\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n September 1974, when they were hopeful teenage unknowns in Deptford, Squeeze created a concept album, Trixies, set in a fictional south London nightclub. Believing they had come up with a substantial work, they recorded the 10 tracks on a borrowed Revox tape machine and expected the world to fall at their feet. But nothing happened. \u201cAll our friends liked it,\u201d says singer and lead guitarist Glenn Tilbrook, who turned 17 just before the recording. \u201cBut that was the only feedback we had.\u201d<\/p>\n The album was shelved, but less than five years later, the band began a run of classic hits, including Cool for Cats and Up the Junction, which had songwriting duo Tilbrook and fellow guitarist and vocalist Chris Difford hailed as heirs to Lennon and McCartney. Now, after recently celebrating 50 years as one of British pop\u2019s best-loved bands, the pair have finally done their teenage vision justice. A fully rerecorded Trixies will be released next March. Taster track, Trixies Pt 1, arrives this week and suggests that all the Squeeze hallmarks of melody, romance and storytelling were there from the beginning, even if few people heard them.<\/p>\n <\/span>Difford, left, and Tilbrook at a festival in 1973.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen Chris and I met in 1973, he started giving me lyrics,\u201d says Tilbrook. \u201cWe\u2019d write eight or nine songs in a few days and just kept popping them out. We grew as songwriters at such a rate because we had nothing else to do. We weren\u2019t getting gigs or getting signed. But somewhere in ourselves we had the ability to produce stuff of the highest quality from virtually the moment we met.\u201d<\/p>\n Back then, with Difford doing shifts at Ready Mixed Concrete and Tilbrook working in a hippy head shop, the sophistication of their songwriting wasn\u2019t matched by their musicianship, which Tilbrook compares to \u201cfive-year-olds playing football\u201d. Now, though, they can draw on years of experience to \u201cget the best out of any song\u201d. For Difford, revisiting their wide-eyed beginnings after the sort of success they always dreamed about has been emotional. \u201cExtraordinary, really,\u201d he says, \u201chearing the songs come back to life.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of Trixies was written in Tilbrook\u2019s bedroom in his girlfriend Maxine Barker\u2019s parents\u2019 house. Difford, nearly three years his senior, also moved in downstairs. Difford remembers hearing his bandmate\u2019s melodies \u201cflowing down the staircase\u201d after leaving lyrics for him on a breakfast tray.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the greatest things was the mystery of what was going to happen to my lyrics,\u201d Difford says. \u201cThen a cassette would arrive with maybe five, 10 songs.\u201d Tilbrook remembers rehearsing Trixies with a lineup including his schoolfriend Jools Holland (who remained in the band until 1980) on keyboards, but the album never made it beyond a demo and the arrival of punk took them (now including drummer Gilson Lavis, who died last week aged 74) in a different direction.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had to dumb ourselves down to fit in,\u201d Tilbrook says, \u201cwhich, admittedly, we did with relish.\u201d Now, though, we can hear the band they were before: slightly softer and influenced by \u201call the great stuff that was happening\u201d, such as David Bowie, Sparks and Stevie Wonder. \u201cI hadn\u2019t heard as much music then,\u201d Tilbrook continues, \u201cso we were picking from a much narrower field and processing it in our own way.\u201d<\/p>\n As a teenager, Difford had never been to clubs like Trixies, an establishment he created in his imagination. \u201cLater, we did go to local pubs where villains were and felt the anxiety of that community,\u201d he says. \u201cBut most of the songs came from dreaming and the excitement of being a young writer.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>The songwriting duo in 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Dean Chalkley<\/p>\n Trixies is often darker than most of Squeeze\u2019s output. In The Dancer, Difford writes with empathy about a nightclub performer who dances \u201cwith fists clenched down by her side\u201d. The marvellous The Place We Call Mars opens with a bloody scene on a hospital floor.<\/p>\n \u201cI was influenced by Bowie performing the Jacques Brel songbook,\u201d Difford says, \u201cbut I was probably feeling that darkness in my own life, as a young man.\u201d<\/p>\n Revisiting the songs after all these years, they have been amazed by how much the demos gave them to work with. However, producer Owen Biddle (also Squeeze bassist since 2020) brought new ears and suggested changing the order of the songs. \u201cI thought: God, that\u2019s it,\u201d Tilbrook says.<\/p>\n So far, only Hell on Earth and You Get the Feeling have been performed live, but \u2013 inspired by seeing Elton John perform his classic album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy from 1975 \u2013 they plan to tour the entire album.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m so proud of the little us that did the songs on Trixies,\u201d Tilbrook says. \u201cYou can hear all our hopes and dreams.\u201d Meanwhile, as prolific as they ever were, there\u2019s another album of new Squeeze songs on the way. \u201cThose little guys that wrote Trixies were on a journey,\u201d says Difford. \u201cThe greatest thing is that we still are.\u201d<\/p>\n Trixies is released 6 March on BMG. The single Trixies Pt 1 is out now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In September 1974, when they were hopeful teenage unknowns in Deptford, Squeeze created a concept album, Trixies, set in a fictional south London nightclub. Believing they had come up with a substantial work, they recorded the 10 tracks on a borrowed Revox tape machine and expected the world to fall at their feet. But nothing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[299,795,19164,19146,5432,7916,19149,167,6707,19162,1928,19163,14185],"class_list":{"0":"post-33463","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-album","9":"tag-chris","10":"tag-difford","11":"tag-dumb","12":"tag-finally","13":"tag-fit","14":"tag-glenn","15":"tag-making","16":"tag-squeeze","17":"tag-squeezes","18":"tag-teens","19":"tag-tilbrook","20":"tag-wrote"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}