SQUEEZE ME? A COUPLE OF LIKELY LADS, A 50 YEAR WAIT AND A CLUB NIGHT LIKE NO OTHER
- Mar 17
- 9 min read
IT’S A RIDICULOUS, highly unlikely story. The kind of story that if you turned it into even a preposterous rock opera and then tried to sell it, would be laughed out of a producer’s office. But, spoiler – it’s ridiculously true.
Act one: two teenage boys in London in the early ‘70s with little to no experience of life outside the songs they’d heard and the books they’d read, – one just out of school, the other, a few years younger, still looking like he was sitting exams – decide to write a song cycle about the denizens of a hardly upmarket nightclub in Soho.
“You get the feeling/You know you might be dreaming/Nobody is leaving/Whisper in my ear/I love the feeling here!”
It’s a place filled with wearied dreamers and losers and small-time criminals and nobodies, while the songs about them touch on pre-and post-Beatles pop, ‘50s melodrama and early ‘70s art rock in equal measure. Like the world somehow arrived at the club, Trixies. Which is a good name for … go on, let’s say it … a musical.
Act two: the two boys form a band, record the songs as a demo and … shelve it all. The band aren’t up to the demands of the music, the prolific writing pair have got more songs on the go anyway, they figure it was a nice try, and soon enough the band, Squeeze, have a following, then a deal, then a bunch of records in the world-after-punk.
“You can’t mend a mind/But you can mend a face/I’m lost in the line/To visit the place.”
The older Chris Difford, now mostly words, and the younger Glenn Tillbrook, now mostly music, are being hailed as some new Lennon & McCartney. No one remembers Trixies, too busy singing Tempted or Cool For Cats or Hourglass.
Act three: 50 years later, Difford and Tilbrook – several splits and reformations of the band, and their partnership, resurrect the tape, and find themselves not just pleasantly surprised at the quality of the songs but beginning to think there might be a place for Trixie’s now, as a Squeeze album. With producer, and bassplayer Owen Biddle, they keep the songs and arrangements but shuffle the sequence, record anew and, bloody hell, they’ve got themselves a new/old album.
“Hello stranger, I know your face/Come inside and I’ll find you a place/We can rock and roll together … You’re at Trixies, you’re a star!”
“It’s been a long journey and I think it’s worthwhile,” Difford says gently, in his quiet, almost diffident manner that really is more a life-long discomfort in this situation. Which, given he is decades into a career not short of exactly these interview situations, is still a little surprising.
“It’s kind of a stepping stone from the last [Squeeze] album, The Knowledge, in 2016, to what is going to come in the future. So it’s a really good time.”
What is going to come in the future is in some ways partially known, at least to them, as Difford and Tilbrook were, importantly as it turns out for their own sense of self, writing new material at the same time as they were working on the remodelling of Trixies. But we are for the moment caught in that past where it has to be said they were a pair of precocious buggers.
Why weren’t they like normal people who would write teenage love songs and basic boogie with the only question being how wide should the flares be? A song such as Hell On Earth especially feels like one of those super smart – maybe too smart for their own good – bands of the early 70s like 10CC. You might remember the deal: more sophisticated musical and lyrical ideas then glam or head-down boogie, but fewer pretensions and showy progressiveness than prog.
What were the young Difford and Tilbrook listening to in 1972, 73, 74? “10CC, Sparks,” he says with a wry smile. “Stevie Wonder, Todd Rundgren. It was a great time for records, wasn’t it?”
As mentioned, one thing that has been changed is the track sequencing, which differs from the strict narrative order conceived originally by Difford.
“It was Owen’s decision to change the flow of the record and it’s interesting that when it appeared on my desktop I looked at it and thought, this isn’t going to work. But it does,” says Difford. “From a story point of view, it doesn’t, but that’s okay because musically it fits, and I guess when you are listening to a record that is more important.”
In this arrangement it is less a continuing story as a series of vignettes, like a London spin on Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City, though it’s inescapable that the characters and storyline seem if not inappropriate for their age and experience, then certainly surprising. But then it’s worth noting that Difford would for a long time be writing characters and situations well ahead of his age, and those of his listeners, like me: an early career line like “my assets froze while yours have dropped” seemed funny to me at 15, but I’m not laughing now!
Anyway, on Trixies there’s a song like It’s Over, which doesn’t just feel like the end of a night or the end of a relationship but the end or nearing the end of a life, like some world-weary French songwriter. Did the teenage Difford figure teenage storylines had limited audiences or was he living in another world, another age, literally and figuratively?
“My imagination has always been in a different age,” he says. “It’s Over was written before I met Glenn and one of the things I remember about my early songwriting, when I wrote the music as well, was I was influenced by people like Jacques Brel and Neil Sedaka and Carole King and James Taylor: people who told stories in a gentle way. With a lot of drama, I suppose, like Leonard Cohen. That dark side of songwriting is something I still love and have been pursuing even this very week.”
Brel as an observer of people is not exactly unforgiving, but certainly unblinking. Is that how Difford wanted to be with the people in his stories, whether they were based on him or people he saw, or people he imagined?
“I think that’s a very good analogy, yeah. The way that [Brel] wrote lyrics was extremely distant from the characters in a way, made them into something really special, writing about drunken sailors and whores and what have you,” Difford says. “The value of those storylines, as he told them, was something that inspired me very much. We had a song on the Cool For Cats album called The Knack, and it was very much driven by that kind of imagery.”
(Sample lyric from The Knack: “Round and round the city/Taxes all fall down/Shot at in a Citroen/East side of the town/Waffle in a Winnie's/Tied between the bars/Fifty fifty chances/Bulletproofed all cars.”)
The reason why that kind of storytelling appealed may come down to Sunday television and family singalongs and the fact. “I loved musical theatre, always have done, and the idea of storytelling has always been very close to my heart. When I am happiest is when I am telling a story, conveying characters that live in a different place.”
So who are these people? And does he see them differently now to how they looked in his mind 50 years ago?
“Well the interesting thing about Trixies is that I’m only getting to know the characters now, after all these years, because the music’s been quiet, it’s been peaceful,” says Difford. “Now I’m delving into it and a few weeks ago I thought I should write a book about these people. So I started writing each chapter as a different title taken from the songs and it tells the story of that song in essay form. By doing that I’m discovering who these people were.”
Initially he wrote about people he imagined, he is now writing about people he understands, and maybe sees differently.
“I think there’s a lot more meat on the bone now because I’ve lived all those years,” he agrees. “When I was a teenager I might have written about a striptease dance but I’d never really seen one. At the other end of the corridor, as I say, you’ve seen it
“I think I am more observant and sympathetic now and I think they will grow, once I’ve written more about them.”
The book he is writing will be separate stories but intertwined, but there is a script also written in the past year full of reminiscences from that time – from him and others – that will feed into the book. For the time being that script will stay an exercise, waiting for a more experienced screen or stage writer to assist, but he envisages that however it emerges it will remain in the milieu as the 1960s turned into the 1970s.
“A taxi drew up at the Chelsea mews/In the cruel and wintry fog/All I could see were her lurex shoes/As she walked her Afghan dog/A cigarette holder appeared in the light/As she opened up the door/It was one of those old Victorian nights/That she won’t see anymore.”
Act four: this project is the fruit of songwriting relationship that goes back to their teens but has not always been a smooth, consistent or indeed friendly relationship. They have both detailed how in fact the friendship ended before Squeeze was formed in the mid-70s. Yet they are in a real sense, inseparable.
If nothing else it tells you that some writers who are sympatico don’t necessarily have to be sympathetic, or friends, but do need to have some deeper understanding. Are he and Tilbrook examples to follow or an anomaly?
He chuckles at this for some time. “Um … a bit of both, I’d say. There are elements of us that I think are worth following, like our ambitions and resolve, and understanding of each other’s dislikes and likes.”
And the bits not to emulate?
“I think, like any relationship, you’ve got to have an understanding of the distance that people sometimes need, and that you need from each other. And sometimes that becomes so far apart that is difficult to come back together again. It’s like an elastic band then suddenly the elastic band breaks and you fly off in different directions.”
This is a truth that is difficult to understand at 15 or 30, but clear in your 50s and 60s, if that relationship can last that long. Is that continuing learning and understanding something that we could see in the new songs slated for a new Squeeze album? Or is it implicit always, now?
“We’ve written and recorded quite a few new songs. My jury is out as to which ones I would see us using in the future, but the good thing about Trixies is its given us the opportunity to write new stuff and give us a bit more inspiration, I suppose. Well, it has me,” Difford says. “The songs that we’ve written are good, but they are not great and I think if we are going to record one more album enough career, then it has to be great. It means that everybody on board has to feel that, and if they don’t then you’re just kidding yourself really.”
To get from good to great, is that more application? More time? More brutal decision-making?
“More luck,” he says with a half smile. “You are in the studio with the band, there are times you feel that. We recorded a song last year which was devastatingly beautiful and at the end of it we were all in tears, it was such an amazing song. And if every song is not like that then we don’t put the album out, as far as I’m concerned.”
Is that a universally understood thought?
“No,” he laughs. “I doubt it, I doubt it.”
Even if it’s not universally understood, is Squeeze like the Security Council of the United Nations: key parties, the permanent members, have a veto?
“I don’t have the power to have a [veto],” he says. “So, no it’s not like that at all. You have to have a lot of trust in the people you work with to come up with the goods and get it right, and my job is to have trust, not to have a vote.”
Maybe this is even more evidence of how this songwriting/band-leading arrangement is an anomaly rather than an example to follow.
“I think so. I trust the process and just hope everybody has the same trust.”
“In the street-level bar, there’s a cabaret at times/A few familiar faces with their necks on the line/Dressed in their dollar suits … The Rock’n’roll is sounding way ahead of its time/All filled with one regret/You ain’t seen nothin’ yet”
Encore: Difford has long been a reluctant traveller, to the point of not coming to Australia for decades, while Tilbrook has been here many times, including with a version of Squeeze. This may change.
“We were discussing that today, funnily enough,” says Difford. “Times have changed. It’s possible, it’s possible. Let’s see. I hope so. I’d like to.”
READ MORE
Trixies is out now.
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