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Gary McKechnie takes the long way home with Squeeze
345 Plays1 year ago
f you are a fan of Squeeze, you know how hard it is to resist their catchy tunes and witty lyrics. But even more importantly - as we’ve learned - is how their music can give meaning to touch points throughout your life.
Gary McKechnie is one of those people. And fortunate to have met Glenn Tilbrook in a hotel lobby in Daytona Beach, Florida. And also arranged Chris Difford’s “Songs In The Key Of Sea.” A rather eclectic summary for this man and for his ability to speak to the ones who ‘get it.’
Gary is also a speaker, award-winning author and motojournalist. And when he offered up the chance to join me in conversation about one of his favorite bands (and songwriters), how could I say no?
More importantly, Gary is passionate, articulate and with his storytelling prowess, a person who can get to the deep heart of this particular subject at hand.
I invite you in for that proverbial ‘Black Coffee’ as you come aboard for an enlightening ride.
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Transcript
Introduction to Cool for Cats and Guest
00:00:06
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 speaker, author, and journalist, Gary McKechnie. Hello, Gary. How are you? I'm fine, Amy. How are you? I'm doing good.
Shared Interests and Gary's History with Squeeze
00:00:27
Speaker
You and I have so much to talk about that doesn't really even have to concern the Beatles, but maybe it will.
00:00:35
Speaker
Because dear listeners, Gary and I have gone back a few years with some preservation shouting about for the Beatles and the preservation of the Deville Hotel in Miami since both Gary and I are here in Florida.
00:00:51
Speaker
But that's a story for another day. And Gary has just come across with some intriguing information about his associations with Squeeze. So Gary, I'm going to hand the proverbial virtual microphone over to you with how it all began back in the day when we were sick as well.
00:01:14
Speaker
Well, Amy, it's interesting. I hadn't really heard about Squeeze until I was working at a record shop in Orlando. And I saw the cover of, I still don't know if it's Argy-Bargy or Argy-Bargy, if it's a hard G or a soft G. It's a soft G.
00:01:34
Speaker
Either way, I was absolutely enthralled. And when I listened to it, and I would play it, and a lot of folks coming into the record shop, they were mostly listening to Thriller at the time. But I always listened to that. I always played it because I loved it. And it was several more years before I had a chance to see them live. I saw them in Daytona Beach in March of 88. The next day, they played at SeaWorld in Orlando. But it was in Daytona.
Personal Encounters with the Band
00:02:00
Speaker
And I thought this was really interesting.
00:02:03
Speaker
playing with them at the bandshell i think it was for a spring break concert and afterward my brother and i
00:02:10
Speaker
It was sort of on the pool deck of this hotel. And so my brother and I went into the hotel and we're sort of like sniffing around trying to find, hey, would we be able to meet Chris and Glenn and Jules and Gilson? And I remember we found the hotel room and we're standing outside the door and Chris came out and he just sort of blew right past us, didn't say much.
00:02:39
Speaker
But when he did that, when the door opened, Glenn was on the far end of the room sitting on a sofa, and he catches my eye. And I'm standing there with a few squeeze albums. And when the door closed, I thought, oh, well, that's it. You know, I'll have to wait another 45 minutes until someone else leaves the room.
00:02:59
Speaker
A few seconds later, Glenn, just as gracious as could be, had seen the predicament and came out, came to the door and he goes, oh, he goes, yeah, I saw you waiting and is there anything, you know, do you want to say hello? And I said, oh, yeah, absolutely. I really enjoyed the show.
00:03:16
Speaker
And he got a sharpie or I had a sharpie and he signed the album so I thought that was nice of me could have just stayed on the couch and ignored us but he was kind enough to come out and you know chat for a few minutes and I thought that was just great.
00:03:31
Speaker
Fast forward about 20 something years and I'm now speaking on the Queen Mary 2 and the ships of the Cunard line and I'm talking about the Beatles and Elvis and Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry and when I was doing that and I'm sailing to Hawaii and down to South America and to Canada and around the Mediterranean, I started thinking this is something that
00:03:54
Speaker
might be good for Chris, speaking on the Queen Mary 2. And there were a lot of British celebrities who were speaking and I figured he'd be just as good. So I got in touch with him. I found his email address and an email. He said, could you run this through my manager and maybe he can take care of it. And he did. And
00:04:16
Speaker
Chris went aboard the Queen Mary 2, and I think he had several, three or four voyages doing transatlantic voyages with his band, not Squeeze, but with some musicians. And he was having a songwriting seminar called Songs in the Key of C, S-E-A. And I remember the first time, and I was really regretting that I wasn't selected to speak on that same voyage because he brought along a pal of his, Roger Daltrey.
00:04:47
Speaker
And the entertainment director was sending me pictures. Hey, here's me with Chris and Roger. Hey, and here's me with Chris and Roger down with the crew in the crew quarters, you know, when they're doing a little jam session with the Queen Mary II Orchestra. And I thought, oh, this would have been so cool.
00:05:04
Speaker
But Chris and I had communicated via email and he appreciates the fact, you know, I introduced him to that. Now hopefully everything worked out okay. But yeah, those are my encounters with them and I just think they're fantastic and I'm glad their songs have this longevity.
Squeeze's Fan Base and Song Imagery
00:05:26
Speaker
It's kind of interesting and sort of serendipitous that you sort of fell into all of this, although a lot of the angles for people to come in to the Squeeze universe are varied. You can come in as an early riser, so to speak.
00:05:48
Speaker
with a lot of the, you know, tunes from the back in the day, you know, literally like the first album. And then sometimes you discover them by accident, you know, like you heard a song and you're like, I wonder who that band is. And nowadays you can just shazam it and you find out that, oh, that wait a minute, that's that squeeze. And so that's wonderful. We'll still we are still doing that to this day, so to speak. So
00:06:17
Speaker
With that in mind, you and I had talked about, okay, what really resonates with us as a theme for this conversation and due to the absolutely, you know, in-tune nature of you being a writer and exploring and just, you know, listening to the songs, we thought that we would sort of kind of go down a list of your favorites. Sure, sure. I'd love to do that.
00:06:45
Speaker
So we have the first one, which, you know, kind of is just like basically your introductory home run hit from right at the top, which is from, it's Take Me, I'm Yours. And so what made you kind of pull that one out? It's interesting. When I first heard them on RG Bargi, some people used to say RG Bargi, but I've since learned RG Bargi from an expert.
00:07:16
Speaker
Anyway, when I heard that, it was so different from anything else I had heard. And again, I'm picking up on them in 1982, but when I found out who they were and I started playing their other albums, and I ran across this
00:07:34
Speaker
What I like about it and what makes me extremely envious of Chris is his ability to paint such vivid pictures with his words. If you listen to Marty Robbins' song, El Paso, that story song about the cowboy who shoots Felina, Felina's boyfriend or Felina's lover, and then he has to escape, and you're writing this movie in your head,
00:08:02
Speaker
So when I listened to Take Me I'm Yours, which had that really beautifully syncopated, I think it's a snare drum that starts it off and it just sort of evokes this desert caravan. And then the lyrics match the sound of the song and it's like you're
00:08:24
Speaker
You know, he's sort of like a kid again, watching, um, Aladdin or a thousand and one Arabian nights. And you're, you're, you're just picturing this, um, oasis in the desert in this guy is traveling across maybe the Sahara. And I think of Michael Palan's, uh, book on the Sahara and is special about traveling across it. And,
00:08:48
Speaker
then he's in Tibet. He's talking about eagles flying, grapes being fed, and all of that. Again, I get chills just thinking about the imagery of it. You can picture any desert caravan, at least in my opinion,
00:09:07
Speaker
where you have a sheik's tent and that's what I get when I look at the lyrics, talking about the belly dancers that are there. It just all comes together as
00:09:24
Speaker
beautiful imagery, not from the 20th century, but I'll go back maybe, jeez, to the 1700s or the 1800s with pashas and I don't know what the other word is, rajas, like the golden idol
00:09:46
Speaker
you know, just that sort of thing that I'm probably not expressing it as well as I should. But again, just that desert Arabian Nights visuals. Sort of like a small scale version of like David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah, maybe this could be like the trailer for Lords of Arabia. In fact, I wish I had said that to begin with.
Lyrical Storytelling of Chris Difford
00:10:15
Speaker
It would have saved us all a lot of time.
00:10:19
Speaker
Everybody's got an interesting sort of slant about what is contained within the lyrics, especially coming across in that time period. I don't personally think that a lot of bands were focused with so much wordplay in describing
00:10:39
Speaker
this particular, you know, situation. It's just, it's beautiful because it's got a great beat, you know, courtesy of Glenn. And you look at the words, and it's really like a sort of backwards love song. You want to say that he's sitting back enjoying a show that's, you know, rather on the sort of exotic side, and yet he's willing to give of himself because it's so intoxicating.
00:11:09
Speaker
And it's interesting when you listen to the lyrics, and again, I sort of place this on my world globe in the Sahara Desert. That's where I get it. But then he's talking about Tibet. And my geography is not the best, but I don't think Tibet is close to North Africa. So...
00:11:30
Speaker
It's, as a traveler, I just love it. And again, it brings back to mind Michael Palin, if you read his books on traveling, especially the Sahara. He talks about seeing, I think it was like a candy wrapper or something.
00:11:48
Speaker
that had a picture of the pyramids and the Sphinx and he saw that when he was a kid and all of a sudden it triggered, hey, maybe that stuff is out there. If you happen to run across this song, maybe it'll bring those images to mind, these exotic images and places that you can travel and some things that might happen when you get underway.
00:12:15
Speaker
Well, I know the literal interpretation of how Chris was inspired by these words, which came across to him when he visited his manager, the band's manager, Miles Copeland, his mother. Everybody was involved in government work. And when Chris went there, Shehe was a collector of Egyptian artifacts
00:12:39
Speaker
and travels that were mostly concerned with the family in the Middle East. And so that's partially where Chris got his inspiration, which, you know, could be continued, you know, as far as the lyrics are concerned.
00:12:58
Speaker
To me, that's as much of a bit of magic as John Lennon getting, good morning, good morning from Kellogg's Cornflakes commercial. I could look at Egyptian artifacts until I passed out. I would never think to turn them into a song like this. And there lies the difference between me and Chris Difford.
00:13:20
Speaker
right and you know it's perfectly allowable because that's just the way that you know chris's mind you know was working at the time right and the good thing about what was happening with him is that he would just basically use his imagination for events that he particularly wasn't going through personally they just happened to come
00:13:45
Speaker
And that's probably where a lot of the goodbye girl starts to happen. But it could be also a lot of people ask them, well, is this autobiographical? Right, right.
00:13:57
Speaker
He kind of alludes to some portions of a lot of his songs, considering the lifestyle that he was starting to live, who was being a rock star, and maybe not so much a rock star, but definitely conversing with several different types of people.
00:14:15
Speaker
And I love Goodbye, Girl. I assume we're making the switch to that song now. And it's interesting that you say, hey, these things may have happened to them or maybe not. It reminds me of Albert Einstein's thought experiments. Hey, what if I were sitting on a beam of light and what would I see? And Christopher, hey, what would it be like if I did meet her in a pool room? And then all of a sudden,
00:14:46
Speaker
were in a room together. And again, the fact that I met her in a pool room, her name I didn't catch.
00:14:57
Speaker
You can visualize these things, and I'm going to use that word all over and over and over again because everyone has an image of what a pool room looks like. It might be slightly different off by a few degrees, but generally you know what one looks like, and whether it's Chris or somebody else, and I would picture Chris in this situation, and then waking up sunlight on the lino, the linoleum,
00:15:21
Speaker
wakes him up and is she there or or is she not uh has she taken off with with his his wallet i i don't know what do you think amy i think it's
Imagination, Struggles, and Empathy in Songwriting
00:15:35
Speaker
A very sort of beautiful version of something that could have happened that might appear slightly seedy. In retrospect to the times, you probably have a thought pattern basically being a guy
00:15:53
Speaker
like him and playing the places that he played, then it should be more romanticized than it actually is. And if that's the case, he also infuses more realistic aspects of what exactly could have happened, but he lets you kind of read into it.
00:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, and when you get to the lines, and I know there's different versions of this song. I lost my silver razor, my clubbed-room locker keys, the money in the waistcoat, it doesn't bother me. I think of that great Seinfeld episode where George Costanza gets on the subway, and he's seduced by the woman on the subway who takes him to a hotel room, puts him in handcuffs, and then steals his money, like all $7 of it.
00:16:38
Speaker
It's just some guy who's just so anxious for sex. It's like, I'm gonna follow this woman anywhere. And then what are the ramifications for that? But no one, again, was writing songs like this, not to the multiple layers of meaning in inventory that it had. It was, I think at that time, if you were lucky,
00:17:07
Speaker
You were probably getting the standard, I love you, you love me, or we broke up. And he writes like a novelist, which is really extraordinary to me.
00:17:22
Speaker
Songwriters, it has to be John or Paul or Bob Dylan or Elvis Costello or somebody who has a way of taking the same 26 letters and putting them in an order into the order of words that hadn't been heard before. And I think Chris does this brilliantly well. And of course, this came on the heels of the Neil Simon.
00:17:49
Speaker
play and movie uh so so it all it all seemed to fit not that Marcia Mason was taking off on Richard Dreyfus but you think there was a connection there whether there was or not maybe just he just pulled the title from it but uh it it is sort of
00:18:08
Speaker
odd that, you know, what hotel room has linoleum floors? It sounds like it could be a mental hospital too. Oh, I like that analogy. So you don't really know and that's the great part of songs or any music that you're interested in, any
00:18:28
Speaker
that you can pull a thread and continue to pull it for decades, still trying to solve that mystery of, hey, what is it really about? And I'm not sure if Chris has ever done anything like say anthology or like the lyrics by Paul McCartney, where you go in and, hey, this was the inspiration for it. This was the meaning behind it. And again, I'll just jump over to John Lennon real quick. I think it was...
00:18:56
Speaker
strawberry fields or maybe I am the walrus and he said hey let the blanks figure this one out and he was just having fun with it. I don't think Chris was doing it to that degree but it's still a treat to hear that song and
00:19:12
Speaker
You can work it like a puzzle. You can change the situation. You can change the room. You can change the girl he was with, the girl who took off. You can change everything around. All you have to do is use your imagination and you can create different scenarios for every one of these verses.
00:19:34
Speaker
And what's really the kicker for a lot of this is that you are still thinking about the lyrics so many years. But you have to remember, too, that a lot of them could be slightly on the darker side for where Chris was coming from, just as a personality, as a human being. And yet,
00:19:57
Speaker
Glenn would put melodies to these words and it would just totally throw you. It's like, really? That's what he was really talking about or not. It was so open to interpretation based on the fact of how closely Glenn would construct a melody to Chris's lyrics or go completely off somewhere in left field.
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, and it's that great creative tension. Say Glenn had put this tune to like a funeral dirge. You would have thought, oh gosh, oh my, this is so sad. But it's really sort of a peppy song.
00:20:44
Speaker
And so you hear it and it's like, okay, is he happy or is he sad? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it okay that his wife has moved to Jersey? You don't know, but it's, you know, ultimately it doesn't really matter. It's just fun. It's fun to listen to. It's fun to sing along to. And it's fun to try to puzzle it all out and you just want to enjoy it and you do.
00:21:14
Speaker
Yeah. And that kind of segs way into the next one. We're talking about a lot of women sort of things, like with women's world, which is the next song we're going to talk about. All from like these interesting, I want to use the word like depression era, but to the strong woman of the fifties kind of viewpoint, you know, she was
00:21:37
Speaker
she's resigned but she doesn't want to be resigned to the fact that you know this happened so this is like a completely different viewpoint of her being you know trying to be really really strong.
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't want to get too deep into it, but on a personal level, I've seen women who were beaten down by the situations they were in, the men they were with, the families that they were trying to care for, underappreciated, overworked. And it's interesting that I'm picking these songs, I mean, the last two songs and maybe a few more down the road.
00:22:22
Speaker
But again, this could be the script for a TV drama where you see this woman in the house and she's just trying to get by. And I remember
00:22:40
Speaker
in. Amy, you'll have to correct me or fill me in. Was this on R.G. Barty, Woman's World? No, this was on East Side Story. That was another one I played at the record shop and I just remember
00:22:53
Speaker
sitting on the counter, playing the song in the record store. And then when Glenn hits that one line, there's no crown upon her head, there's no kingdom. And it just like pierced through the space and
00:23:12
Speaker
Because I had I had time no customers in the store at the time and I would hear this and I'm thinking he is describing Women I know he's he's describing Situations I had seen in my neighborhood growing up where it in the 1970s. Hey, this is a male-dominated society this is the woman who is tasked with all of these things and
00:23:42
Speaker
You just sort of pity this woman when she staggers up the hallway, makes herself a sandwich as they're looking through the doorway. I don't know if she's drunk or maybe just beaten down by life, but whatever it is, it's a really pitiful, sorrowful scene.
00:24:04
Speaker
You just want to go in and rescue her, just get her out of that place and let her know she's appreciated. So that one really speaks to me on a lot of different personal levels. Again, I think anyone who's observant, who's watching the world around them,
00:24:28
Speaker
will think of someone they knew. Maybe, I hate to even say, maybe even their own mother, the mother of a friend, a newlywed couple who's trying to figure things out. But this situation happens frequently. And I think Chris, if he didn't get an award for this song, he should have because it just sort of,
00:24:58
Speaker
wraps all of that. It's not a culture, it's a situation. He wraps it all up in a nice little package, a sort of melancholy, depressing, sort of hopeful, wistful, wishful package. And it is also heartbreaking to move
00:25:22
Speaker
Because you can, this one to me feels like you can actually get into each stanza. And like you say, with that particular one right before the end of the song where, you know, she's fed up, she abdicates your title. Yeah, I'm over it.
00:25:41
Speaker
And yeah, and then the family's just like, expecting something different. Oh, they're not getting what they think they should be getting. And she's just like, I can't do this anymore. I have to go and I have to lay it out. You know? Yeah.
00:25:56
Speaker
Yeah, and I tell you, on a personal level, I remember I was, boy, man, if I knew myself when I was 15, I would have smacked myself. I remember I was just a cocky, unappreciative kid. And I remember just one night my mom puts the
00:26:20
Speaker
dinner down at the table. And I just looked at it and I sort of, you know, just when it went, huh, you know, sort of like, is this the best you got? And she just looked at me and she picked up my dish in my dinner and she just walked back in the kitchen, dumped it.
00:26:35
Speaker
I thought, hey, I went a step too far. And man, that always sticks with me 45 years later. And that's what I see in this song. It's like these people, hey, she's doing everything she should be doing. She's meeting all her responsibilities. And then to have the husband or the kids not appreciate it,
00:26:59
Speaker
And she gets to a point that's like, okay, she's going to the bar, she comes back home, screw you guys, I'm going to bed. And I think, again, just on a human level, everybody gets pushed to a breaking point. In this case, it happens to be the woman who has been taking care of things.
00:27:20
Speaker
in the family just, OK, hey, that's what mom does. And I can tell you from experience, when I pulled that stunt on my mom, she sort of showed me, hey, this isn't something you do. And man, did I learn my lesson that night in this song. You know, if I think about it too much, I mean, I could I could draw an almost direct line to it. You know, my mom did go to a bar, of course.
00:27:45
Speaker
But it was, it's a good one. It's a good one on just a human level, those human connections that he writes about. Yeah, and I'd also like to see it unfortunately played a little bit more often, but I kind of understand the cadence is a little bit of a throw off. It's not as, it's really slow and quiet. I believe that they did it once on the last tour here in the US. They had a guest,
00:28:13
Speaker
player with them, whose name escapes me and I'll probably have to go look for it, but it was appropriate that it come out in that direction. But as a band, I'm not quite sure the mindset is there because of the time back then.
00:28:32
Speaker
But can you imagine trying to play this at like, CBGB's? Oh my
Favorite Songs and Performance Challenges
00:28:40
Speaker
gosh. The last dollar, some, you know, 100 capacity nightclub, you know, and with beers everywhere, this just wasn't gonna, it wasn't gonna make it. Yeah, this is a thoughtful song. This is a, this is a, you know, fix, fix things before they break song. And you have to be tuned into it.
00:29:02
Speaker
Absolutely. Although the other song that's really interesting is the one that you picked next was Piccadilly. Oh, one of my favorites. I just, I love it because there's so much going on in that song that you're just like, and again, it's from East Side Story, but the
00:29:27
Speaker
The circumstances are almost comical, you know, it's so incredible. I was trying to think of the Paul McCartney song. And if I if I I know you know it, the one where he talks about the girl who it's it's not. She's leaving home. It's it's the one I think he put out on a solo album about the girl who gets in her car and drives up to the Highlands or something. Another day, I think. Another day. Yeah, other day. Yeah. And
00:29:54
Speaker
I think of that, and I think this one is on, this equals or surpasses that. And again, this is one of my favorite songs. If I'm ever feeling down, I could put this one on and just be happy in a nanosecond. And there's so many lines in it that I wish I had thought of first.
00:30:15
Speaker
You know, they say a poet. I remember when I was in composition class in college and the teacher was talking about poetry. She says, a poet says the mostest in the leastest. And I thought, oh, that's pretty good. And that always stuck with me. It's like, how much can you put together? How much can you convey in a sentence using the fewest number of words? And when I get to just those
00:30:42
Speaker
five or six words when he says she hooks up her cupcakes and puts on her jumper. I think that just tells you everything you need to know about this girl.
00:30:57
Speaker
It's it's such a chipper sentence. It's such a Hey, is she still in her training bra? You know is is How old is this girl? But to me that's that's what I see. I see this young girl. She's got a purple hair dryer. No, it's not brown. It's not yellow It's not black. It's a purple one. Yeah, I can picture her bedroom just by knowing that The color of her hair dryer and in the fact that she's has to hook up her cupcakes
00:31:27
Speaker
and it's it's it's such a visual uh uh it's like his his thesaurus is just perfect what's another word for breasts huh cupcakes yeah that'll work it's it's kind of like he he can't think of anything else to say but that so he's just gonna say it yeah if if you put it in that perspective and then um
00:31:56
Speaker
It's it's kind of interesting because as it goes along, you know, like in the next, you know, verse, you know, she's just going on and on talking about her day and everything. And he's just kind of like, you know, la, la, la, la, la, la, just put up with it all. Because I find that the next verse is the most hysterical.
00:32:16
Speaker
Yeah. He's making the observation about the people behind him. Yes. Oh, my God. That that one first time I heard that I just I just thought it was great. I must have played this song, you know, four or five times in a row. It's like, oh, my God. And you're talking about the man behind me talks to his young lady.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yeah. And I still use that line. I'll slip it into a conversation with people who don't know this song. I said, oh yeah, a friend of mine's, you know, he's talking to his young lady. Oh yeah, what? Yeah. Well, you know, she's having his baby. I said, his wife won't be pleased, but she's not been around lately. It's like, oh, oh my gosh. Oh.
00:32:59
Speaker
And so they don't know I'm quoting Piccadilly, but it's just such a beautiful line. And I can see that after college, I headed over to Europe and I backpacked around Europe for seven months. And I spent as much time as I could in England. And I remember I was just such a fan of the Beatles.
00:33:19
Speaker
at the time, this is back in 1985, it was like, where could I go that was just so purely British and hanging around Piccadilly Circus was one of them. I remember Victoria Station, all that, hanging up Buckingham Palace. So when I listened to this song, I can now see where he's talking about. And again, everybody has a little,
00:33:46
Speaker
movie theater in their head. So when you hear this song and you know what the candle that Taj Mahal looks like, you know the neon club lights of adult films and Trini Lopez. When they sneak into the house together, you're watching the whole thing. You're the art director of this script. So you're now putting everything together.
00:34:13
Speaker
And he lays out every scene, and it starts with her drying her hair, hooking up her cupcakes, and meeting this guy in Piccadilly.
00:34:24
Speaker
It goes to the show, it goes to dinner, it goes to the taxi, it goes to the house. And how he advances the plot in just two sentences, it's so striking to me. And I've spent years, and sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don't. My batting average is pretty good.
00:34:47
Speaker
when I convey a story on the page but I certainly can't do the mostest in the leastest like Chris Difford and in this one is great I mean when he's talking about the begging folk singer and in a fiver and a 10p in his hat for collection you can see that because you've seen buskers out there with
00:35:09
Speaker
Looking for cash you can see everything he describes because it's all familiar. And he just has a gift of saying it in a way that is entertaining and you can hear it over and over and over and over again for forty years and it doesn't get old it's still funny.
00:35:30
Speaker
And it does have this galloping melody to it. It just skips along. Yeah, and it just goes. And that is the beauty of listening to these two. Just beyond Gilson and John Bentley and Jules, just the synchronicity of Chris and Glenn and how they complement each other.
Squeeze's Place in British Rock and Song Themes
00:35:59
Speaker
They're you know, this is a cliche. They're more than the sum of their parts It is and it isn't because you definitely feel as though they are in charge And they will they will you know put this car on the road and get it somewhere and everybody else around them is
00:36:20
Speaker
contributes beautifully to that, to that storyline. And the fact that you're able to relate to everything that's going on, you think one thing's happening, but actually something else is happening. Because you get sucked into that first verse, like you said, well, you think, oh, he's just going to be dissing this girl. And he doesn't really care. He just wants to get out for the night.
00:36:42
Speaker
maybe you'll get lucky, but the language that Chris uses along the way to get to the very end has kind of a comical ending to it, kind of a, you know, this denouement, and then boom, you find out that basically, you know, his mom's, you know, her mom's checking in on him, when they get to wherever they get to, you know, wherever they were. So it's really so, there's like these, just the forces going back and forth.
00:37:12
Speaker
Yeah, just one of my favorites. Of all Squeeze songs, I'd put this up in the top five.
00:37:19
Speaker
Yeah, and the delivery is so exquisite. It's kind of a bummer because of that galloping kind of skipping melody to it because you kind of lose the lyrics, say, if you were at a sweaty club, and you weren't quite getting it as well as you should, if that makes any sense, because it's truly, it's really a fine piece of work.
00:37:45
Speaker
Yeah, all I know is when I listen to it, if I happen to be in the car by myself, the volume is turned up high and my voice is even higher. And I'm just like, it's a wonderful song to sing along to any time of the day.
00:38:03
Speaker
And I wish more people knew it. It should be, if this were the Great American Songbook, if they had the equivalent of the Great American Songbook for 1980s British Rock, this would be in it. Yeah, I think we'd all agree that almost every song off of
00:38:22
Speaker
East Side Story is worthy. But like you've noted in your list, there's like so many to pick off of R.G. Barji, like the next one was Vicky Verkey. Yeah, R.G. Barji, Vicky Verkey. How about that? Oh my goodness gracious. Again, though she's only 14, she really knows her courting.
00:38:47
Speaker
Boy, again, I bet she has a purple hair dryer as well. And I bet before she went out to meet this guy, she hooked up her cupcakes too. And this is, it's sort of a sad song. And that
00:39:06
Speaker
when he makes a little bit of money and they splash out on an ice cream, you know, on the high street or main street. And she's just learning how to be, she's not even learning how to be a woman, she's just learning how to be a teenager.
00:39:21
Speaker
And I work with 13 and 14-year-olds. I do tours up in Washington, D.C., so I see them constantly. And I've been teaching courses up there for the last eight years. I've aged, but every year, the kids remain the same age, and so I see these girls sort of trying to flirt with the boys, you know, expressing interest and trying to be more womanly than they are
00:39:49
Speaker
So the first part of this song where, you know, when all her mates would giggle is lady like she'd wiggle. I'm just seeing a lot of the students.
00:40:03
Speaker
I work with everybody goes through that awkward phase you're not a you're not a kid you're not an adult you're somewhat in between and you're trying to figure it out and then all of a sudden oh boy I just I get emotional sometimes when I listen to songs and I think
00:40:21
Speaker
the lines in a squeeze song that affect me most, it's that one verse. Each morning she got sicker, her mother sometimes hit her. If she'd have known the story, she would have been so sorry. You can hear my voice cracking now. This is a fictional character, and this girl's in a situation.
00:40:46
Speaker
Can she get out of it? Can she navigate this? And her mother hitting her, but she doesn't know the story. And if she had, she would have felt so sorry. So it's just this sort of tragic couple who
00:41:07
Speaker
I think if I'm reading this correctly, there was nothing else to do but get rid of it. Get rid of it. And oh my God, all of these life decisions that they're having to make and they're not prepared to make them.
00:41:32
Speaker
You're rooting for this couple. You hope they make it. But they've really found themselves in a situation that's out of their control and you just feel sorry for them. But again, it's...
00:41:49
Speaker
It's a beautiful perspective on that period of life. I don't know, I knew kids in high school who all of a sudden they're in class one day and they're not the next. Hey, where did Bonnie go? You didn't hear? And then all of a sudden it's like, yeah, boy, this is what happens, real life situations.
00:42:16
Speaker
Anyway, I could go on about it, but it's just wonderfully captured.
00:42:27
Speaker
and it's universal obviously because it's still speaking to you and speaking to a lot of people who again could be absolutely blindsided if they took a moment again with the way that Glenn wrote this melody that actually when you watch him perform he's singing and doing this very complicated lick
00:42:55
Speaker
over and over and over and over and over again and you're kind of momentarily distracted uh when you're watching that and you could completely miss the point of what's going on whereas the laid-back approach of um up the junction is seems more appropriate and it's interesting that this is coming from a British perspective and yet again
00:43:21
Speaker
uh the way that Chris is able to put all of this into a storyline that here we are again resonating so far in the future you never would have thought that these you know 20-something kids uh who play for all these uh hooligans in uh you know in the pubs around Deptford
00:43:43
Speaker
uh would come would would would be able to extract something so deep um that didn't really even affect any of them and you know somehow chris
00:43:57
Speaker
new intrinsically, is that the word intrinsically, that the reason history works, and I'm a student of history, the reason it works and the reason you can learn from it is because human nature never changes. And that's what makes
00:44:16
Speaker
That gives us this connectivity that gives us an understanding what happened in the past will happen in the future not it doesn't ride it what is it it doesn't ride but it echoes or something like that.
00:44:30
Speaker
It doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes something to that extent where you can't always predict the situation, but you can generally predict how a society will work, how people will react. And I think knowing that human nature is a constant.
00:44:48
Speaker
He writes on a level where everybody could understand this. It's like a Charlie Chaplin film. You can show it in Japan, you can show it in Australia, you can show it in Somalia, and people would understand it because it's a universal truth.
00:45:06
Speaker
gist of Vicky Verkey is a universal truth. Everybody goes through the same maturing. They go through a first crush, a first love, situations that they can't quite figure out. And he wrapped it all up into this beautiful three minutes
00:45:30
Speaker
And it's just I hope it's one that people kind of maybe hopefully through this discussion will go back and look at a little bit more carefully. I think it gets a little bit lost when you talk about the more hits oriented songs and tunes that are on this album.
00:45:52
Speaker
the subject matter, you know, should really be investigated more deeply. And I think that that's going on a lot, especially with R.G. Bargee. I never really kind of thought about like the next one that you were listed was there at the top. Again, more of a female driven storyline. It's a little ambiguous to me. It kind of, I mean, it's not as straightforward. You think that you're kind of
00:46:22
Speaker
Maybe observing a woman who is coming into her own who wants to do better with her life And she's in control and in charge of you know, it's sort of like a businessman or something And going on these trips and everything but the the last part of the song kind of leaves you a little Yeah, doesn't it?
00:46:43
Speaker
Yeah, because could she be? And, you know, I would suggest when people listen to this podcast, you know, bring up the lyrics in front of you as we talk about them. And I certainly, I am not the expert at this. I can't say definitively that's what this song is exactly about. It's malleable. You can play with it.
00:47:07
Speaker
But it's nice to look at this. And yeah, you started off, again, I'll go back to She's Leaving Home or Another Day by Paul McCartney. And when, hey, she's in her comfy red Granada.
00:47:23
Speaker
Up to the midlands with a tape Sinatra i think that's probably the first time Sinatra and Granada had been ride but again found under covers with some representative the deal is affected but still only tentative in the very last line back to the mirror in the empress hotel with a businessman smiles in the object to sell.
00:47:41
Speaker
Yeah, what is it? What is her career path? What is that all about? 21 years old, she's out on her own. Is she getting into middle management? Is she an account manager for some firm or is it something a little bit more untoward? I don't know, but you're right when you point out
00:48:08
Speaker
in several of the songs that I've chosen, it is from a woman's perspective or about a woman. And I wonder where that comes from for Chris, if he finds it easier to write for that. I mean, if the character in this song were a man, how would that change things? Would it have been as easy for him to write it as he did for this with this 21-year-old woman?
00:48:34
Speaker
I'm not sure, you know, I'm just I'm thinking sort of like just knee jerk in my mind, like what could have transpired and kind of I've read his autobiography, but I wouldn't be able to sort of pull it out of thin air about how how it all kind of transpired for him. I know that he was very, very close to his mother.
00:48:55
Speaker
His parents were not absolutely the loving type between a standard wife and husband. There was a little sort of philandering going on there. But he was very close, however, he was very young. He had two older brothers, much older than him.
00:49:15
Speaker
So he has a very nostalgic, warm kind of memory, I believe, of what his mother was like and how he was, although, you know, he wasn't like the best circumstances, he could concoct a lot of this from just his imagination because, and he has said this too, that he had imaginary friends.
00:49:41
Speaker
He could have concocted a lot of this Besides seeing possibly some of it happen in real life He seemed to have been very taken with that kind of you know, that kind of mindset. So that's that's just my personal perspective on it yeah, and the fact that you I didn't know that he had imaginary friends, but what boy what a You know, what a good Way to
00:50:10
Speaker
create imaginary worlds. Yeah, I mean, like, where, where could you go, you know, as far as picking up
00:50:21
Speaker
You know things like that in your life that made you not necessarily are going through and they didn't actually have you know The white picket fence type of upbringing either But they had girlfriends that you know were very close to them you know, he was very close with Glenn's first girlfriend Maxine and I think he saw and he has described that situation as being very they were both very angelic and
00:50:49
Speaker
together. And she lived in a world that was much more upscale and more upscale than he had ever known. And he was very friendly with her, very close with her and her parents. So again, that's just me hypothesizing a lot of where possibly this female driven viewpoint could be coming from. But you know, that's kind of just where I feel like it's, you know,
00:51:19
Speaker
I don't know where it's coming from. Yeah, well, wherever it came from, it landed in the right spot. It was just so well done.
00:51:27
Speaker
Yeah. So the next one, The Day I Get Home. Yeah. That's one that I don't really seem to dial into, possibly. I'm going to let you take the lead on that one. Yeah. The reason I liked it, I think this came out around 1992.
Personal Experiences and Songwriting Influences
00:51:45
Speaker
Was it on Ridiculous? It's on Play, which is like one, yeah.
00:51:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I think what I like about this is nearly every band, every solo artist, every band has a song about touring. And it's like, oh my God, I'm tired of the hotels, I'm tired of the bus, I'm tired of the planes, I'm tired of the in and out, not being able to see my kids, my house, you know, the things I'm comfortable with.
00:52:14
Speaker
The lyrics are a little bit surreal as you go through them. Nothing really connects the dots, but the lamppost moving in the road, I sing and dance in falling rain, it's good to be back home again. Simon and Garfunkel, Homeward Bound, Talking Heads have songs about getting back home again. In this one, I just like
00:52:42
Speaker
The way Glenn sings it, when this young man comes rolling home, the cheese on toast is in the grill. Memories are filed the way I come and go, and it's fun that way. Again, I'll go back to the imagery. He gets back home. Hey, he just wants a grilled cheese sandwich? Fine. He's comfortable there.
00:53:09
Speaker
When he's out on the road, he wants to get home. When he's home, it's like, well, the roads that map the globe go east and west and north and south. He wants to get back out again. But generally, it's a song about homecoming. It's a song about the things that we find comfortable. As a travel writer, I could go out for months and months at a time, but at some point,
00:53:34
Speaker
the switch is flipped and you just want to, oh my god, I just want to sit in my couch, you know, on my couch or I just want to be in my bed. And that's what I get out of this one is just a different way. It's not
00:53:51
Speaker
It's not so basic. It's a little bit more abstract about, I think, the touring life of a musician and then the desire just to return home. And again, as a travel writer, I would experience similar things without a crowd of
00:54:11
Speaker
get five thousand people watching me but i did want to get home again and again that's the universal truth of uh i think most people we we all share that thing there's no place like home
00:54:26
Speaker
Yeah, and for Chris, I can give you a little backstory on practically the entire album, which he was in a really bad place mentally. And he did not want to be where he was, which was on the West Coast with the band doing this album.
00:54:48
Speaker
And he was extremely careless with his health. He was taking a lot of drugs. And in fact, he went down, I believe it was the highway to get back to where he was. He didn't want to stay with the band nearby.
00:55:07
Speaker
And he went down the wrong way. And he's very, very lucky that he didn't get killed. And, but he was so not there. He just could not place himself in a mindset that was going to be worth his time. And he had left, he had just had a baby. Uh, I think the Gulf war was going on. So you can see that kind of reflected in, in a lot of what's going on, um, you know, subliminally.
00:55:35
Speaker
in these lyrics where he has got that surrealism and dreamlike quality that may or may not have anything based in reality. And I think that's kind of where his mind was.
00:55:46
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm glad he worked through it. I wasn't aware of the situation around it, and again, that's my mea culpa. I'm certainly not an expert in this, and anyone who hears it might have a different interpretation, but when you know, like you've just explained, where his life was at the time.
00:56:07
Speaker
It just adds another layer to it. And again, that's why I think we listen to musicians. We listen to artists because they can say things to us and make it enjoyable because we get to unwrap the package and try to figure it out.
00:56:25
Speaker
see how it relates to us or on a personal level or how it relates to us on like an intellectual level can can we figure it out does it does it you know check the boxes that that we like in a song so
00:56:41
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it really goes very, very deep. You know, they kind of came back with the next song that you chose, which is Third Rail, which is off of some fantastic plays. Wow. Wow. And this, the whole entire album just has such a poignancy to it. And the backstory on that essentially was that
00:57:05
Speaker
for the actual song, Some Fantastic Place, Maxine had passed. She lied very early, I believe. She had leukemia, if I'm not mistaken. And Chris took that, and everybody did, of course. You can hear it in Glenn's voice, because this was Glenn's first serious girlfriend. So they had brought Paul Carrick back to play keyboards for the album. So I feel like this whole entire album is a wash in nostalgia.
00:57:35
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, just the cover of some fantastic place and Chris, again, sort of pouring his heart out for this person for Maxine. And when you get to this song, Third Braille, I think why I picked this one is, again,
00:57:59
Speaker
Whether you're a teenager in your 20s at every phase of your life, and it doesn't have to be a romantic relationship. It could just be a friendship. I mean, I've had friends for like 20 years and all of a sudden I'm not talking to them anymore. It's not that I don't like them. It's just, okay, just sort of move past that. And that could be the third rail.
00:58:21
Speaker
when you get to the very end of the song. And again, it's just about change. They want it to work, but there's just no energy left. And it's, you know, this is a nice one where it's nobody's fault. It's not like you cheated on me and I hate you or whatever it is, you know, you fell in love with my best friend. It's just like they're,
00:58:49
Speaker
They're just not connecting anymore. And I think the line in this one that really does it for me is when they're on the platform. And if you've ridden on a train or the tube in England or London, you know what it's like. And I've seen scenes of lovers kissing each other, getting on the train. I've seen arguments in the tube stations.
00:59:19
Speaker
And so he puts you there. We kiss on the platform. And the way Glenn sings, the doors slowly close. I just love the way he pulls that one line out, like theater curtains pulled after the show. We both know it's over. Somehow we've failed. But they didn't fail. They didn't fail. They're just growing up.
00:59:41
Speaker
I hate that it sounds like a cliche growing apart, but that's what they did. But they're also growing up and everybody's just trying to get through this. And I think that's why I like this song. It's just...
00:59:56
Speaker
Everybody has a hundred battles every day and you have to make decisions. It's all improvisation. You're trying to figure it out as you go along. Everybody's just trying to make it through life. And this couple is too. And whatever separated them is nothing sinister. It's nothing bad. It's just the life cycle of a relationship.
01:00:24
Speaker
Yeah, like with Chris, you could be losing the passion or wondering, you know, partially you're trying to figure out where did I lose this connection with the person that I was having such a deep emotional bond with. And
01:00:42
Speaker
He's mulling it over in many, many, many different ways. And there's really no concrete answer to any of this. And again, I think also, you know, again, that was partially his state of mind and, you know, not being able to figure out within his relationship. And also he speaks quite bluntly about, you know, losing something with Glenn.
01:01:08
Speaker
Yeah, they've been together for, you know, 20 years, and they're still making music. However, you know, you've got these scenes of, well, we're just gonna go with it, you know, and we've left a lot of stuff behind. And it just seems really convenient. He talks a lot about this in his autobiography, where there really wasn't a plan. It's just like, okay, we're Chris and Glenn, we've got a band called Squeeze, and we're just gonna
01:01:36
Speaker
do it without any real thought process like, well, doing it this way could be very, very harmful to our mental state. And I think that tends to make him very, very melancholy. Yeah.
01:01:52
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm aware of some of the difficulties Chris had. And again, but like I said, everybody's just trying to get through it, whether you're a gifted songwriter and you've got fans all over the world, or if you're just you and your wife in a house alone, everybody's trying to navigate it.
Family Dynamics in Squeeze's Music
01:02:14
Speaker
Now that you mentioned it, could be Glenn, could be
01:02:18
Speaker
the person on the platform uh that they're you know that they're discussing their their relationship okay so we're moving along to our next one which is a very underrated album and a lot of people say please give it some time um is from sweets from a stranger which is his house her home isn't that interesting oh gosh and yeah his house her home sometimes i i
01:02:45
Speaker
I listen to it, read the lyrics and think, okay, is the couple divorced? Or did the husband pass away? Your husband is watching from his portrait and his eyes are looking down on the slipper and stocking. He says,
01:03:10
Speaker
when we're in the bathroom sees me kissing mother doesn't blink and I ask a lot of questions so you know and then he gets bound hungry for the love I rescued from the grave so did the the father uh pass away and this guy comes into the picture and the kids trying to puzzle it out uh who is this new guy in the house uh
01:03:33
Speaker
you know he's watching cartoons he i'm now part of his life he didn't expect it he didn't sign up for this but now we're together and i've got a i've got to figure this out uh how do i inject myself into the life of this woman and the life of her son and boy i tell you
01:03:59
Speaker
Again, when I was coming up in the seventies and you see divorce is a little, you know, happening a little bit more frequently and you see, uh, friends who all of a sudden have paid the new stepmom and Sarah new stepdad is there. And it's this stranger that, um, all of a sudden you're expected to welcome them in.
01:04:22
Speaker
But it takes a lot more than that. And again, you can see this and you can see that little bit of awkwardness when he's watching cartoons.
01:04:38
Speaker
It's not his son who's watching cartoons. It's your son is doing that. There's a separation there. But he wants to be part of it. And again, he's trying to puzzle this out. This character is trying to navigate this really, really narrow channel.
01:05:00
Speaker
to make sure things go right because he appreciates this woman, he appreciates her son, but it's his house, her home.
01:05:10
Speaker
Yeah, and I thought that that was always a very, very pointed way of saying, I know I have to work at it here. Because I'm coming into a situation that involves a child. And there's another interesting verse in here where he says,
01:05:32
Speaker
Let me see if I can find it where he's talking about back against the bookcase. Yeah, down upon the floor, empty the decanter slur again for more. So it almost feels like he's kind of like, I don't know, guilty is not the word, but he's trying so hard. And maybe, you know, he feels internally like he doesn't know if he could do this or not.
01:05:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I don't you can read that two different ways on the slipper and stocking back against the bookcase down upon the floor empty the canter. So, you know, are they having drunken sex? I don't know. Or is he just, you know, boosting it up and passing out?
01:06:15
Speaker
I don't know either. Whichever way you slice it and whatever way you point the camera, you can get a different image and a different storyline to this. But generally it's the same. It's the stranger in the house. And how does he become part of that house?
01:06:40
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So we're gonna actually move on to brighter things. Okay, yeah. Yeah, to a degree. This is your, what you've called basically your favorite squeeze song, which is The Junction.
01:06:57
Speaker
You're going to have to go for this one, sir. OK, I'll do my best. But I tell you, I get choked up at this one, too. And I've listened to it for 40 something years now. It's just one of those songs that pulls a trigger. And you.
01:07:13
Speaker
you hear it and i've said this before and in fact i think somebody posted the video on facebook recently i said this is a two-hour movie captured in a three-minute song uh how he advances every single verse and there's no chorus in this i believe just every single verse advances the storyline and uh i i think you know it seems to me
01:07:42
Speaker
someone should just make a movie about this because the script is already written. There was just so much going on and every time I think about it, because the first time I heard it, you know, I was a kid, you know, I was not a kid, I was in my late teens and I could see myself in a situation like this.
01:08:04
Speaker
I could see myself, okay, hey, this is, you fall in love with a girl and you work hard because you want to buy her some flowers. And in that one verse, I got a job with Stanley. Hey, you know who Stanley is? He said I'd come in handy, started to be on Monday, had a bath on Sunday, bought her some flowers, boom, right away. She said she'd seen a doctor, nothing now could stop her. You've met this couple,
01:08:34
Speaker
55 seconds later, she's ready to have a baby and she's not going to give it up. Oh my God, what is going to happen? And then he doesn't walk away. He doesn't say, I'm in over my head. No, I'm going to work all through the winter.
01:08:51
Speaker
and so you know time is passing and he puts away his money, he sells the television set, late evenings by the fire, little kicks inside or even as Amy even as I'm saying those words I'm getting chills just reciting them and again this is 40 years plus since I first heard this song. You sympathize with again a young couple
01:09:19
Speaker
that isn't prepared for what's about to happen to them. And again, in one line, no wonder Chris has won awards for songwriting. She gave birth to a daughter within a year of Walker. Okay, so you've now gone from
01:09:38
Speaker
the the the time and clap them to them moving into the basement now she has the baby and now a year later she's in a walker and then just immediately after that she's two years older so the little the baby is now three years old
01:09:57
Speaker
And what has happened in those three years? Well, they've split up. The guy became a drunk. The mother is now with a soldier. And now he's in the kitchen by himself. And it's just such a dismal
01:10:15
Speaker
a depressing scene. And he's taken us through this and with Glenn's beautiful, beautiful voice and just the understated playing on it. Nothing fancy, nothing dramatic, just a slice of life song with lyrics that
Emotional Imagery and Music Videos
01:10:36
Speaker
just tell you everything you need to know in nothing more but the nothing more is the stuff that is added by your imagination the visuals of all of this and and again i would imagine if you could chart these um
01:10:54
Speaker
We would all share 90% of the visuals people get from the song would fall along the same lines. It's the way that when you see a movie after reading a book, when they make a movie out of a book,
01:11:10
Speaker
the director, the art director, the producer, the set designers, everybody's had, has shared a similar visual. And I think that's what most people would see in this song. And the fact that Chris can propel it through four years
01:11:31
Speaker
A four-year relationship in three minutes is extraordinary extraordinary and to be able to do that with just little lines like Again, she gave birth to a daughter within a year a walker She said she'd seen a doctor. Nothing now could stop her. It's You know, okay, she's having a baby She has the kicks inside her she uh
01:11:59
Speaker
two years after she's scooting around the room in a walker, we're split up and I'm drinking too much. I can't handle any of these things where before I'd have a bath, I'd work 11 hours, I can't even function. My wife has left me and she's taken the baby. Oh my God. Oh my God.
01:12:25
Speaker
that i wish they put a special nobel prize for uh songwriting and just give it to chris and in glenn for this one because i i just can't i can't even compare this to any other song this is uh this is just on top form just absolutely top form and just listen to it sometime if you're listening to this podcast when i'm done yapping about it
01:12:54
Speaker
You know, just sit by yourself, turn this song on, listen to the lyrics and let your mind go. Let your imagination go with it.
01:13:05
Speaker
see where it takes you, see where it takes you and how you can paint this portrait of what Chris has written about. And again, every song we've talked about, it just underscores his genius as a songwriter. And I wish Andrew Lloyd Webber would just
01:13:25
Speaker
somebody would just like tap him on the shoulder and said, hey, you're looking for another Broadway musical. Why not the lyrics, you know, the music and lyrics of Difford and Tilbrook? That would be phenomenal because he could pick out 10 songs, 15 songs, and he's got it all right there. It's all set. He just has to come up with the characters to plug into it.
01:13:49
Speaker
I know I wish sometimes, but based on the fact that it was so early in their career when you look at the video for that song, you'd like there to be a little bit more, but it's interesting the connection. Let's do it. There's the Beatles connection that song was filmed at...
01:14:10
Speaker
in John Lennon's house. Actually, I don't know if he was not there. He had already moved to New York City. So they were blown away because they had also done Cool for Cats in the little church that sits on the estate. And they thought that they were just doing the one, the Cool for Cats. So you can tell that they were just going great guns on that video. And then it turns out the director said, oh, you know, hey, we got some time to kill.
01:14:37
Speaker
let's go in the kitchen and do up the junction. And if you look at Glenn, he's just so like bleary eyed and so knackered to deliver this thing. It's just, that's, I find that amusing. His demeanor matches the song. It's somebody who's been
01:14:57
Speaker
beaten down and just at the end of their rope and where do they go from here and I'm not saying you know Glenn was you know three years drunk but it was it was just it fit the song his his appearance fit the song and that of the band and the women cooking on the stoves in the background it's just a little bit of motion uh
Life's Challenges and Ongoing Impact
01:15:21
Speaker
you wait until you sort of think okay this could be uh the woman even though there's two of them this could be the woman that uh is you know working in the basement or you know living in a basement uh and just trying to get by trying to get through the winter and trying to uh again navigate life but i i just can't say enough good things about this song it high marks all all the way across every single part of it there's certain songs
01:15:50
Speaker
that are perfect, where you literally could not change a note to make it better. And there's some songs I know that, oh, it's almost there, but then they put some sort of musical break in, and it just sort of messes it up. This song, there's just no way to improve it. Have I told you I like this song, by the way? A tiny bit. Oh, okay, okay.
01:16:12
Speaker
But I mean, I absolutely, I would agree with you. And I think in today's technologically advanced era, I'm hoping that sometime
01:16:20
Speaker
there will be somebody who would like to take advantage of the fact that this is worthy of a little bit of a short film attached to them. It may happen, it may not happen, but the fact that we can visualize in our mind, minus the video even, is just a testament to the delivery, the lyrics. And oftentimes we always keep saying, Lennon McCartney, Lennon McCartney, Lennon McCartney.
01:16:46
Speaker
for the two of them, but I've actually feel more in tune with the fact that we've got a Bernie Toppin and Elton John partnership going here and the fact that they wrote separately and Chris delivered things to Glenn.
01:17:02
Speaker
just shows you how things like this, especially like with up to junction, just happen and you don't get a chorus and you just get up to junction is literally the last three words in the song. Yep, yep. Again, just genius level and I'm glad at the time.
01:17:20
Speaker
the critics and the media were tuned into it and they knew something special was happening with the band and they got the credit they deserved. I'm so happy for them that they weren't overlooked and said, oh, we'll just do one album and it doesn't go anywhere and we'll just call it a day. No, they kept going and going and going and going and I'm really grateful and glad they did.
01:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really happy that you're able to expand upon the fact that Up to Junction is basically the major classic that it is, and a lot of the songs that you've picked out deserve way, way more attention.
01:18:01
Speaker
that they're given rather than keep beating the drum over several other songs that they're well known for. So that's why I appreciate the fact that with your journalistic background and your world traveling that you're able to put a different spin on it all.
01:18:19
Speaker
Well, I hope this was helpful. I know this was fun for me, and if folks who listen to it find some commonality in how they think about the songs or want to go through just for a little exercise, go through each album and pick out one or two songs on each album, put them on a mix tape or whatever it is that they call them today, and just try to dig into it a little bit.
01:18:46
Speaker
and figure out why you like that song, why it speaks to you. And you gave me a platform to discuss this. Again, I'm no expert. I'm just a fan who just appreciates good writing. And Chris's writing along with Glenn's melodies and voice, or even Chris's voice sometimes, it's just beautiful. It's such a gift. We're not around here very long.
01:19:12
Speaker
And to have this happen while we're here is wonderful.
01:19:17
Speaker
Well, Gary, I so appreciate the fact that you took the time out to wax lyrical on all of this wonderful gifts that just keep on coming to be perfectly honest. They don't seem to stop. And the reimagining and the retrospect on a lot of this music is warranted. So I just want to say thank you so much for all of your time, for spending it with me and our listening audience.
01:19:47
Speaker
Well, and I compliment you, Amy, for starting this podcast, and I compliment your listeners for having the good sense to tune in to Squeeze. You can't go wrong. I think in the top five bands of all time, just for their output and just for their ability to craft music that is eternal. As long as
01:20:14
Speaker
People are people and human nature is a constant. People will tune into music like this and see themselves.