA before we got signed by A&M in the end.<\/p>\n
What prompted you to go back into the vault and revive \u201cTrixies\u201d?<\/p>\n
Tilbrook: I never liked the thought of looking back, but when we did our last record [2017\u2019s \u201cThe Knowledge\u201d], it came out to a resounding sort of lack of interest. \u2026 Someone said to me, who works in the business, \u201cYou know what you need? Next time you do a record, you need a story, and the story has got to be something really big.\u201d We didn\u2019t make a record after that until we made this one, and the thought of that was, \u201cYou want a story? This is a really good story, and it\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n
Difford: It wasn\u2019t something that we could get our teeth into [when we originally wrote those songs]. We were young, we didn\u2019t have the chops. Two years ago, Owen Biddle, who definitely has the chops, listened to the demos and said we should record this as an album.<\/p>\n
![\"Chris](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1789557489_296_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Chris Difford <\/p>\n
(Louise Phillips)<\/p>\n
How did a former member of the Roots end up joining Squeeze?<\/p>\n
Tilbrook: Owen joined us just before COVID hit, so we didn\u2019t get to meet for about a year and a half after he joined. We were going to go do all this touring and then suddenly, of course, we were doing nothing. He joined without playing a note. We knew he was the right guy. I think he\u2019s the first member of the band we\u2019ve ever had who absolutely loved the band, as opposed to seeing it as a good gig. He\u2019s just a joy to work with. He\u2019s so smart and musical, and just moves us in a way we hadn\u2019t moved before.<\/p>\n
Difford: Owen has brought so much to the band since he joined. He\u2019s brought confidence that is outstanding, and a musicianship that really raises everybody\u2019s game. He\u2019s an incredible player and I think everybody just brings an ingredient that we didn\u2019t have before, so that when all the ingredients come together, it\u2019s kind of like a masterful dish.<\/p>\n
Do you have any regrets about letting former keyboardist Paul Carrack sing lead on 1981\u2019s \u201cTempted,\u201d which turned out to be one of the band\u2019s biggest hits?<\/p>\n
Tilbrook: Paul sang it in a way that I could never have dreamt of singing it. I felt I couldn\u2019t sing properly until I was 26. I could sing, but not properly, and 26 is when I found my voice. I sound a bit different now to how I did in my youth.<\/p>\n
Difford: [\u201cEast Side Story\u201d producer] Elvis Costello\u2019s decision to have Paul Carrack sing was the perfect choice. Without his vocal on it, it wouldn\u2019t be the No. 1 play on Spotify for Squeeze.<\/p>\n
I know sometimes in the past your relationship has been difficult. How are you guys getting along these days?<\/p>\n
Difford: Glenn has been quoted as saying that we\u2019ve never been friends, and I think he\u2019s probably right. We\u2019re not the sort of people that go out to dinner or we don\u2019t send Christmas cards to each other. But we write great songs and we come together on stage. There\u2019s a reason in life for the way life evolves, and I think one of those is the unsaid, and the unsaid is a beautiful thing.<\/p>\n
Tilbrook: Life during wartime. Same as it ever was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For more than 50 years, with a few breaks in between, Squeeze has been making memorable tunes by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[11416,183319,217,183315,81711,183317,48,52,51,1637,47,50,49,10390,42884,183314,183313,183316,183318,8843,72],"class_list":["post-465513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-band","tag-danica-dora","tag-day","tag-difford","tag-glenn","tag-hollywood-bowl-gig","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-life","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-song","tag-sort","tag-squeeze","tag-tilbrook","tag-trixies","tag-vocal","tag-way","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}