Squeeze: Classic Or Dud

I absolutely love Squeeze. Up the Junction is amazing - yes. Also love Annie Get Yr Gun, Goodbye Girl, Another Nail in my Heart all of the big singles really.

true story: my dad and my uncle gigged with squeeze and lent them their stuff

Slap & Tickle is my jam, Cool For Cats is my album. Love it but never warmed to the others beyond the singles.

Some people turn their nose up at them simply due to the Jools Holland connection, which is a shame. Far less consistent than the likes of XTC, yet their finest material - most of which is non-singles, believe it or not - more than compensates for the intermittent failed pop experiments and stylistic wrong-turns.

Heard Up the Junction in the car today and god damn that is one of the best songs ever, no question. <3 <3 <3

Classic for the "Hourglass" video alone

Itunes tells me i've listened to This Summer 22 times (and never skipped it) in the last two years, which feels like a fairly healthy amount. Such. A. Tune.

I'm the only guy in the world who likes Sweets From a Stranger; Difford & Tilbrook don't even like it last I heard. Still some great stuff there, reminds me of high school road trips.

The non-Squeeze Squeeze album Difford & Tilbrook and Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti are really the low point of their career. Sweets From a Stranger is plenty alright.

Just wrote some thoughts on their debut album here:

Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

Sweets From A Stranger has I've Returned, His House Her Home, The Elephant Ride and Points Of View in it's favour, with some dodgy moments like Stranger Than The Stranger On The Shore and The Very First Dance which are unpleasantly weird enough to derail the album's credibility.

I've always liked Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti, massively flawed as it is. 'Domino' is the real dregs and a sad end to their career.

Chris Difford & Glenn Tilbrook badmouth Sweets from a Stranger:

GT: I was particularly headstrong on this record and it resulted in some of it sounding awful.

Out of Touch
CD: [The unreleased version recorded with Paul Carrack] stands head and shoulders above this one. This is really naff. There's no personality to it whatsoever and to follow East Side Story with this was shooting ourselves in the foot. It's a ridiculous sounding song.... Those synthetic drums sound horrendous. Listening to it now I just wince.
GT: ...it sounds very much of its time and not in a good way.

I Can't Hold On
CD: ...it's not a great moment for me lyrically because it doesn't say anything. I was beginning to lose the plot here.

Points of View
GT: This is a great band performance marred by a slightly poncey vocal performance by me.
(To be fair, CD has nothing but praise for GT's vocal on this one.)

Stranger than the Stranger on the Shore
CD: I have to apologize to Glenn for not punching him when he played the ocarina on this... I said "OK, if you think this is good I'm getting out of here because this is crap."

Onto the Dance Floor
CD: This does nothing for me at all.

Black Coffee in Bed
GT: It's far too ponderous. It could never be a fast song, but it certainly had the opportunity to be slightly perkier. My vocal is mannered and not very good at all, and I can't stand to listen to it now.

His House Her Home
CD: This is my Peter & Gordon number... This is me trying to be sophisticated, but just sounding camp.

The Very First Dance
CD: This is atrocious. ...there's no passion in it.
GT: I sounds a little ponderous to me.

Quotes from the book "Squeeze: Song by Song." Contrary to the quotes above, they do have some good things to say about certain songs and performances, but on the whole CD and GT both consider it one of their worst albums.

Heard Up the Junction in the car today and god damn that is one of the best songs ever, no question. <3 <3 <3

it really is. someone tells a story in another thread about the song being on the radio while he was driving his mom around, and she started to cry when it was finished she thought it so sad.

What were their favorite creations, H.L.?

What were their favorite creations, H.L.?

I'll skim the book and post some things tomorrow.

They've both said at one time or another that the song "Some Fantastic Place" is the best thing they've ever done.

cool. I would really enjoy more excerpts if you have time tomorrow!

If it's in there, I'd love to know what they think about "Letting Go."

Interesting read, that. I love it when artists badmouth their own songs. How could anybody hate "Black Coffee in Bed"?? "Ponderous"? Fucking "ponderous"?

Actually, "Black Coffee" does sometimes wear out its welcome after 6 minutes. They usually up the tempo a bit on stage.

Well, skimming the book turned into rereading the whole thing, so give me another day or two. I just checked, and they both say that "Letting Go" is one of the best things they ever did.

Can you tell me what's essentially said about "Vanity Fair" or "Up the Junction"?

Up the Junction
CD: When I wrote this it was Dylanesque and was much longer, with about 16 verses... [ Who Killed Davey Moore ] inspired me to write in a seamless way, like I was narrating a story, with no chorus.
GT: I was thinking of something like Dylan's Positively 4th Street as a template when I wrote the music.

Surprisingly, A&M Records recognized the potential for the song early on, when the band was originally playing it in a slower, folkier arrangement, and asked them to make it poppier.

Difford also suggests a future ILM thread: "Incidentally, there aren't many songs that end with the title as the last line. Two spring to mind: Up the Junction and Virginia Plain."

Vanity Fair
GT: I wrote a piano part for this but when it came to playing with the orchestra I bottled out, to my eternal shame.
CD: This has an absolutely stunning melody and beautiful arrangement. It's one we never really did live which was, in retrospect, a lost opportunity.

In the back of the book, they print the lyrics of a number of songs which are evidently their picks for the best:

Strong in Reason
Take Me I'm Yours
Slap and Tickle
Up the Junction
Slightly Drunk
Goodbye Girl
Cool for Cats
Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)
Another Nail in My Heart
I Think I'm Go Go
Separate Beds
If I Didn't Love You
Vicky Verky
Tempted
Piccadilly
Someone Else's Bell
Woman's World
Is That Love?
Labelled With Love
When the Hangover Strikes
Black Coffee in Bed
King George Street
Last Time Forever
No Place Like Home
Tough Love
The Prisoner
Striking Matches
The Waiting Game
Peyton Place
Slaughtered, Gutted and Heartbroken
She Doesn't Have to Shave
Love Circles
Melody Motel
Letting Go
The Truth
Walk a Straight Line
Wicked and Cruel
There Is a Voice
Some Fantastic Place
Third Rail
It's Over
Loving You Tonight
Cold Shoulder
Electric Trains
Walk Away
I Want You
Daphne
The Great Escape
To Be a Dad
Without You Here

They don't do a song-by-song analysis of the "Difford & Tilbrook" album, but do make note of Love's Crashing Waves, On My Mind Tonight and The Apple Tree.

On some of the songs listed above their opinions are split--yes, Tilbrook really does call Black Coffee in Bed "ponderous," adding "My vocal is mannered and not very good at all, and I can't stand to listen to it now."

One thing that crops up a lot in the book, particularly from Tilbrook, is statements like this:
GT: [ Rose I Said ] falls into the same category as If It's Love in that I like the song and the performance of it, which is very spirited, but it doesn't distinguish itself in any way.

Tilbrook also seems to distrust the simpler pop songs; Grouch of the Day is "a fun song without any importance attached to it." Vicky Verky is "lyrically slightly twee in the way that Up the Junction isn't, which makes it less interesting to me. Musically, I don't think it's very good either." Trust Me to Open My Mouth is "quite an ordinary song really, although I liked it more at the time." Is it that he finds these songs too easy, or that they don't do anything new?

Difford does it too: Farfisa Beat is "crap... It's an album filler at best... It was probably just stuck on the album because it was uptempo."

thank you!

weird discovery: although I've heard it >50 times as a boy, 'If I Didn't Love You' is fucking amazing, like seriously a candidate for best Squeeze and one of the better pop songs of its era

seriously it's so great when you rediscover a piece of music you once knew off by heart but it still blows your mind

"If I didn't love you, I'd hate you."

Tilbrook: If I Didn't Love You was "musically inspired by Talking Heads. The line 'The record jumps on a scratch' was such a gift that I had to use it, so we sang 'If I, If I, If I, If I.'"

Difford: "I love Glenn's slide guitar solo. When he first did it I thought 'This guy's out of his tree. What's he doing?,' but it's brilliant."

"'Singles remind me of kisses / Albums remind me of plans.' They are my favorite lines on the whole album. When I used to have girls back to my flat I'd go through my record collection and find the album which had the longest side... I knew that by a certain point on the record if I didn't have my hand down her pants then it wasn't going to happen because I'd have to get up and change the record over... The best album for this purpose was Something/Anything by Todd Rundgren, because it had one side that was 30 minutes long. I'd put it on and get down to business and knew that I had a couple of minutes at the end of the album to lie on my back and then I'd have the excuse to get up and change the record."

Now, some 35 years later, Squeeze have re-recorded 14 of their classic tracks for Spot the Difference, an album of all their classic hits re-recorded in a way so painstakingly faithful to the originals that they challenge you to spot the difference.

dumbest...idea...ever.

in general, i kinda hate (and avoid) re-recordings of old stuff, but this goes beyond that. this is demented. in the metal world people will re-record albums cuz when they were young they only had five dollars to spend on making an album and now they have ten dollars. i kinda understand that. even if i never want to listen to the results.

I wouldn't mind hearing their first album re-recorded. Peel sessions are much better sounding. Other than that, no interest in this, I don't think...

Hmmmmmm. I really really love Squeeze but that just sounds like a pointless effort.

I was just wondering today if there were any remasters of squeeze's stuff. their 80s recordings sound a little thin and wouldn't it be nice to give them a little attack. but this is not what I had in mind.

In the past year or so they've redone Argybargy, Sweets from a Stranger, Frank and Ridiculous, but they're only available as imports in the U.S. Three of them have the appropriate b-sides plus unreleased stuff from each album, except Ridiculous, which for some reason has none of the b-sides that it should. Argy is a double with a concert on the 2nd disc.

This is the perfect opportunity to get all those b-sides in the right place, not doled out piecemeal on 17 redundant Greatest Hits records. Don't piss me off, guys, or I'll... get all sullen and bitch about it on the internet.

Tilbrook has also released 3 of a planned 5 volumes of demos from the Squeeze years.

DeepDiscount has the deluxe Argy for $23.38, and it was well worth it. Nice remaster, bonus tracks and great sounding live recording. I hope they do East Side Story next.

"New recordings - improved sound quality"

i wouldn't mind hearing it if it means improved sound quality (not that classic squeeze sounded *bad* per se -- it isn't as if they started off as some no-budget crusty-punk band). but if their idea of "improved sound quality" is the "compressed-to-an-inch-of-its-life" junk that too often passes for remastering then i can live w/t it.

If you're a Squeeze fan and you *haven't* heard the 1992 BBC Session of Take Me I'm Yours, please do yourself a favour...

http://open.spotify.com/track/3YDGxXzhoTJdtF5mPn5jBq

And when you're done with that, here's a song from Tilbrook's last solo album Pandemonium Ensues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WZXIfAYAV4

I think you guys missed the point of the "Spot the Difference" album. They re-recorded those tracks so they'd have the rights to them and could license those out instead of the ones controlled by their record company.

oh yeah, I bumped this because I was wondering if it's worth going past "Argybargy"

oh yeah, I bumped this because I was wondering if it's worth going past "Argybargy"

Well certainly "East Side Story." And I think "Play" is the equal of "Cool/Argy/East," although it took some time to reveal itself--it's definitely not as poppy as any of those.

Listen to my picks of better later Squeeze here:

The ILM Fan-made BEST OF/ANTHOLOGY Compilation project -- POST Tracklists, Cover Art, Liner notes, editorials, spotify links and/or otherwise LEGALLY obtained streaming album lists HERE!

There's something inexplicably great about the lines "I'd beg for some forgiveness / but beggings not my business" in Up The Junction.

my favorite song by them right now is "Goodbye Girl", such a wonky time

It's great!

Melody Motel is so weird.

Tempted is among the worst songs ever written. Utter crap, and every copy on earth should be destroyed, similar to what happened with smallpox virus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qums4Soo2Is

How's the Difford-Tillbrook solo album?

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Monday, May 29, 2006

I heard an excerpt a few months ago -- sounds like the boys decided to record a Hall & Oates album and failed.

The live at the Hammersmith Odeon, March 9, 1980 set on the deluxe edition of Argy Bargy is just super hot.

i really like squeeze, but i cant abide jools holland's superfluous boogie woogie breakdowns. 'cool for cats' is a prime example. needless.

Alternate universe where the 'suntan lotion' backing vocals are in the studio version

you're going to get that and so much more when openAI puts musenet back online!

There is a flexi disc which has them in. Actually sounds terrible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WkPIG2inPA

It sounds like they were recording in the studio next to The Muppets, and got them in for some impromptu backing vocals.

A bit of a dry-run for Squabs on Forty Fab, this.

Tbh not sure what you're both getting at.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdzHoiF8nmU

I think this is my favourite track from Ridiculous (1995), there was a lot of Beatles homage stuff around at that time but I can't think of much that's in this style, it sounds specifically like some of the more eerie tracks from the White Album