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Conversation: Author James Griffiths - 'The Pop Music Played'
325 Plays2 years ago
Many columns of type have been spread across the decades in the music press when it comes to Squeeze. However, very few books on the band have been published. Taking into account the crucial formative years in the global public eye, music journalist James Griffiths has penned 'The Pop Music Played,' a detailed deep-dive into the years 1978-1982. This time period - considered 'classic' by Squeeze fans - has rarely been chronicled as much as Griffiths has put to print in book form. In this podcast, he talks about not only his book but how how and where his musical inclinations started, how the band grew from small town pub group to Madison Square Garden headliners, all with a good-natured interplay from someone who has given us more to love (and read) about Squeeze. James' book can be purchased on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Squeeze-Music-Played-Story-1978-1982/dp/1739957407 and brick-and-mortar stores wherever good books are sold.
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Transcript
Introduction and James's Book on Squeeze
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Cool for Cats with me, Amy Hughes. We're inviting you in for black coffee and a chat about our favorite band Squeeze. In this episode, I'm welcoming James Griffiths, music journalist and author of Squeeze, the pop music played. His self-published book that covers in detail the band's musical tenure during the crucial 1978, 1982 period. Hello, James. How are you? Hi, Amy. I'm very well, thank you. How are you?
00:00:37
Speaker
I'm doing well. I'm so excited to be talking about this book because to be honest, I think you'll pretty much agree there's not been a lot of paper chopped down to talk about the band in 40 plus years. There seems to be only about maybe three actual books. And for you to pop up with this at the time that I was kind of even starting to think about a podcast,
00:01:06
Speaker
I literally had a hashtag mind blow thinking, I can't believe it. Somebody has written a book about Squeeze, so I am so happy that you gave of yourself for this venture. Yes, good stuff.
00:01:25
Speaker
So I want to let the listeners know that you are British-based, so thank you for being in Britain. It really helps a lot.
British vs American Perspective on Squeeze
00:01:34
Speaker
To be perfectly honest, sometimes when we start talking about Squeeze and I look at a lot of the American audience because that's pretty much who I hang with and have a lot of empathy with, of course. It helps a tremendous amount.
00:01:51
Speaker
to get it from the British perspective, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. But for me, it's a great
James's Musical Journey and Discovery of Squeeze
00:01:58
Speaker
thing. So I'm going to let you kind of start off with your thoughts on your background in getting started with Squeeze, how you found out about them, what drew you to this band, and at what time period for you, how old you were, how did that music actually speak to you at that time?
00:02:21
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess that's a very big question. I mean, the thing that always strikes me about this is just the amazing kind of fortuitous, coincidental nature of how you get into music. I think particularly when you're young, I mean, I was, I mean, we're talking in my case about the late 1970s and I got into the music charts right at the end of 1977. And the reason for that was actually Paul McCartney was more of Kintai getting to number one.
00:02:50
Speaker
in the charts, Christmas 1977 in the UK. And we could do a whole other podcast about just that, just the impact that one record had on me and my life. It was just incalculable. I mean, completely, you know, just a total ground zero moment. But what it did, it tuned me into the pop charts because until then I hadn't really taken any interest. I don't think I even had any awareness of the pop charts as such, you know, this idea of a chart where every week you tuned in to find out
00:03:20
Speaker
where your favorite record was in the chart and, you know, where your favorite bands were. It was a steep learning curve.
Squeeze's Unique Television Presence
00:03:27
Speaker
So that got me into 1978. Now, I totally missed Squeeze's first year. And it's curious because when I think about it, I must have seen them because from January 1978 onwards, I was watching Top of the Pops every single week without fail, mainly to see how Malek and Tai was doing.
00:03:49
Speaker
But I got into a couple of other bands in 1978, but missed Squeeze. And so I didn't catch Take Me I'm Yours, Miss Goodbye Girl. And then I don't know what show it was. I don't think, I don't even think it was Top of the Pops. I think it was some kind of daytime show. I saw Cool for Cats. I saw the boys doing Cool for Cats on the show. And back in those days in England,
00:04:18
Speaker
I was in Wales, actually, I should say, because I was in Wales. You would just have things on during the day. It's not like today when you tune in during the day and it's all, you know, cookery programs and, you know, DIY programs. You can actually turn on the TV at, say, half ten in the morning and catch Squeeze doing Cool for Cats. It just seemed like a totally different era, you know. And I can still see myself sat in the living room and these guys come on. It's Chris that I can distinctly remember.
00:04:47
Speaker
In fact, it's interesting, when I got the record of Silver Cat, the single, I was actually amazed that there were five people in the band. I looked on the back of the cover of the 45 record of Silver Cat and I was thinking, who are these five people? Because Chris just so dominates that song, his delivery and his persona.
The Lyrical Appeal and Vocal Dynamics of Squeeze
00:05:10
Speaker
And when you first see him on TV, you know, back in that era, he had the sure and headed look
00:05:16
Speaker
He just looks so cool chopping away at that guitar of his and singing these lyrics, the likes of which I'd never heard before. I mean, I was eight years old, I should say. So what he was singing about, I mean, I couldn't even begin to understand, but the colour and the humour of the words definitely came through to me. And I think I love the way that each verse
00:05:45
Speaker
completely reset everything. You get a verse about, you know, the score and the court pool, and then you get this verse about the bank job. And then you get the verse about the guy going down the club and getting a nasty little rash. And it just changes all the time. And I think for a child, you know, that's quite good because, you know, kids don't have the best attention spans, I guess, you know, but, um, it was a comedy record at the end of the day, wasn't it? It was a kind of crossover.
00:06:12
Speaker
record i guess you could if you're being unkind you describe it as almost as a kind of novelty gimmick kind of record in a way and so that really appealed to me but then the crucial thing i think that happened was up the junction came out because i think if squeeze had done another cool for cats straight after cool for cats i don't think i would have been as interested in them um
00:06:41
Speaker
it was the fact that Up the Junction came out and was totally different. Not only was it totally different in sound and style and the kind of lyrics and the kind of delivery, there was a different singer. And I loved that. I mean, it sounds so mundane, doesn't it? But I just watched it on TV and I was like, hang on a minute. Chris is kind of in the background of this one. Who's this guy? And Glenn,
00:07:10
Speaker
If you watch all the video footage for Cool for Cat, Glenn is virtually invisible in nearly all those clips, isn't he? He's just in the background, dancing away. You don't notice him, you don't kind of see him, but then in up the junction, he's totally front and center and he's the singer. And that, I was just fascinated by that because most groups didn't do that. Most groups were just, you know, the same guy or the same girl up front, every record.
00:07:38
Speaker
And they all tended to sound the same to me. You know, one Blondie song was much like another. One Buntown Rat song was much like another. Cool for Captain Up the Junction, it was like chalking cheese in a way. You could sort of hear that they were both just as great as each other, but in different ways. But I think it was that that pulled me in. I was so interested in this Yin Yang, Chris and Glenn thing. And that really carried me through the first couple of years of being a Squeeze fan.
00:08:08
Speaker
you know, excitedly buying the albums to see which songs Chris is going to sing and which songs is Glen going to sing. And then of course, you know, Jules takes a number as well. And it was just so kind of multifaceted and interesting. So yeah, a long answer, but I mean, I could talk for the next two hours without you interrupting me. So I'll bring that little segment to a close if that's okay.
00:08:34
Speaker
Not a problem, because it's always an interesting perspective to hear why the appeal happens. Where does the appeal happen? Some people say, well, they don't understand why this can be the same band. If you stand back and look at the overall picture of Chris singing and Glenn singing, because
00:08:57
Speaker
that should be wrong. And then you have the people who obviously are sold on the band thinking this is the best thing since sliced cheesecake, that they have two different singers and can be almost two different bands so that they are not shoehorned into one
00:09:16
Speaker
I guess vocal kind of delivery as it were. I know that I listened to some of those songs that are on UK Squeeze and on Cool for Cats and I can kind of hear Glenn feeling his voice in quotations and a lot of those.
00:09:36
Speaker
him trying to do sort of a Cockney delivery. I think it's in That's Not Cricket. I listened to that and I went, I think he might be better served with the song if Chris did it. Because Chris did it so effortlessly in Cool for Cats, if I sort of put that opinion out there. Would you say that that's kind of where the first couple of things with Packet of Three onto UK Squeeze, onto Cool for Cats?
00:10:02
Speaker
Well, it's really interesting that you say that because when I first got the Cool for Cats album, I thought Chris was singing It's Not Cricket. And it's crazy now because when you hear it now, you know, as an adult, it's clearly Glenn. But because, as you say, he was doing this very broad South East London accent, I just thought, OK, that's Chris on that one. You know, it took me a while, I think, to work certain things out. But I'll tell you one thing that was really interesting.
Creative Tensions and Vocal Challenges
00:10:33
Speaker
So I heard Cool for Cats first, heard Up the Junction second, and then I bought the album, I bought the Cool for Cats album, or rather my parents bought it for me. Took it home, put it on, and of course the first track on that album is Slap and Tickle, isn't it? Yes. And it was really strange because as soon as the vocals come in on that record, and it's weird because I was so young, but I think because my ear had been attuned to music already for quite a long time,
00:11:02
Speaker
I should just say, even though I'd just got into the pop charts the previous year, I'd heard music ever since I was a young child. You know, my father was really into music, et cetera. So I think my ear was tuned to certain things. But as soon as the vocals came in for Slept and Tickle, I was like, oh my God, they're singing together on this one. It was like the two voices that I'd kind of heard separately were singing together in perfect unison. And that was the other sort of this incredible dimension to it.
00:11:29
Speaker
And I was like, wow, not only do they take it in turns, but they actually also come together. And they're not even singing harmony, they just sing an octave apart. And maybe that more than anything else, really. I think I mentioned that in this book that I've written quite a few times, really. This idea of the, you know, the unison vocals of Diffred and Tilbrook. A fairly unique thing, I guess. I can't think of another band that has that.
00:11:56
Speaker
Obviously, you get bands like The Beatles and Queen, where you have lots of harmonies going on. But this idea of two voices actually, they're not in harmony, they're just an octave apart, singing an absolute machine-like, accurate unison. And it kind of turns into this kind of blended personality. You can hear the kind of rough and ready, criss thing, which is almost slightly menacing, I think. It's got a slightly menacing sound.
00:12:22
Speaker
But Glenn's voice is the total opposite. His voice is all light and sunny and attractive and appealing. Stick them together and you've really got something then.
00:12:34
Speaker
Well, it's also fortuitous that that sort of started very, very early because in a lot of later tunes, Chris, it seems to me, and maybe he even said it a few times and has said it, that he felt very forced to give that angelic higher register soft vocal delivery. He felt very, very uncomfortable with that.
00:13:02
Speaker
and especially if you listened to, and you kind of, well, you didn't kind of, you pretty much pointed it at, I think it was his house, her home, where he's very hesitant. And I understand if all of the listeners here know that it was a difficult time, obviously, working up to that date in hindsight for 1982, but
00:13:24
Speaker
it always felt like a real struggle for Chris to find his voice without feeling overwhelmed that maybe he wasn't the right person to be singing, whereas we're all pretty much in agreement in this squeeze universe that it was the right choice for Paul Carrick to sing Tempted at the time. And it's now a completely different song when Glenn sings it.
00:13:48
Speaker
So I always found the two of those elements together to be, like you said, and I agree, quite appealing that it's not around in a lot of other bands. Even from that time period, it was very singularity. Like you said, Bob Geldof gave his identity to the Boomtown Rats. And either it was that or you had just had a lot of noise that people couldn't understand.
00:14:17
Speaker
yeah and you had Paul Weller of the Jam of course and you had Sting in the police and as the 80s as you got further into the 80s that became more pronounced as you got into the kind of independent British scene you know bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, the Smiths, the Cure they were all characterized by this you know very clear cut concept of a lead singer in a band
00:14:43
Speaker
and uh but yeah i mean squeeze squeeze was something more interesting than that i think it's funny you were talking about chris doing his house at home and um the the previous song that he did that high high vocal was on east side story wasn't it it was um
Chris and Glenn's Creative Dynamics
00:15:00
Speaker
The second track on East Side Story. Someone Else's Heart. Yeah, that's right. Now I was fascinated to learn, I think it was probably in Jim Drury's book Song by Song that Chris had had this voice prior to the band being signed by A&M. It was a voice which he had used in the band's early days and for some reason he'd let it go. He'd stopped doing it.
00:15:25
Speaker
And I wonder if it was something to do with the Miles Copeland strategy, which was to try and toughen the band's sound up. You know, in about 1977, he famously said to them, you know, you've got to try and get the band to sound a bit more punky and a bit more energetic. So it might well be that Chris decided to let go of that kind of sound and to go more kind of earthy and ladish.
00:15:46
Speaker
And I think it was the right move, to be honest with you. I think on Koo for Cats and RG Bargi, I think that really, really works well. And by the time you get to East Side Story, when Costello is starting to encourage them to expand and to develop and to
00:16:02
Speaker
I think outside the box, I think, musically, I think that was the right time then for Chris to almost kind of dust down this voice that he'd kept hidden in the closet. But like you say, I think maybe what happened is on East Side Story, Costello perhaps was there as a nurturing influence to help Chris to do that voice. On Sweets from a Stranger, you've got no Elvis, you've got Chris and Glenn starting to get a bit kind of gnarkey with each other.
00:16:32
Speaker
And again, I think it was in Jim's book, Song by Song, this extraordinary misunderstanding that seemed to develop. But Chris got it into his head that Glenn was deliberately out to make him sound silly. And I love that story. It just gives a little snapshot into just the very, very complex and difficult
00:16:54
Speaker
thing that can go on in a band, you know, between musicians in a band, band members, but I think particularly between the creative people in the band, the people who are writing the songs, all the kind of paranoia that goes on and the insecurity. And what's interesting, I think, is I picked up on all this. It's this weirdest thing. But when I was a kid, I'm not, I'm not kind of making this up in retrospect. I can remember listening to R.G. Bargee,
00:17:21
Speaker
Because for a start, I noticed that Chris only had one lead vocal on that album. He's only got, here comes that feeling, hasn't he? Yeah, I think so. On side too. Yeah, he takes one verse in, I think, on Go-Go, and that's it. Whereas on Cool for Cats, he'd done Cool for Cats, he'd done Hard to Find, he'd done The Knack, three quite big songs. And I could see, I could tell, there's something going on in the dynamic of this band.
00:17:51
Speaker
Glenn is singing more, Chris seems to be singing less. And I picked up on it. It's the weirdest thing, because I mean, you're talking about maybe 30 years later or something when I was reading the Jim Drury book and thinking, God, I was right. You know, when you hear Glenn saying, oh, I was a terrible tyrant during this period, you know, I was playing all the keyboard parts and I was singing all the songs and everything and, you know,
00:18:16
Speaker
crisp saying oh you know I was really insecure at this point I thought Glen should sing everything I was taking a back seat and I was thinking that is amazing I was 10 years old and somehow I picked up on all all this dynamic that was the extent to which I think I was into the band when you listen to a you know record like a thousand times as I did you know as you bar G
00:18:41
Speaker
probably only had about four albums at the time you know so you just listen to the same record over and over and over and over again and you're looking at the pictures of the band on the cover and you're trying to you're trying to piece together what kind of people are they you know you're looking at the expressions on their faces and it's just endlessly fascinating trying to work out who they all are and what what what exactly is the relationship between them all but yeah
00:19:05
Speaker
Well, it's fascinating for you to be able to gather all that information, so to speak, in one place with your book because the accepted story and the true story is that it was Chris.
00:19:21
Speaker
who was the one who put the advert in the Sweet Shop window, looking for somebody because he had, in quotations, a band. And what ended up happening was that he was the one who ended up
00:19:38
Speaker
pushing himself further and further into the background after he found someone like Glenn, who obviously, I don't know, I mean, if you want to sort of speak to that, maybe didn't even realize how much of, you know, how much get up and go he had back then because he had expressed, and you quote it several times, which is great because you bring together so many
00:20:04
Speaker
articles and clippings and interviews from the period of 78 to 82 that Glenn is very frustrated because they can't be bigger. They should be bigger. Chris kind of tosses off one-liners.
00:20:20
Speaker
like, hey, whatever, that kind of attitude. And I'm not saying it's prevalent to that time period. I think that that's just Chris's nature. But to observe how the dynamics sort of set themselves right there at the beginning, sort of Chris pretending to have a band, but yet Glenn is the one who had the wherewithal, the fortitude and the gumption to
00:20:45
Speaker
to make it happen and then unfortunately just kind of bulldozed his way through a lot of the musicality of the band and everybody just kind of threw up their hands. I mean, how do you see that? Yeah, well, I think Glenn in more recent times has taken himself to task for a lot of that and
00:21:15
Speaker
You know, maybe on some level he doesn't really need to, I don't think. Well, obviously, you know, we went there, we don't know exactly what went on, but it's clear that Glenn, you know, if you go back to, say, 1980 and the I.G. Barge era, Glenn is, at that point, he's moving, I think, he's evolving very quickly as a songwriter.
Squeeze's Sound Evolution and Studio Dynamics
00:21:34
Speaker
If you compare the songs on Koopa Cats to I.G. Barge,
00:21:37
Speaker
There's definitely a step forward in Glenn's composing, his arranging. Everything starts to sound more competitive, I think. I think the Cool for Cats album is still squeezed in South East London mode. They're still playing the kind of Deptford dives. They're still fraternising with the criminal underworld.
00:22:02
Speaker
in southeast London. RGB, it's starting to sound more like the Beatles now. It's starting to sound like something which people in America are going to tune into. I mean, I don't know how ill Glenn was at the time. Pretty young. I mean, 22 something? I guess. I don't know what you think.
00:22:21
Speaker
maybe a little bit older, I'm not sure, but definitely evolving quickly. And I can absolutely understand why in a studio setting he would take charge, because Jules, great pianist, wonderful guy, you know, great comedic spirit, but not really, if we're honest, not really 100% tuned into the British pop thing. His roots are a bit different,
00:22:52
Speaker
He's got a slightly different musical agenda as became clear in 1980 when he left the band in order to pursue that. So if you imagine the studio set up, Glenn's trying to get these songs done, songs like Vicky Verkey and songs like If I Didn't Love You. And he's got Jules, they want him to play the Boogie Woogie. He's got Chris, they want him to go down the pub.
00:23:13
Speaker
Um, it's fairly understandable given his talent and his just, just this speed with which he is developing as a writer that he would just go, right, we just need to crack on and get this done. I think with John Wood in particular, I think Glenn and John Wood formed a good working relationship. And John Wood was very old school, you know, he'd produced or he'd worked with people like Nick Drake and, um, uh, John Martin and Pink Floyd. So he, you know, he had a great musical pedigree and I can totally imagine John Wood in the studio
00:23:43
Speaker
um honing in on Glenn and thinking right of all the people in the studio this this is the guy that seems to know what he's doing he's written all these tunes single-handedly um he seems to know what all the parts should be you know he knows what part Jules needs to play he's playing Chrissie's guitar
00:24:02
Speaker
for him at this stage according to Chris. Chris's own testimony is that he wasn't even really playing with him guitar at this point so he and Jules would often head off to the pub and Glenn and John Wood would hunker down and crack on as they say.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, I found that revelation if I may interject about yeah Chris saying he wasn't even really playing the guitar and I know he has said several times throughout the years he's very You know per functionary and sometimes if Glenn is showing him something He just you know, it's just a fistful of chords. That's his quotation. That's a lovely. That's a lovely
00:24:43
Speaker
little bon monte to drop in there as far as Chris is describing himself. So that inadequacy of being able to level up because, you know, James, to be honest, nobody can compare to Glenn as a guitar player. I mean, we often kind of brush that aside in the context of squeeze as a band. But when you think about all of that,
00:25:07
Speaker
I don't know, is it? I'm going a little bit off there because I tend to think about the British mindset and I don't know if it's pertaining to now the guys in squeezer about 10 years on from us.
00:25:24
Speaker
And that whole playing everything down, oh, it's not a big deal, keeping it all on the DL, so to speak, on the down low, for them to not acknowledge either they're having a problem or they're doing fantastically brilliant.
00:25:42
Speaker
is maybe from my perspective, one of their biggest, it's a disappointment to me that something didn't happen where there was acknowledgement on either side. Okay, Chris, you're having a problem. Great. I'll help out. And no, don't go down to the pub with Jules and get sozzled like, yeah, I like your word sozzled. Stay here.
00:26:07
Speaker
And I'll work with you. So how do you feel? I mean, do you feel that whole generation just had super difficult times trying to get the point across? Well, I'm going to offer a geographical insight into this, which may not be an insight. It may be wrong.
00:26:28
Speaker
But I mean, I'm not from London. I'm from North Wales. So I do I do hesitate to try and read too much into this. But I think there is a bit of a London thing going on maybe with that. The band that I think of straight away is the Rolling Stones. There are all kinds of stories about the stones. And if you think about how the stones come across in interviews, you know, think of Charlie Watts, think of Bill Wyman.
00:26:55
Speaker
both very, very sort of London characters. So we say, you know, kind of London guys, not terribly communicative. What's the word? A little bit morose, slightly kind of truculent with each other. You know, not prone to maybe, you know, if you imagine, you know, Mick and Keith just play this extraordinary song in the studio. They play something like Paint It Black for the first time in the studio.
00:27:25
Speaker
Can you imagine Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts just, you know, infusing about it and congratulating Mick and Keith? No, not for a second. You can just imagine them going, okay, whatever, you know, and just cracking on with playing the song. And I think maybe there was some, some part of that with Chris and Glen too, that kind of London. I don't know what it is. Is it a macho thing? No, maybe not. Maybe it's just.
00:27:48
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, like I said, I hesitate to give that insight because I'm not from London and I don't want to cast any aspersions on the personalities of Londoners. But I do have a couple of friends who are Londoners and they are a little bit like that as well. They're not people who necessarily bestow praise very easily.
00:28:11
Speaker
It's interesting because you have to put it into context of the times back then. And I guess if we can go past 82 just a little bit and see how everybody has changed in their attitudes and their outlooks and the acceptance of we had a problem back when we were in our 20s and we're acknowledging that. And I know that a lot of people
00:28:39
Speaker
today want to have a problem with cool for cats they want to have issues with the lyrics and the delivery and that whole time period and It's frustrating obviously to a lot of people who say you have to look at it and what was going on back at that time period even if
00:29:00
Speaker
Chris has explained ad nauseam, that this is how it got inspired. It is very difficult to extract your current thinking and put yourself back there unless you actually were Chris and Glenn and their posse of friends or maybe not friends, but that attitude. And so they've been very fortunate to have these breaks sometimes
00:29:29
Speaker
for the worse and for the better to come back and bring it all back and acknowledge that they can still play Slap and Tickle and Cool for Cats and it means something. I've actually said that a few times. Chris has said, well, I don't think Cool for Cats is a song I should be singing anymore. I don't relate to it anymore.
00:29:49
Speaker
kind of misogynist a little bit, you know, but then again, it gets everybody up. Yeah. So it's super difficult to make that break, but understandable given the time factor if Chris just wants to say to Jules, you know, well, guess we're not needed. Let's get out and get a drink.
00:30:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean Chris always wanted to slope off, I think. He was quite fond of that. I mean, there's quite a few interviews that I kind of, you know, read while I was writing the book where Chris was clearly
00:30:27
Speaker
not quite on the same page as Glenn. Like you said earlier, Glenn tended in interviews to talk a lot about the fact that they weren't selling enough albums or that they needed to be bigger than the jam. And Chris would often just be there saying, well, I just want to go back to college and learn how to spell properly. Or he'd say something like, I've always wanted to be a novelist, really. That's what I want to do, really.
00:30:49
Speaker
I don't know whether it was just a defensive thing or whether it was genuine. Given that Chris has basically pursued the life of a lyricist and rock and roll musician pretty solidly, hasn't he, through all these decades?
00:31:05
Speaker
As far as I know, he never wrote a novel. He never did go back to college, I don't think. He has just played the game and he's been incredibly successful at it really in the scheme of things. So it is curious that through all these interviews, he always seemed to be somebody he seemed willing to walk away from it. He even, you know, he used to make comments like this one interview, I think it was on the Australian tour when he said that it was really starting to get him down.
00:31:33
Speaker
you know all the touring and the live work and he'd started thinking maybe I should do the Brian Wilson thing maybe I should stay at home and write and let Glenn go on tour and apart from clearly there was the very dark period for him around about 1998 somewhere like that during the Domino period when he did finally
00:31:57
Speaker
you know, he had to confront the fact that actually he couldn't do this touring thing anymore. But in the scheme of things, if you look at the whole kind of arch of their career, that was a blip, really. It was a blip that went on for maybe a few years. But I mean, how many years of Chris and Glen being back together now? I think they came back in 2004, didn't they? And it's now 2022. So they've already had a much longer stretch of time together than the stretch
00:32:23
Speaker
of time that I cover in my book, you know, 78 to 82, a little brief little four-year window that was compared to the whole story. Yeah, it's amazing to look back at that time period and consider that they're together. And doing all of this work still, you know, there hasn't been a lot of new, new material. But looking back at that time period, they also seemed to be able to speak their mind, but
00:32:53
Speaker
I don't know. I have another theory too about not wanting to burn bridges as it were because you kind of allude to it a little bit and even the fact that maybe people are not sort of forthright in how they're actually feeling about let's say members of the band that had to be let go and that sort of thing because there seems to be
00:33:21
Speaker
If we sort of pick out jewels, people want to say, Chris said he was gutted, heartbroken. But if you look at it now from the distance, they're still together. They are still performing and making music. And I often wonder,
Jules Holland's Departure and Diverging Paths
00:33:41
Speaker
After you kind of looked at it in that context back then, did it just have to happen? Because Jules just felt there was no way for him to be able to perform authentically within those dynamics.
00:33:59
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's pretty extraordinary if you look at it now. I mean, the idea that Chris and Glenn ever thought for a moment that Jules was just going to spend the rest of his days just tinkling the piano on their songs. It's pretty mind-boggling now to think of that because when he left the band in 1980, his solo career clearly didn't exactly spark
00:34:26
Speaker
But of course he had the break, he got into the TV world and everything and his talent as a presenter or as a personality quickly became evident.
00:34:35
Speaker
and he was able to use that then as a springboard to get back into music broadcasting and music performing with his own band. Jules is, I mean, I guess you couldn't say that Jules has made a unique and wonderful contribution to the world of songwriting over the last, whatever it is, 30, 40 years. I'm sure he himself would say that. I mean, his material kind of exists in order to facilitate
00:35:03
Speaker
the Boogie Woogie and the big band Bon Ami, which his band do so fantastically well, you know, and it's very successful and it's very characterful. But he I, you know, I would I would imagine he would be the first to agree that compared to say, Chris and Glenn, you know, Chris Glenn had created a body of work which is which is truly unique in the, you know, in the world of pop music. You know, they wear the new London and McCartney, weren't they? They hated that comparison.
00:35:31
Speaker
But just this idea that Jules, they ever thought that this guy, Jules Holland, was just going to be their keyboard player and just kind of sit there playing the solo and pulling muscles and, you know, singing Wrong Side of the Moon and having his songs consigned to B-sides or just completely chopped out of the album altogether. I mean, you know, Jules had no songs on the first album. He had one song, Kufukat, one song on, um, Aji Baji, a couple of B-sides.
00:36:01
Speaker
And then he left the band. So it's not really surprising when you look back at it, I guess.
00:36:10
Speaker
I can understand his personality is so dominant from this distance and what he ended up doing was being more of a personality presenter. We tend to forget what he did and what he was good with back then. Although, again, I've noticed in one or two instances, Glenn and Chris have said, well, there wasn't going to be any
00:36:33
Speaker
there wasn't going to be any further thought process of having another songwriter. And I think, did Glenn ever say or sort of imply that he was a little unhappy with the way that Chris and Jules were able to sort of put songs together? Even though Jules and Glenn were friends first, right? Am I getting that all correct?
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's the interesting dynamic in Squeeze that Glenn and Jules were friends first, but I mean, to my knowledge, they never wrote anything together. And I don't even know why. I don't think Glenn's ever particularly explained that. I'm going to conjecture that it was, again, maybe this split between Jules wanting to be very bluesy and quite American.
00:37:20
Speaker
and Glenn wanting to be the Beatles. I mean, that's just pure conjecture, but it didn't stop Chris and Jules working together. But of course, Chris was just, he was writing the words, so he could give the words to Jules. Jules could do what he liked with them. He could turn them into a kind of bluesy thing, kind of pub rock thing, say, for example, like hop, skip and jump. Or he could do what I think is quite kind of
00:37:46
Speaker
special really. I've always thought this on R.G. Bargee. Jules manages to write a different in Tilbrook song really. He does Wrong Side of the Moon, which is fairly uncharacteristic of his kind of style of songwriting up to that point. It does kind of sound like a different in Tilbrook song.
00:38:04
Speaker
you know, if you were not paying attention, you'd probably think, oh, Chris and Glenn gave Jules a song to sing on that album. You'd have to scrutinize the, you know, the label to see that it was a Holland and Difford song. But what Glenn said, I think, again, this is going back to song by song by Jim Truery, Glenn said he always enjoyed playing the guitar on the Difford and Holland songs because I think if you're a songwriter, it's nice sometimes to play on somebody else's material.
00:38:30
Speaker
because for once you're not kind of lost in the, just in the whole process of the arrangement and how the song came to be created. You can get some distance from it. And, you know, Glenn plays a really, really nice guitar solo on that track. And he plays some nice guitar on a few other dual songs later on. You know, I'm thinking there's some nice guitar work, isn't there, on Heartbreaking World on Cozy Fantootie Free Tea. He does some great guitar stuff on
00:39:00
Speaker
It's also gutted and heartbroken on Frank. So no, to my knowledge, I don't think Glenn had a problem as far as I know.
00:39:09
Speaker
But it is interesting, isn't it, that very few Difford and Holland songs got onto those records. And it is interesting. It would have been good to have been a fly in the wall in those studio sessions to find out actually, why actually was that? Was there some aspects, maybe, of Glenn quietly taking Chris to one side and saying, look, I think your songs with Jules are really good, but I think we need to be very focused in Squeeze. We are the songwriting partnership here.
00:39:38
Speaker
Or he may not have done that at all. We just don't know. We just have no idea. It may have been that Jules saw it that way himself and wasn't that fussed about having his and Chris's songs featured. It's just one of those things we just don't know. I mean, we'd need to sit down with Jules, Chris and Glenn for a very long pub session in order to try and find out these facts.
Band Synergy and Commercial Challenges
00:40:02
Speaker
I know it seems to come to a nice, I guess I want to say conclusion or fruition, but one of the nicest things I've listened to and I referenced it in a previous podcast is the instrumental Frank's Bag.
00:40:17
Speaker
from Frank, which is 1989. And I find that extremely satisfying, if I could use that kind of word, because it's a contribution from all the members of the band at that time, which was Keith Wilkinson on bass. But that, to me, in those three minutes, so to speak,
00:40:41
Speaker
brings together a lot of what each of them could bring to the band. And as far as Jules is concerned, he and Glenn, I don't know what you think, but they're like the driving force behind that whole song. Yeah, well, I think it's a shame really because Frank happened at just the wrong time for them. And I still don't quite know what happened. I mean, you might know better than I do on this one because Babylon and Arm,
00:41:10
Speaker
did represent a stride forward for them commercially in America, didn't it? And in the UK as well, I think Hourglass was a top 20 hit and Babylon On was a bit of a hit album. And I think Frank, as the follow-up musically, it saw them hitting a new peak in a way. They were kind of recapturing some of the spirit that they had on Argy-Bargy, and which had been, I don't want to use the word diluted exactly, because that's a bit of a negative word, but if you take what
00:41:39
Speaker
Castello did with them on East Side Story. I think Castello kind of changed them or he kind of encouraged them to evolve away from that bluesy pub rock kind of almost like garage rock occasional kind of raw sound. And then they carried that through to Switch From a Stranger but without Castello's guiding hand. So there were some problems there. Then they went totally Paul Young and Laurie Latham
00:42:09
Speaker
on Cozy Fantusi Fruity. Then they went to bubble on and on, which even though they stripped the sound down, that album is still, I would say, a very kind of slick sounding record, which it sounds to me like it's almost been precision tooled as a statement as in squeeze kind of saying, hey, we can go back to playing the arena circuit on America's East Coast with these songs. You know, they have a certain kind of bombast to them or a certain kind of, you know, they sound like they're trying to be commercial.
00:42:38
Speaker
But then what they do, they do Frank, they come out of this bag, to use a pun, Frank's bag, with Frank, and their sound is just so natural again. And they seem to be just really gelling. There's loads of really good jewels, piano on that record, probably the best piano record he made with Squeeze. You've got the great piano solo and painting place. You've got piano in Rose, I said. It's also gutted, this piano. Is it too late? Piano. Dr. Jazz, of course.
00:43:08
Speaker
There's more piano on that record than on Kufa Cats and Rajibhaji, which are mainly kind of organ type sounds on those records, aren't they? So Frank, I think, in a parallel universe, Frank was really successful. Jules stayed in the band and then they just had this incredible run of records, squeeze as they were always meant to be. This kind of very lively sounding, live, fun,
00:43:38
Speaker
raw kind of band that came out of the pub rock scene really in England and then went into the punk and the new wave thing but that's not of course what happened Frank flopped Gilles left the band they got dropped by A&M and then signs of Warners and of course however we might rate the songs on play and the maturity and the song craft and you know etc etc
MTV's Influence and American Success
00:44:03
Speaker
My own view is that from play onwards they lost something which is very much in evidence on Frank and that's the sound of a band. A band of friends, you all know each other and love each other from way back.
00:44:21
Speaker
I think from play onwards they start to sound more like, you know, this is Glenn Tilbrook writing some music to Chrissie's words and then they're just recording with whoever they can find to play with them or, you know, they're employing musicians. You start to get that revolving cast of characters in the 90s and it all goes, I think it loses some directness.
00:44:47
Speaker
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00:45:16
Speaker
Download the Anchor app or go to anchor.fm to get started. Well, you're kind of right on the bat with the Babylon and An situation because contrary to the belief that 78 to 82 is supposed to be, you know, the hits, quote unquote.
00:45:42
Speaker
Fortunately or unfortunately, Singles 45s and Under reinforces that, and you note that in your book towards the end, like an afterward, that people had this perception that that time period and the very end of that, those songs, people could take a look at it and go, my God, this band is incredible.
00:46:04
Speaker
And yet for us here in the States, even though they did Madison Square Garden right there at the end, that's really not an accurate picture because the big selling thing that happened was Babylon and on an hourglass. That for the American charts was the hips. That was the one that really kind of catapulted them more towards
00:46:29
Speaker
Well, for want of a better word, mainstream radio back at that time. So it's always interesting now to put that time period into its own context because 78 to 82, a lot of people do like to talk about that as the classic lineup.
00:46:51
Speaker
I always thought that that was funny. Is that just an ongoing, you kind of just heard that and that's how it's evolved, that that time period or that version of the band is the classic version? I'm trying to think. There was classic Coke and that didn't go over too well.
00:47:08
Speaker
You know, so I'm not saying that that's a bad time at all because we all have our favorite time periods and we can say that about Squeeze. So I'm curious because I was wanting to know how classic that term derived itself and put itself into 78 to 82. Well, I think different people will have different perspectives on this. I mean, I view the classic lineup as being the R.G. Barge line up.
00:47:35
Speaker
But if I was to interrogate myself as to why I think that, I think I would struggle actually, other than...
00:47:42
Speaker
I guess it's a more mature album than Cool for Cats. It's the first one with John Bentley. Jules is still in the band and there's still that lingering element of the Deptford pub scene. They're still writing those kinds of songs like Misadventure, that kind of rough and tumble thing. And the sound is not too produced. The sound has still got that kind of
00:48:07
Speaker
rough around the edges farfeasal organ kind of sound with Jules' piano very much in there.
00:48:14
Speaker
So to me, that's the classic lineup. Now, I would imagine for yourself and maybe for other people from America, perhaps the East Side Story lineup maybe comes through as the classic one because Tempted obviously was the record that got a huge amount of airplay in America with Paul Karak on vocals and everything. I mean, is that the case? Would you say that?
00:48:41
Speaker
For American fans, it's the East Side Story lineup, which maybe is the classic one. I think what helped to drive that point home, fortunately or unfortunately in Squeeze's case, was MTV. Yeah.
00:48:58
Speaker
And I'd like to hear actually your perspective as somebody across the pond. How was that perceived at the time? Because I'll give you a little story about it is that MTV started in the summer of 1981. And pretty much the only videos that were available were these British New Wave bands. Some of them were well known, some of them weren't.
00:49:26
Speaker
Some of them were very flashy, some of them weren't. And we could also say that Squeeze at that point had a video and it could just be played to death. And so that's the advantage for East Side Story.
00:49:44
Speaker
coming at the time that it did because it could be, and it was heavily promoted unto itself, used as actually breaks between things when MTV first started. You'd see Paul singing on stage with his organ and his synthesizer, but
00:50:04
Speaker
I think that that probably is an accurate description for us as far as classic. We may not have known who the band members were previous to East Side Story, but the fact that that song got such a heavy visual push from a channel that was just starting up and didn't have a lot in their vaults, so to speak. So that totally helped a lot. Did it help Squeeze a year later?
00:50:34
Speaker
I'm not quite sure. It seems like everybody kind of disses that video, including when I spoke to Chris about black coffee in bed. Yeah. He says basically they didn't understand why this was happening, how it happened, why they looked the way they did. And then you actually so great confirmed it in your book. Can you give me that little anecdote because it was like, yes, that's right.
00:51:01
Speaker
Yeah, well, this came from John Savanna, previously known as Don Snow, of course. I had shared a couple of drafts of the book with John. He was good enough to read it and give me some feedback on it, and he was very positive and encouraging. But he alighted on the passage where I talked about how they all looked so bored.
00:51:25
Speaker
in the video for Black Coffee in Bed, which I think is mentioned in song by song as well. I've got a feeling that either Chris or Glenn mention the fact that they do look so kind of dejected. And I mean, it's it's quite a stilted thing, isn't it? Because they're all kind of standing in the windows of this kind of fake house, aren't they? And it's all a bit kind of staged. But what John Savannah said to me was they didn't realize that the camera was rolling.
00:51:50
Speaker
It was as simple as that. They thought it was Steve Barron, the director. He's the director that did the big Michael Jackson song, Billy Jean. He'd not told them that the camera was rolling. So they thought that they were just kind of doing a quick just rehearsal and they ran through it. And then it turned out that it was a take.
00:52:14
Speaker
And that's why they all look so miserable. And it's quite interesting to reflect. I wonder what they'd have done if they'd have known it was a take. How would that video have been different? It's quite fun if you watch the video, you imagine perhaps they'd all started doing big rock star poses or something, or they'd start to really emote and look really as if they were really into it. I don't know. It's quite funny.
00:52:40
Speaker
I once gently heckled Chris at a show that he did, a solo show in Morcombe, where he introduced a song. I can't remember what song it was, but he got talking about the 1980s and he said something like, oh, Squeeze, Squeeze were one of the few bands that never brought into all that eyeshadow and eyeliner thing. And I just found myself just sort of shouting out, what about the Black Coffee in Bed video?
00:53:08
Speaker
It just sort of came out, just completely instinctively. And he immediately kind of backed down and went, oh yeah, yeah, of course, I forgot about that. So, yeah. And let me, I know we're doing audio, but we've recently just seem to unearth things that get lost or need to be forgotten about when we talk about the tempted video because the classic, hey, there's that word.
00:53:37
Speaker
The classic version is, of course, the one that was done by Barney Bubbles of them miming on a stage rehearsal. Who knows what the heck was going on with that? That's just the accepted norm. But you alluded in the book about an alternate version, and it has, I felt, just popped up on YouTube. I watched it. James, what the heck?
00:54:03
Speaker
What is this? What is this? Everybody just kind of went wow and give your description because I'm probably going to break out in laughter if I try and even describe it. Yeah, well it's the kitchen mops, isn't it? Do you call them kitchen mops in America or do you have a different word for them?
00:54:23
Speaker
No, that's what they're called. Yeah, yeah. Now, in my memory, the band were all playing with these kitchen mops and kind of dancing with them, almost like a kind of ballroom dancing thing. And of course, that's not what's happening. It's even more strange than that, because the band are all kind of standing in the background. Paul's there doing his miming and his singing. And somebody, I suspect it was Colin Fulcher, Barney Bubbles probably,
00:54:49
Speaker
off-camera at ground level. It's just kind of hoisting these kitchen mops up into the shop. And no matter how hard I try and kind of work out what that was all about, I can't piece it together in my head. Is there a lyric somewhere in Tempted about mopping the floor? I don't think so. Maybe it's a metaphor.
00:55:16
Speaker
Yeah, let's let's try and rationalize this James like 40 plus years later What was going on and if we just want to kind of throw our hands up and say we don't know We don't know but we don't know why it's kind of like and we've alluded to this too And I don't think we're gonna be able to figure this one out in this podcast, but they're ongoing
00:55:39
Speaker
Enigma, mystery, gotta figure this one out of the dancing girls in Cool for Cats and Up the Junction. So because it's a little bit more on the British side, I've seen a lot of stuff go back and forth about who is in the video. There's a woman who said it was her and then she said emphatically it's not her. Chris stated in his autobiography that he can't recall who they were.
00:56:05
Speaker
We kind of know who the backup singers were, the girls in the song, but the video has presented its own, like it's taken on its life of its own basically because we can't track down these women or can't have anybody come in agreement. James, you're my expert. You're going to solve this for us. This is going to be in volume two of your book on Squeeze. The things I need to figure out from the band's past.
00:56:31
Speaker
Well I did have to make a decision about this because I'd heard that it was Michelle Collins who was an actress and I'd heard different things but I couldn't in all honesty, I couldn't establish the veracity of that enough for me to put it in. I had a similar issue and you might be able to help me with this because this is the thing that's always bugged me. Is it on Schwarzenegger on the front of the first Squeeze album, on the front of UK Squeeze? Because I've heard that from so many different sources over the years
00:57:00
Speaker
But when it came to writing the book, could I find one single written reference to that which I could definitely believe? No, I could not. Now that's not to say it doesn't exist somewhere, but is it Arnie? Does anybody know?
00:57:15
Speaker
I mean it's highly probable that it could be because it's the right time. Whoever was running the art department at A&M Records could have noticed a photo and to avoid
00:57:30
Speaker
legal obligations put the wording upon the eyes. And to heavily sort of cartoonize the actual graphic itself is, again, another sort of clever device, maybe, to sort of cover up the fact that maybe, maybe, maybe not we're using a celebrity's likeness. That's my theory.
00:58:00
Speaker
I guess I always thought, well, if it was Arnie, wouldn't that be more out in the public domain by now? It would be out there, wouldn't it? Arnie would have talked about it. People would have talked about it. It would have been out there. But it's not really. It's just one of those kind of squeeze rumors, which, as you say, may well be true, but we don't know. But just go back to the girls for a moment on the Cool for Cats video.
00:58:29
Speaker
It's most likely, well, there's two different options, isn't there? The first option is that they were just actresses or dancers who could have been hired by A&M at the drop of a hat the day before, just a day's work, come to Tittenhurst, you need to dance around in this video, you need to make some tea in this video, you'll get your money at the end of the day and they just go home and that's that.
00:58:53
Speaker
Or it was two friends from within the band's social scene. But if that's true, wouldn't you think Chris would remember that? But Chris's memory is perhaps not the best, I don't know.
00:59:06
Speaker
Yeah, I would say that it could still be an ongoing debate when somebody says yes and then somebody says no. And as you've noted too as well, when you're trying to get the facts and figures straight, you have to be kind of like that third party standout and not totally embrace either what Chris said in his autobiography, what Jules said in his autobiography, and you have to go and kind of, I mean, there was a big thing happening and that's the great thing about your book is that
00:59:36
Speaker
you have straightened out a lot of stuff that actually doesn't need to be pointed out by the guys who said, ah, you guys, you made a mistake. And you just kind of got on with it and presented it. And it's like, hey,
00:59:52
Speaker
It's all done. It's all good. We're good with that. It works and we're gonna we're gonna take that so that's what I like about the style of your book is that You know this this and this happened and especially when it comes to the music press I suppose for us on the US side it really does help because a lot of that stuff happened and
01:00:14
Speaker
on the UK side a lot of that sort of build up before they actually came over here and I'm not talking about that sort of you know stuff that happened in the van you know and going into these terrible cities and you know for the lives you know they ran for their lives because they were being chased with guns and stuff
01:00:34
Speaker
I meant more along the lines of a critical, I mean, there was a whole different music press, if I'm correct. Could you want to talk about that a little bit too? I mean, I'm talking about New Musical Express, Melody Maker, all the music writers for all the trade journals over there. Did they have friends? Did they have people that they were trying to make friends with so that they could get more press at that time period? Well, I don't know for certain. I didn't get the impression that that was the case.
01:01:05
Speaker
What you hear in some of the interviews, particularly on Glenn's side, is Glenn being fairly kind of combative and kind of not taking certain things lying down. You know, like all the accusations of misogyny and sexism and so on.
01:01:28
Speaker
I didn't get the sense that a huge number of these journalists were kind of on Squeeze's side. I more got the sense that they were kind of on the attack quite a lot and Chris and Glenn were often quite defensive and Glenn in particular was often, you know, at pains to defend the band's record on those kind of things. So no, I don't think Squeeze were ever, well, I think for about five minutes Squeeze were
01:01:57
Speaker
looking to become maybe the new darlings of the british press and when it happened it was just after the up the junction single got to number two i think that was their little window where momentarily i think and i'm going off just
01:02:14
Speaker
the amount of interviews that come from that period and the kind of interviews they wear this is the period when they started to get on the cover of these magazines and people started to actually take notice of them because until I think until up the junction they would had been viewed largely
01:02:30
Speaker
With a slightly jaundiced eye, really, by the punk journalists and that scene that Squeeze were trying to make inroads into, it was quite a fundamentalist kind of scene in terms of music, you know, the punk journals wanted a particular kind of thing.
01:02:47
Speaker
and they would often they would do things like you know they would praise the support band and then they would give Squeeze a kicking and that was because the support band was a quote proper punk band unquote and Squeeze were not so you'd get these reviews you know saying well you know thank god we had a really good punk band for the support and then unfortunately Squeeze came on there was quite a lot of that in the early days you know but when Up The Junction came out I think that was the first dilemma I think that most people had
01:03:17
Speaker
Actually there's something more to this group. You can't really kind of argue with that song in terms of the lyrical cleverness of it and the timelessness of the tune and the way it all hangs together. People are not being as convinced by Koopa cats I don't think. The NME referred to Koopa cats as something like the quote was a silly bugger something noise, a silly bugger slice of noise or something. It was seen as being a kind of an annoying
01:03:45
Speaker
gimmick record for kids, whereas Up the Junction was clearly seen as a classic record straight away. And I think because it had been a big hit, there was just a really brief, interesting period where it's obvious that Squeeze had been courted by the music press. Paul Morley interviewed them in 1980, and Paul Morley was a true kind of rising star of British music journalism.
01:04:09
Speaker
he went on to become quite famous. He joined the Art of Noise, he wrote books and he became quite a prominent figure and he interviewed Squeeze in 1979.
01:04:22
Speaker
Yeah I don't know I don't think after that I think it tailed off a little bit I think because maybe just for the simple reason that you know sad to say that Squeeze kind of stopped having any hits really big major hits after up the junction which seems just crazy in retrospect when you think of how good those records were and how well liked they are and how loved they are in fact in retrospect another nail, polymuscles, tempted
01:04:53
Speaker
those records had real kind of lukewarm chart success.
Media Perception and Squeeze's Struggles
01:04:58
Speaker
And I think because the music world was changing and evolving so quickly in that period, and that's one of the things I really wanted to look at was just how fast things were moving. You know, when Squeeze came onto the scene in 1978, they were competing with things like Reckless Eric, Rockpile, things like that, you know. By the time they finished in 82,
01:05:21
Speaker
They're up against haircut 100, Duran Duran, soft sell, spandau ballet, it was just a total sea change. And yeah, just this incredibly fast moving landscape that they're in. And unfortunately, for whatever reason, after that little brief period in 79, they start to struggle commercially.
01:05:45
Speaker
And I think at that point, the press, even though the press liked them and reviewed them kindly, increasingly so after that point, they started to get some good critical notices. I think that was the end of them being treated with true kind of decorum, I think.
Squeeze's Unexpected Breakup and Legacy
01:06:01
Speaker
It is a misnomer to kind of look at singles 45s and under and use that as the barometer because then what happened was you know sweets from a stranger came out and You know there is that sort of oh my god. They're they're breaking. They've got they've now got MTV able to help them promote themselves on a national scale which is
01:06:24
Speaker
You know, I mean, to be quite honest, a lot of that beforehand was really dominated by regional publications. Billboard's a very dry read. That's all about numbers and facts and stuff. And you had that sort of alternative, quote unquote, press. And I don't mean to lump, I can't even put Rolling Stone in that category. But you know, you had Trouser Press and you had Cream. And you had, you just did not have that overarching
01:06:53
Speaker
sense like a top of the pops that had such an influence, that had such an immediacy to it. And MTV started off very small, very regional in New York City, and then expanded very, very quickly. So here we are from East Side Story to Sweets from a Stranger, and they were able, like you said, that is a phenomenal jump. That is quicker than quick.
01:07:17
Speaker
And yet what happened was things were so bad. And I wanted to tell you this personally because I was not aware of sort of the chronological timeline is that Chris and Glenn decided unto themselves that they were going to stop Squeeze. They tell Gilson and Don and John, it's over, and they have to go out.
01:07:44
Speaker
and perform and play this gig in Jamaica and all of this big, big stuff. Like you said, they can't even really remember. There's been no documentation. Did Madison Square Garden actually happen? I was dumbfounded almost when I read that little passage that they decided to end the band, tell everybody, and yet we're going to go out and play. It's mind-blowing.
01:08:11
Speaker
Well, Madison Square Garden did come before that. So they played Madison Square Garden a few months before the split. I think it was Madison Square Garden in the summer of 82, I think, wasn't it? And they split in at the end of the year. But they did do a farewell tour. It was called the Last Orders Tour. And then they played this bizarre Jamaican festival at the end of November.
01:08:38
Speaker
And John Bentley shared a nice little story with me in the book about that particular gig. It's the gig that Chris remembers. I think he remembers it in his autobiography and it's also in song by song as well as this really terrible performance where Chris claims that he's just playing all the wrong notes and Gilson's playing too fast and the audience are not reacting. They're just kind of standing there and John
01:09:03
Speaker
John Bentley told me quite a nice little story about that as to why the audience were so zombified. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, when Squeeze broke up in 82, I was genuinely gutted. I mean, at that point, I would have been 11, just about to go to secondary school.
01:09:23
Speaker
And this is a really important thing for me that Squeeze, as you say, Squeeze developed really quickly over that four year period. When I got into Squeeze in 79, I was eight. So all that kind of music, the kind of cool for cats kind of thing, that really appealed to me as an eight year old, obviously.
01:09:40
Speaker
By the time they split up, I was 11, just about to go to big school, senior school. And Sweets from a Stranger, sure enough, has songs which are far more matured and far more developed and far more adult, I guess. So I felt like I'd grown with them in that four-year period. And they'd absolutely become my band. They were just
01:10:05
Speaker
I mean, there were other bands that I liked and there were other things that I was really into, but Squeeze were special, I think, because their records came out in real time and I bought them, you know, as and when they came out, you know, I was really into Queen.
01:10:21
Speaker
But with Queen, it was mostly going back and checking out all the albums from the prehistoric era that I'd missed. It was buying Sheer Heart Attack from 1973, and it was buying Day at the Racist from 1976. And I loved all that. I loved all the archeology of that, all the kind of backtracking and the exploring and piecing it together. But Squeeze were really the only group where I would go to town with my parents on a Saturday afternoon. And of course, because I was young, I was too young to read the music papers.
01:10:49
Speaker
So I would have no idea that a new Squeeze record was coming out. I would literally have no idea. And there's one particularly great memory I've got of being in Chester with my parents. I would always go to the S section and just flip through, just to look at the Squeeze records that I'd already got, you know. And on this particular day I was doing that. And I genuinely wasn't expecting to find East Side Story.
01:11:10
Speaker
I pulled it out of the rack and I can still remember this feeling of just almost like you sort of got the record in your hand like grasping both hands and your hands are trembling.
01:11:22
Speaker
And I remember frantically turning it over to scan the song list on the back because I was worried straight away that what this was was some kind of compilation album or some kind of thing where they'd collated together some tracks. And when I saw all these new songs, you know, in Quintessence and Tempted, and I was like, my God, there's a new squeeze record. I can't describe to you how magical that was. It was just...
01:11:47
Speaker
just the most wonderful thing. And then it would have happened again with Sweets from a Stranger a year later. Again, I would have had no idea that there was a new Squeeze album. Suddenly, it's there in the racks. So I think that's why Squeeze was so special to me. So when they broke in 82, it was pretty difficult, I think, coming to terms with that. It was like this sinking feeling, like, oh, right, I'm not going to have those kind of experiences again. I need to find another group. I need to try and move on.
01:12:14
Speaker
And I did try and move on. I tried to move on with Madness, who, to me, they seemed like the nearest kind of group. They were also from London, from North London, of course, rather than South London. But they were still from London. They had a bit of a cheeky chappy thing. And their songs were not a million miles away from Squeeze. But I never, I never got my hooks into Madness in the same way that Squeeze, that got into Squeeze. And when Squeeze came back in 85, I mean, that's just a whole other
01:12:44
Speaker
just another amazing moment, really. And of course, by then, I would have been 14 by then.
Squeeze's Global Impact and Modern Recognition
01:12:49
Speaker
And three years is a long time when you're that age. From 11 to 14, you can imagine all the kind of things that can change. And you're just a different person, aren't you? And when that album came out, it was a big, real big moment. And Jules back in the band, it was just incredible.
01:13:08
Speaker
And it's interesting, too, because a lot of the perception of them from that time period is now global. You know, we can talk about how we felt and what they meant to us in real time, which is, you know, pretty fantastic. But you look at 78 to 82, and definitely
01:13:30
Speaker
They were not skewing to me. If I was a teenage 13-year-old suburban girl in someplace in sort of mid-America, not exactly sure what the appeal was.
01:13:51
Speaker
I don't even know, James, if they would have even been remotely aware because it seemed like when you go back and look at that, it was really them just trying to be true to themselves. And like you said, there seemed to be some
01:14:07
Speaker
seismic shift that happened right between East Side Story and Sweets from a Stranger where they finally realized we can expand our horizons. And I guess it was a good thing and a bad thing from our perspective because now
01:14:27
Speaker
we could see what we were missing and get more of a history, a backstory than listening to Tempted because people look at that and they're going, that's squeeze. That's the same guys who sang Pulling Muscles or that's the same band that did Cool for Cats. That's always been the big thing too is like how much do you hang on to
01:14:53
Speaker
that era of 78 to 82, or maybe just previous to that, and now you look at it. Today's perspective looking down at that, I find that extremely, extremely fascinating.
01:15:06
Speaker
Yeah I mean Squeeze really got stereotyped as Squeeze 78 to 82 really didn't they? I mean I come into contact all the time with music fans in the UK because I've got this YouTube channel where I talk about you know music and records and there's a fairly wide network of people on there who I correspond with on a regular basis you know talking back and forth
01:15:32
Speaker
And there's very few people really on there who are kind of Squeeze fans. There's maybe two, three people. Most people that I talk to, they view Squeeze as being this group from the late 70s and early 80s who had a few good singles and then they just disappeared.
01:15:57
Speaker
and most people seem to have a kind of vague memory of the 80s period. I think because Hourglass have been such a big hit, I think there is a bit of a residual memory of this later squeeze that
01:16:13
Speaker
appeared as if from nowhere briefly and appeared on various shows on tv you know during 87 squeeze appeared on lots and lots of different shows they appeared on the lenny henry show oh no that was different in tulip wasn't it they appeared on the french and saunter's show they appeared on saturday night live that's our version of that and various other shows and they became very visible briefly
01:16:35
Speaker
but then of course it all went wrong and they vanished again and it completely disappeared again so most people they they view Squeeze either as being yeah cool for cats up the junction tempted then there's this kind of weird foggy kind of space where nothing exists and then they think of hourglass and then there's nothing else
01:16:57
Speaker
And when I did an interview recently with a British DJ on, you know, local radio, and he was genuinely the gobsmack that Squeeze had ever played Madison Square Garden, even once, let alone twice. When I told him twice, you know, his head almost exploded, but he just got no idea of that. He just saw them as being this sort of pop group that, yeah, they had a few nice songs, but they just kind of came and went, and that was it.
01:17:26
Speaker
And yeah, interesting. It's kind of, I don't know, frustrating for me because I know I appreciate the minutia now that's available to us because we have the Internet. So you can literally know that, you know, there's going to be an upcoming gig by Glen Tobruk in March of this year, you know, things weird stuff like that that I wouldn't really be able to get a handle on. But I think about, well, why does the bands
01:17:52
Speaker
history have to hang on the fact that they sold out Madison Square Garden. What's the purpose of that, to be perfectly honest? Because it has to, because it's so iconic, and it doesn't really matter that you and I and a bunch of other people who have seen Squeeze in
01:18:14
Speaker
Every conceivable iteration, it seems, and I'm talking like a venue, how many people it can hold and age groups. Why does that not count today? Does it? I mean, does it really count anymore or are we just so...
01:18:32
Speaker
Are we so narrow-minded that we have to continually focus on the things that we think are squeezed, but to be perfectly honest, there's just so much more? Or is that our duty, James? Is that the purpose? Is that our purpose in life?
01:18:50
Speaker
Well, I guess the Madison Square Garden thing, I mean, it's it's an historic venue, isn't it? It's got a certain kind of reputation in rock history. You know, usually when people hear the word Madison Square Garden, they think of Led Zeppelin, don't they? Or they think of, I don't know, Wings Over America or something. They don't necessarily think of Squeeze singing black coffee in bed. So I guess
01:19:15
Speaker
I guess it's inevitable in a way that when Squeeze fans are kind of placed into a corner and have to be defensive. But I guess what I'm saying is that we've got Madison Square Garden, haven't we? It's kind of in our armory, if you like. When people turn to us and dismiss Squeeze and say, oh, Squeeze, they did cool for Captain. What else did they ever do? You know, we can kind of turn to them and go, well, they sold out Madison Square Garden in 1982 and again in 1987. Thank you very much.
01:19:43
Speaker
So yeah, it is sad that we have to do it, but you know, it's a string to our bow, isn't it?
01:19:48
Speaker
Yes, it is. And you know the other thing you just got me thinking about that I've never really thought about before is the credibility of the band never seems to come to the front with bands that sort of endorse them. I mean, really big stuff. I mean, the Clash got a huge, huge push when they got to open for The Who.
01:20:15
Speaker
And now again, that's a real weird like the who are sort of trying to wrap things up back in 82 and the clash are just kind of coming up in American. Abi, can you think of
01:20:28
Speaker
an instance where the band really had a huge endorsement from a sort of a global perspective. Because it seems like nowadays it's okay for Squeeze to play these sort of festivals now where they may be the headliner but it's four days. I'm not saying like they have to
01:20:51
Speaker
have a big ringing endorsement from something like Coldplay. Do I need Chris Martin to come on and say in Rolling Stone cover issue that he worships the ground that Glenn Tilbrook walks on? I'm being facetious here, of course, but do you have any instances that you can think of? Elvis is kind of a given, so to speak, and maybe things would have changed
01:21:19
Speaker
if Dave Edmonds, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, and Paul McCartney had done what they wanted them to do, what Jake Riviere really wanted to happen, which was to have that double album. But give me your sort of perspective on that. Well, essentially, you mentioned Paul McCartney there. Because the one quote that I searched and searched for and couldn't find to use in the book was this quote that Paul McCartney was meant to have come out with. And I think it was in Rolling Stone.
01:21:48
Speaker
and it would have been I think 1980. Paul McCartney apparently said during an interview with Rolling Stone that he really loved Squeeze. Actually it might even have been before R.G. Pargy because
01:22:04
Speaker
or it may have been after. Chris got some, Chris Difford got a mental block with his lyric writing. And he said part of the reason for that is that he'd read this interview with Paul McCartney where Paul McCartney had said, yeah, love squeeze. I think that was the whole reason why they tried to get him on board to do East Side Story. I don't think it was a complete, what's the word, like a kind of shot in the dark. I think the reason they approached McCartney for East Side Story was that he'd gone on record saying he liked them.
01:22:33
Speaker
and how I couldn't find that quote. So, you know, if David's listening or Steve Bertram or somebody, you know, help us out here, where's this quote from McCartney? Because that would be a very interesting one to find and read. But he hasn't, I mean, McCartney never really followed up with it, though, did he? I mean, he and Chris Difford were neighbours for a long time down in
01:22:57
Speaker
in Kent. I think they were just literally neighbours. I think that Landa joined each other and they became, not friends exactly, but they became neighbours, I guess. But McCartney never repeated the trick. When East Side Story came out, he didn't make a statement saying, oh, I wish I'd
01:23:16
Speaker
I wish I had produced that record. What a fantastic album. He sort of, I don't know, I think he probably moved on by then. Just that fast moving scene. Now apart from him, you've got Mark Knopfler. Does he count?
01:23:30
Speaker
I'd say Marx got a name recognition. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he was very nice about them. Well, he appeared in the BBC Four, Take Me I'm Yours documentary. He was one of only a very select handful of people who I think there was Amy Mann, Mark Knopfler, and Elvis Costello. I think there was the only three kind of star singers who appeared in that to basically say, yeah, Squeeze were great.
01:23:59
Speaker
Sting said a couple of things over the years, nothing too conspicuous but in his autobiography Sting makes quite a nice comment about Squeeze because he's talking in general about the fact that a lot of the punk bands didn't have a great deal of musicality and he mentioned Squeeze and saying you know Squeeze were clearly a cut above you know we could see that Squeeze were not cut from that cloth so that's quite a nice comment.
01:24:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of it, too, it's either helps or hurts when you all tend to run around in that same company of people and management, of course, and those of the kind of people that believe in you and want to see the best for you. And there was a lot of hustle going around to try and get them big.
01:24:54
Speaker
It is kind of frustrating. I'm not quite sure what the takeaway is when you have them being offered things like this video that was directed, and it turns out to be so terrible, really, that they have nothing nice to say about it anymore.
Creative Tensions and Lasting Fan Connection
01:25:12
Speaker
And so you always wonder, where should I be treading with a lot of these
01:25:17
Speaker
effusive comments that mean so much to me and yet they could have a completely different perspective based on what happened. We could say R.G. Bargee is a completely awesome album and yet, like you say, it could just be Chris saying, well, I can't play guitar and I had to get down the pub with Jules and Glenn did everything.
01:25:43
Speaker
So it's always like you say, it's always you feel like your back is against the wall when it comes to giving praise, where praises do. And I'm hoping now that we doing it at this time of our lives, I think that there's been a turn of the tide when you say with them being able to come back, stay together, not necessarily have to be a band to sell records anymore, but enjoy the presence of giving back to the public. Because that's what it looks like to me.
01:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, it was interesting. I think it was David, wasn't it, who shared a handbill or poster or something on Facebook the other day for a festival that Squeeze are doing later this year. Did you see that? It was a multi-act bill with all these bands. You know, level 42 were on there, I noticed, and you know, a fair few other groups. And Squeeze would build really high compared to a lot of these bands.
01:26:38
Speaker
Now, when I look back at the 90s, that was a period for me as a Squeeze fan when I was deeply frustrated on their behalf because a lot of groups are coming through, such as, you know, Level 42 and the Beautiful South, you know, British pop groups from a similar pedigree, I guess, in terms of having just really good songwriters in the band, you know, that's not Level 42 so much, but Beautiful South obviously had Paul Heaton, you know, a great British songwriter.
01:27:06
Speaker
And there were a few other groups like that who were around at the time, just having such great success and just having all these big hit albums and, you know, Squeeze brought out Play in 1991. And when I heard it, my immediate reaction, oddly enough, because now when I listen back to it, I think, yeah, I can kind of hear why this record was not big. But at the time I listened to it and I just thought, wow, you know, this record's really going to go places because it's got a real maturity to it. And there's a kind of emotional depth to it.
01:27:33
Speaker
And it was during the period when REM was starting to come through, I think it was what's massive for the people or maybe the previous one, you know, was big at the time. And Squeeze had had such a history and such a kind of pedigree to them that I just thought, Squeeze's day is now going to come again. There's going to be a kind of squeeze, you know, Squeeze is going to happen in the 90s.
01:27:55
Speaker
and kind of that didn't really happen and a lot of the groups that came up I kind of I almost resented them I was kind of like oh come on you know Squeeze are better than this why why is Squeeze not selling those kind of records but now these groups that outsold them back in the day are like sixth on the bill seventh on the bill and Squeeze are headlining
01:28:18
Speaker
And you think, well, God, what has happened there? And it's probably, going back to what you've been saying, we're probably back in the realm of 78 to 82 again, aren't we? We're probably back in the realm of
01:28:34
Speaker
45s and under and just the fact that they had this rich four-year period so even though they had lots of problems later on they can always come back and be remembered as the group that did up the junction and pulling muscles
01:28:52
Speaker
during this great rich golden period of British pop history they're just lucky that they were around I think in that time which is a period I think which is looked back on now with immense fondness and immense you know people love that era and Squeeze wrote fantastic music during that era which even though perhaps those records didn't sell big at the time they are viewed as being these great classics
01:29:16
Speaker
So despite everything, Squeeze is still there. Squeeze is still playing arenas and headlining festivals. It's just, it's really incredible.
01:29:27
Speaker
And to the advantage of technology today, we're all able to connect, which is even better because then you don't feel so isolated. You don't feel like, like you said, where your back's against the wall and you mean I have to go watch them in a, you know, in a thousand seat theater and feel let down. You go and you see the audience there and they are demanding of, and being able also to receive
01:29:53
Speaker
a band that can have a rich heritage and be able to play slap and tickle. There's a whole different generation. I met someone in a line at the gig that I went to in Florida, and she was in her 20s, but she was a goth almost. She was into Echo and the Bunnymen and all the bands that we grew up with. She had never seen Squeeze before, and she was looking forward to it.
01:30:21
Speaker
She was very, very happy that she would be able to see a band that had some, I guess the word is substance for her because sometimes you look at the landscape and you're wondering where do they fit in now and do they have to? I mean, it's pretty much just general knowledge that they're not in it to sell records anymore. Let's face it.
Future Plans for Squeeze's Story
01:30:46
Speaker
there's a great kind of irony there isn't there because we've now moved into this period where nobody sells records so it's there's a kind of nice irony there that Squeeze finally have this big wonderful renaissance in the era when it's not just Squeeze that are not selling records nobody so you know unless you're a Dell as Chris would say or you know Coldplay
01:31:09
Speaker
you earn your living as a musician now by playing gigs and unlike the vast majority of musicians you have to earn their living playing gigs Squeeze can headline festivals and still you know play arenas supporting madness and just on that note I think I mean I didn't go and see the shows unfortunately but I mean all the feedback I'm getting about the madness and the Squeeze tour is that it was
01:31:34
Speaker
It wasn't really, well, it was Squeeze supporting Madness, but I think it almost had the feeling of a double header bill, really. And Madness fans have been posting saying, wow, Squeeze were great. I mean, clearly not just a support band. They were, I think, Squeeze and Madness. I mean, perhaps they're not quite equal in terms of record sales or their following or whatever, but I think there's, you know,
01:32:02
Speaker
They're virtually on the same level in a way, aren't they now? Yeah, especially for the audience. Our audience is more receptive and sometimes pleasantly surprised by the fact that they'll throw out stuff from that error. And it still means something to us, and we're happy to hear it. It's not just that they have to play it, although maybe they do feel
01:32:29
Speaker
And I think it's been noted, too, that if you're supporting and you're a headline, you've got to pick and choose which songs are going to have the most impact within that time period. So if they play a standalone, we get to hear Big Bang. If they play a support, we may have to hear
01:32:49
Speaker
pulling muscles or something. But I mean, you know, that's not a bad thing. I'm not trying to say, oh, that's a terrible idea. So I'm really happy that, you know, we've had this chance to kind of, you know, kind of not categorize, but have a really good appreciation, especially with your book, able to do a sort of level headed yet in your personal voice,
01:33:16
Speaker
understand why there is so much interest and there's so much of a well to be had there for the personalities and the way that the band was covered back at that time and the songs that came from that. So
01:33:32
Speaker
I definitely want to say I'm glad you persevered. I'm glad this book is out. I did, for the record, want to ask you. So, volume two, you're working on that right now, yes?
01:33:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, originally it was just going to be a one volume work. I mean, that was my first plan all the way along was to tell the Squeeze story and not stop at 1982, but carry on. But it's only I guess when you start to get into the structural aspect of it. And I wanted to tell the story in an engaging way. There are certain music biographies which just simply are too long.
01:34:11
Speaker
I mean, I'm reading a great one at the moment. It's called 10CC, The Worst Band in the World by Liam Newton. And it's a good book, but it's big. You know, I've got it here in front of me now. I mean, it's 500 pages. And at the end of the day, I didn't want the Squeeze book to be this vast, huge, interminable tract that people had to wade through. And of course, when Squeeze reformed in 85,
01:34:42
Speaker
That period is, it's not an easy period to cover. There's a lot of stuff in that period. Cause you're facing all that fallout, you know, with Chris and Glen falling out with each other during the Domino era. And there's just so much. And of course, Jules leaving the band again. And I just came to the conclusion that that's a whole separate story really. But yes, in theory, I would like to do it.
01:35:06
Speaker
but maybe not immediately. Maybe I'm going to turn my attention somewhere else for the time being and see how the book goes.
01:35:15
Speaker
I keep telling myself, if I can sell a thousand copies of it, maybe then I'll do part two. So we'll have to see. Well, like I said before, I really, truly appreciate the fact that you have gone the distance between those years to give us really an amazing collection of insights that reads well, that is personable,
01:35:43
Speaker
informative for me, especially when a lot of that kind of stuff is so far in the distance. It's hard to gather it all together. And you did manage to do an outstanding job that's monumental in scale at this point. So I definitely want to thank you for coming on the podcast.
01:36:06
Speaker
sometime hopefully in the distant future. You will be back again to talk about Volume 2. Superb. Yes, I should look forward to that. Thanks Amy.