Here’s the thing about Squeeze.
The combination of Chris Difford’s piquant, often humorous lyrics about everyday British life, combined with Glenn Tilbook’s sunny and adventurous melodies, made Squeeze one of the most unique pop bands to come out of the mid ‘70s U.K.
Less spiky than some of its contemporaries, Squeeze existed in its own universe. “Up the Junction,” “Cool For Cats,” “Goodbye Girl,” “Another Nail In My Heart,” “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)” “If I Didn’t Love You” and a handful of others still sound as fresh and fun as they did in the day.
In America, Squeeze scored exactly one minor hit (1981’s “Tempted”) and was relegated, by the end of the 1980s, to cult status. It’s a pretty big cult, too.
After more than a few starts and stops, some of them nearly fatal, the band still exists and continues making records and touring.
Tilbrook, the band’s lead singer (although that’s not him on “Tempted” – long story there), maintains a separate career as a solo artist, as does Difford. They have always been the heart and soul of Squeeze, which makes it wholly understandable that after five decades, they’re the only original members remaining. Even after a couple of bad breakups.
Squeeze headlines at the BayCare Sound Wednesday, Aug. 19.
In this interview, conducted over Zoom, Tilbrook talked about the band’s fortunes (and misfortunes), the status of his relationship with his longtime musical partner, and – as the conversation began – Trixies, the first Squeeze album in eight years, which consists of new recordings of songs Difford and Tilbrook wrote as teenagers. Trixies is the name a fictitious London nightclub.
Said Mojo: “It might be the best work of their career.”
St. Pete Catalyst: If I discovered a bunch of songs that I’d written at 16 or 17, I wouldn’t want anybody to hear them. Did you remember these songs?
Glenn Tilbrook: Yes, I did remember them. They’ve always been bubbling along, and we’ve thought, from time to time, about recording them. But the thing is, I think that they sound of their time. And when I went into thinking of it as a possible record, that’s the first time it had occurred to me.
Musically, I absorb stuff very transparently. So I can tell ‘What More Can I Say’ is me listening to Stevie Wonder repeatedly, and ‘Don’t Go Out in the Dark’ is sort of Wings a bit. And ‘Trixie’s Part 2’ is listening to the John Lennon Some Time in New York City album.
Was it forever in the back of your mind, ‘Chris, we’ve got these great old songs – maybe we should revisit them’?
No. I don’t think it was. We always thought they were good songs, but Chris and I could never see where it would go. How you could interrupt the flow of your songwriting, moving on, and then go back to some of the first stuff that you’d written? It just felt a bit of a weird move.
And I think what changed it is time and context. Then there’s a sort of validity to say ‘Hey, we did this then. We’re nothing like that now, but we can listen to the songs and go ‘Fu-in’ hell, they’re good!’
Not only that, but we can put them through our blenders now, and any imperfections we can sort of get rid of. And we can play ‘em properly. And we can sing them properly. That’s the two most important things, that we couldn’t do at that point.
With that benefit of hindsight and experience, how much tweaking did you do?
Little bits of tweaks. Things that spring to mind: In ‘The Place We Call Mars,’ there were four verses, and there was no middle section. It was verse/chorus, verse/chorus, verse/chorus, verse/chorus, end. [Laughing]. So we added a middle section.
But I think all that is the sort of thing any producer would do anyway. And I think if we’d handed those songs to a producer in 1974, he’d have taken one listen to the band and said ‘Look. I’m going to get other people to play on the records; all you do is sing.’ Really, honestly. Because that’s the only way we could’ve made it.
The tapes of Squeeze playing those songs sound like what we were: We hadn’t had any gigs, we had no experience, we couldn’t hold down a tempo, and we all followed each other like a bunch of 5-year-olds playing a game, you know? Flittin’ all over the place.
So the songs were good, but that was all that was good, really. Well, no, that wasn’t all that was good – we had the enthusiasm. And we didn’t know, but we had the ability to write stuff like that when we met.
You’d never been in a nightclub when you wrote these songs. Did you dream the whole thing up?
Well, I hadn’t; Chris was 19. He could’ve gone. But I had a sheltered life! [Laughing]
Has the process always been the same? Does he give you lyrics and you think, ‘OK, what can I do with this?’ Or does it sometimes start with the melody?
It very rarely starts with the melody. And it certainly didn’t at that point.
Chris had many more songs than me. And when I met him, and heard his lyrics, I couldn’t even begin to aspire to being anything like as good as he was. And he had his own sense of musicality. I think my musical ability was stronger than Chris.’ And my tunes were also good, but I wrote a lyric every six months or something. I’ve had been on my third album by now, or something ridiculous like that.
When we got together, he gave me lyrics, and I could match him with tunes. We didn’t have a plan for that to happen. We tried it out, and it just kept on happening.
If I think about it, what are the chances, someone living half a mile away from you, having that talent? And you being the person being able to respond to it? It’s quite mind-blowing, really, because this has been our whole lives.
How do you reflect on 50 years of doing this? Are you thinking ‘How is it we’re still here?’
Yeah. I think more of the marvel is, to me, having experienced that career go up, and falter, and then gradually fall down, and then we split up … going back to, really, the beginning. It was like the beginning of my career, except I was in my 40s.
The thing that really gave me a great realization was the fact that I wouldn’t have chosen for it to end up there, but if that’s where I ended up, I was happy. I like playing gigs. I like pubs. I can do it by myself.
So all that stuff, all the insecurity I had about where my career was going, left at my lowest point: ‘I’m here. And it’s OK.’
And so when we got Squeeze back together, it felt much more liberating to be able to go ‘Well, wherever this takes us, we can make it good. And let’s do what we want to do.’
The dispiriting thing about being A&R’d when you’re not being successful … and I’m going to say we went through four different A&R guys’ versions of what we were … some of it was good, and a lot of it wasn’t.
And then, towards the end, it began to feel like we were desperate for something. And I went away from the last Squeeze record thinking ‘Well, there’s some good stuff on there, but I never want to go through that process again.’ If I sell 20 records to people who like it, I’d rather do that.
I guess it’s liberating when you realize you don’t have to chase the golden goose any more. I think that’s what you’re saying.
It is what I’m saying. In doing that, you have to settle with the fact that you’re not going to be rich. You’re not going to have all the things you thought you might have. Or you might have had them, but they’ve gone.
You’re not rich, Glenn?
[Laughing] No, no, I am not. But it’s all OK. We’re in a good place now. We’re selling more tickets than we have done for a long while. The band is the best it’s ever been. I can only say, hand on my heart, I feel it in my bones that we are great, and the reaction we’re getting now tells me I’m right. I can listen back to us playing and think ‘That’s really good. We’re really nailing it now.’ In a way that I don’t think we ever did.
In the other Squeezes, what we had our side was energy, and we were punky, we played fast and we looked great and all that. And we had great songs as well. But the sophistication really came a bit later.
How much of this was re-building your relationship with Chris? There were some rocky patches there, we all know.
As I understand it, we’re something like the Everly Brothers. Or whatever it is, you know? We don’t really have a relationship outside our professionalism. I love Chris, but we have been through so many things together, a lot of them not good, that our personal relationship is done. But our professional relationship is great. And we leave whatever baggage we have at the door when we play. And it’s fantastic.
We’re doing stuff that we could never have dreamed of … in the last century, let’s put it that way.
Also on the bill Aug. 19: Adam Ant and Haircut One Hundred. Showtime is 6 p.m.; find tickets at this link.