Squeeze - Tried, Tested and Trixies

When it comes to storytelling, very few pop groups have done it as well as Squeeze. But even the group’s songwriting mainstays Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook would be hard pushed to devise a plot twist like the one that has resulted in Trixies, their first album in eight years. Because, if truth be told, the band who have given us sky-high classics such as Up The Junction, Tempted, Cool For Cats, Another Nail In My Heart and Labelled With Love weren’t planning another album. And that was ok. They’d scaled the highs of pop stardom; they’d disbanded and reconvened; fallen out and made up. Along the way, they got to bear witness to the effect their songbook has had on generations of fans –their compositions covered by artists as disparate as Erykah Badu, Tricky, Patti Austin, The Shins, Joe Cocker, The Lathums and Questlove & Robert Glasper. Their songs even pop up from time to time on Desert Island Discs, most recently when comedian Bob Mortimer revealed that he had already requested that the title track of their 1993 album Some Fantastic Place be played at his funeral.

And by returning Difford and Tilbrook to the birth of their creative partnership, Trixies has acted as catalyst to a latter-day songwriting surge. On the heels of Trixies, an album of brand new Squeeze songs – recorded concurrently with Trixies – is finished and set to follow in the future. “The act of revisiting the Trixies songs had me in tears,” smiles Tilbrook, “partly because they’re so good, but also because I’m aware of all the stuff that I’ve still yet to hear and write.” The sentiments are echoed by Difford: “It really fills me with joy that at my age we can discover that we wrote such great songs when we were teenagers. I’m very proud of that. And to have all these new songs alongside them, it really is the best of both worlds."