British Power Pop Squeeze: A Legacy of Music

Squeeze singer-guitarist Glenn Tilbrook admits he didn’t think his band would still be going strong some 50 years after its formation in London. But the group tours and records on a regular basis and has just released Trixies, a new album featuring songs that Tilbrook and bandmate Chris Difford wrote as teenagers in 1974, just as Squeeze was coming together.

“I don’t know that I really thought that far ahead back then,” says Tilbrook via Zoom from his home/studio in London. Squeeze performs with Adam Ant and Haircut 100 on Tuesday, Sept. 1, at Jacobs Pavilion. “The moment came when I thought I might be doing this all my life when I backed off Squeeze and was focusing on my solo career. Having a lack of success makes you think about whether you really want to do this. I did. It was a good thing to learn. Now, I feel like I’m invincible and will enjoy it wherever I am.”

Tilbrook was 16 and Difford was 19 when the two started penning tunes that reflected their love for bands such as the Kinks.

“From the moment we met and started writing, we were on fire,” says Tilbrook. “Literally, we wrote so much. Chris [Difford] had started on the concept of Trixies before we met and had written a couple of songs for it. He started giving me lyrics and wrote ‘Trixies’ up in one corner, so I knew that’s what it was for. We were writing other songs at the same time, but we finished it in a year and shared it with our friends. They all loved it, but we couldn’t get arrested.”

When the two recently revisited the tracks, they felt like they still stood out and possessed that distinctive power-pop sound for which Squeeze would become known.

“They really were good,” says Tilbrook. “We always thought they were good, but we were never analytical about it. When we sat down with it, we realized it’s a proper piece of work.”

Songs like the jangly, Beatles-inspired “Why Don’t You” already sound like fully formed Squeeze songs from the 1980s.

“That is the first of four songs I wrote when I was semi-infatuated with tango,” says Tilbrook. “The last one was [1978’s] ‘Take Me I’m Yours,’ which was our first single. It’s intriguing to see what I was infatuated with back then. My focus as a writer was much, much narrower. I was 16, so I had maybe ten years of listening to music intensely and you absorb all of that. I loved it from what I can remember. But it was a very narrow prism of stuff, though the music from the ’60s and ’70s was brilliant.”

Tilbrook says that producer Owen Biddle brought a good deal of enthusiasm to the project.

“We have got a great band, and Owen is the cherry on top,” he says. “We’re a nine-piece now. The latest member is Liam, one of my sons, who is 23. He is a great foil for me. We can both play guitar together on the songs.”

The album centers on the goings-on at a fictional nightclub, and Tilbrook says that classic films served as an inspiration for the LP’s concept.

“When we grew up, there were just two channels on TV, and a third one came in the ’70s,” he says. “We got Hollywood movies on those channels, and they were influential and exciting, and that fed into our imagination about what a club would be like. Highlifes and lowlifes would be mixing together. It’s really intriguing. We had never known anything like that. It was Chris’s imagination.”

One album highlight, “The Place We Call Mars,” has a glam rock feel to it.

“It is very influenced by David Bowie,” Tilbrook admits. “I heard [Bowie’s] ‘Life on Mars’ recently and thought ‘The Place We Call Mars’ would be like it, but it’s not. It’s in the same ballpark, and I really leaned into the [guitarist] Mick Ronson approach. Every type of music filters through in some fashion.”

Squeeze took an unorthodox approach to recording Trixies. The group recorded another album of original tunes at the same time. That album has yet to come out.

“We recorded Trixies and what’s going to be our new album at the same time,” says Tilbrook. “It was an interesting and necessary thing to treat all the songs as new songs. Trixies was informing the new songs and the new songs were informing Trixies. It was such an intense period. We had never done that. It’s like recording a double album.”

The group has already toured mainland Europe in support of the album, and Tilbrook says he looks forward to bringing the show to the States.

“In Europe, we played the whole album [Trixies], and it worked. It’s nerve wracking. We have never done that before. I don’t know if we’ll play the whole album because the structure is different. I think we can do a good chunk of it plus other songs that people will love just as much.”