Riffs, Rants and Rumors: Glenn Tilbrook's Squeeze Play
posted in: Exclusive Interviews • Features • Rock
In the late ’70s, Squeeze was a quirky crew of new wave weirdos with a string of strange hits (“Take Me, I’m Yours,” “Cool For Cats,” “Slap and Tickle”) in England and low-key cult-hero status among the rock cognoscenti in America. In the early ’80s, the albums Argybargy, East Side Story and Sweets From a Stranger made them stars in the States. Led by the songwriting team of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, who began getting a rep as a modern-day Lennon and McCartney, Squeeze was among the small handful of acts (Blondie, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, The Cars) that burst up from the new wave underbrush to mainstream success in the US. They did it on the strength of songs like “Another Nail In My Heart,” “If I Didn’t Love You,” “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell),” “Tempted” and “Black Coffee in Bed,” mating masterful pop hooks from tunesmith Tilbrook with weird, wordy, worldly-wise lyrics by Difford. In 2012, Squeeze is back on the boards, touring with contemporaries The English Beat and preparing for a new album; all the aforementioned songs and more can be heard on their new concert recording, Live at the Fillmore.
Of course, it hasn’t all been licorice and lollipops for the lads from London”between their ’80s heyday and their late-2000s revivification, they broke up a couple of times and went through a whirl of personnel changes. “Chris and I had fallen out for a number of years,” says Tilbrook, “which is absolutely standard amongst bands, I know that. But we were promoting some re-releases that Universal put out [in the 2000s] of Squeeze, and we kept on saying “No, no, no.” to Squeeze getting back together, because really I was happy in solo world. But doing loads of press about what is essentially our past, our heritage, we thought Well, why not? Let’s do that. Let’s just concentrate on the past and do that. Thus it was that Difford and Tilbrook buried the hatchet, and their band started bringing its songs to the stage once more.
For Tilbrook, banging it out with his old bandmates again feels particularly proper at the present moment. “I think something happened to the band towards the end of the ˜80s,” he explains. “We got slightly more complacent, I guess. We still made some great music, and songs I’m very proud of. I think that now the band sounds closer to the way it did at the beginning. It’s got a spark back. And that’s something I’m very, very keen to maintain.” Capturing that spark is exactly what made Squeeze decide to make Live at the Fillmore, recorded at an August 2010 concert. “The band was sounding really tight,” Tilbrook reasserts. “One of the things about Squeeze when we came back together is I realized that the previous version of Squeeze had fallen into a pattern of not being as on it as the earlier Squeeze had been. So this time around we’ve been very keen to keep the band sounding exciting. That involves work, rehearsal and application, and not just being ‘It’ll be okay’ about it. So I wanted to capture that with the band. By a sweet coincidence”this had never happened to Squeeze before”the gig that we did at the Fillmore that night, it was a magical gig, it was just one of those ones where everything went right, and you can hear the enthusiasm of the band. Of course we didn’t know that when we were scheduled to record; we just thought it would be good to record the band in this state.”
Like any long-lived band, Squeeze spends many of its onstage hours performing songs that must feel like they’re imprinted on the members’ DNA by this point. How do they keep the likes of “Is That Love,” “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Goodbye Girl” and “Hourglass” fresh in concert after all this time, both for themselves and for their fans? “We’ve done that so far by keeping really close to the recorded versions,” says Tilbrook. We’ve gone all ’round the houses with those songs. What I’m really proud of is that those songs stand up. They’re not horrible songs to be playing again and again, they’re good songs. But we have to be ever-vigilant about not falling into the trap of being complacent. My main thing is, it’s got to sound sparky.”
But the twenty-first century Squeeze is about more than tickling their admirers’ ears with the classics. Word has been bandied about that the group is in fact getting set to record what would be the first batch of new Squeeze songs since 1998, and their first with bassist John Bentley since 1982’s Sweets from a Stranger. “Yeah, that is true,” confesses Tilbrook, “we’ve already written some songs I’m really, really pleased and proud with. But I realized something about Squeeze looking back. When we head a really great band, what we did was show up with sort of sparky versions of songs on the day, so what I’m doing is I’m writing songs but I’m not giving demos to the band; I’m not letting the band know what the songs are like until we record them. And when we record them, they’ll hear them on the day, and we’ll work out a version. We’ve got a good many songs but we’re still working on some more. We’re gonna record some of the songs when this tour ends…we’re gonna record when we get back, and then again in October, and we’ll release an album next year.”
Asked whether the new sounds would be some kind of sonic kin to what fans consider “classic Squeeze,” Tilbrook replies, “Classic Squeeze, to me, is when we experimented and came up with things that were fresh and new. The less-than-classic Squeeze is when we thought we knew what Squeeze was. So the only rule I have for the next thing is that we’ve got to excite ourselves, and we can’t go backwards, we’ve done that already.”