If you wrote a terrific batch of material as a young artist, would you immediately set out to record it, or would you put it into a time capsule, bury it and think, “This might come in handy in 50 years”? Historically, not many singer-songwriters or bands have taken the latter option. But Squeeze did — effectively, if not as a conscious decision — and now it’s finally paying off as the band’s new album, “Trixies,” makes good on an early promise with a unique instance of very delayed gratification.
The unusual narrative behind the new release is this: Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford met as teenagers and virtual neighbors in the U.K. in the early 1970s and immediately struck up a songwriting partnership that would last for a half-century (and counting). Their first collaboration in 1974 was a song cycle, or would-be concept album, called “Trixies,” about imagined goings-on in the kind of London nightclubs they were still too young to inhabit. But they had long since set the material aside by the time they released their debut album in 1978, as the new wave era dictated a simpler, rockier style than the progressive pop of “Trixies.”
Flash forward to the mid-2020s and suddenly that archived and mostly forgotten material is sounding very good to their current bass player and producer, Owen Biddle, who eggs them on into boldly revisiting their child-prodigy origins and finally recording “Trixies” for contemporary release. “It’s a gift,” says Difford, meaning from his and Tilbrook’s past selves to their current ones. Longtime fans of the group can feel free to accept it as one as well.
The very good news is that it sounds like an encouraging new direction for the band, even if it’s actually a road not taken. Note to Robert Frost: Sometimes you can work your way back to an intersection.
Variety spoke with Difford and Tilbrook separately via Zoom in their native U.K. as they prepared to rehearse “Trixies” for a full-album performance.
There aren’t many, or any, precedents that come to mind for something like this: a whole album’s worth of unheard, seminal songs that has been revived decades later by a veteran band as a fresh recording. Can you think of anything comparable?
Tilbrook: You know, I don’t know of anything else that is even remotely like this. We never really took seriously until a few years ago the idea of actually doing it. Up until now, I would’ve regarded doing an album of old songs as really retro-aggressive and like we’ve run out of steam or something, so I would’ve been against it. But the songs really stand up, and I’m old enough now to not feel embarrassed about saying, “Hey, this is what we did when we were that young. It really stands up.” I’m really proud of what we did then, and we really haven’t changed that much of it. It’s what we wrote, but we couldn’t play it or sing it properly at the time.
If you didn’t know the story behind the record, you probably would never guess that these were songs that were written in the 1970s. It doesn’t come off as a period piece per se. To you, does it strike you as a moment frozen in time, or are you impressed by how timeless it is?
Difford: I’m impressed at how timeless it is on the one hand, but it is a moment frozen in time as well, so it straddles both of those things. What I adore about it is, it tunes into two young people that have just met, and they’re writing songs to impress each other. Then the whole thing was abandoned because we were playing in local pubs, and this wasn’t the kind of music that we would play in a pub. So we went down the old rock ‘n’ roll route and started writing pop songs and really going off into a different space and time. And then when we made our first album with John Cale (as producer), it certainly was not gonna be something that he would’ve tuned into. It wouldn’t have been his thing at all.
What do you think the primary difference is between this set of songs and what you ended up doing on your debut album?
Difford: These are more sophisticated than our first album, I’d say. And also they’re more melodic, I guess, and they’re more beautiful. The songs on the first Squeeze album are very much driven by John, in an experience that we weren’t expecting, which was very demanding and very different and wonderful all at the same time.
And how the songs are different from anything you’d write now, 50 years later?
Tilbrook: I think the really big difference is, at 16, my input was rock music up until 1974. And very specifically on “Trixies,” the template for all the songs seems to be rock music from 1971-74. Almost every single song I can go, “Oh yeah, that’s Bowie, that’s Wings, that’s Sparks, that’s a bit of the Beach Boys and a bit of the Beatles.” I mean, I know that there are ‘60s influences, too, but that’s Stevie Wonder. As a writer now, I can dip backwards and forwards across all sorts of styles of music that I love, but I’m never that conscious about it. It’s what I’m listening to at any given time that will influence me.
Teenagers usually betray their influences more as writers than you did here. No doubt all that stuff you mentioned is in there, but there’s really just one song, “The Place We Call Mars,” where you go, “OK, that’s obviously very Bowie” — especially because there’s a guitar line that’s very Mick Ronson in there.
Difford: I can hear Sparks and I can hear Wings and I can hear Bowie, so the influences are pretty easy to spot, I would’ve said. And you’ve nailed that one.
Tilbrook: I have to say “The Place We Call Mars” is exactly as it was when we wrote it. So the guitar line is of course me going, “Oh, I can be Mick Ronson here.” There’s not that much change in (the writing), but we have the ability to step back and arrange and play it properly, which is something we couldn’t have done in 1974.
The material you were writing was too tricky for your playing ability at the time?
Difford: Yeah, it was tricky. I couldn’t play it then, and I still can’t play it! It’s a complicated piece of work. But, with those challenges all there, we’ve been rehearsing it and it sounds pretty much like the album to me. So it is achievable with the help of backing tracks and the help of a great band.
Tilbrook: I do think that we didn’t want to make just a “Here’s what we would’ve done in 1974”-type record. I think it transcends that. It sounds of that time, but it also sounds modern.
Had it crossed your mind much in the intervening years that this was a trove of material you could ever revisit? Or did it kind of come as a surprise to you in the last few years when you went back and listened to the tapes?
Tilbrook: Well, I’ll give you a “for instance.” The chorus for “The Place We Call Mars,” I used on a song that was on the Squeeze album “Domino” called “Time for a Short Break.” It’s just the chord sequence; I mean, the song itself is rubbish. But I love that chord, and I honestly couldn’t, in my mind, imagine that we’d ever record a song called “The Place We Call Mars” at any point in the future. So I thought, “Well, I’ll use that.” I always thought that the songs are so of their time that I couldn’t see any point in going back to them. And now there’s every point in going back to it, because it’s such a lovely story — a lovely story of where we were as young people with our lives ahead of us, when we didn’t have anything going for ourselves except the fact that as soon as we met each other and started writing, we just flowed, you know? It’s extraordinary, and it’s one of those things… We lived like half a mile from each other, and if we hadn’t met, I really think our lives would’ve been substantially different, and not necessarily for the better.
Obviously there’s a throughline in the songs, and 1974 was the prime era of concept albums — and not just Pink Floyd, but the Kinks doing one concept album after another, like “Soap Opera,” so it was not all lost-in-space kind of stuff. Was that an influence on you trying to sort of write in terms of a song cycle?
Tilbrook: Yeah, I mean, I’m sad that I can’t spot any Kinks influences on this record, but the Kinks were a big influence, and really Chris introduced me to later-period Kinks, which I wasn’t overly aware of until I met him. But all those concept records were sort of flying about then, and for a while afterwards, so we were just being excited by the zeitgeist then.
Difford: Well, I was into “Captain Fantastic,” the Elton John album. The story of that was brilliant. Obviously, “Quadrophenia” and “Tommy” were just leaps ahead of anything that I could ever imagine writing. But I see it now more as a play with music, to be honest. And what I would love to find is a great scriptwriter who could sit with me and imagine what this club would be like, where it would be, who the characters would be, and for the band in the club to be playing these songs. Those are my dreams anyway — those are my hopes for the future.
So you think an adaptation into a musical might become a reality?
Difford: I’d really love it to, because the songs are so great and the story is fascinating. There were clubs that were kind of quite risque in the ‘60s and ‘70s, particularly in London, and there’s stories to be told.
You were very young people at the time. Had you collected some experience with nightclubs at that point, or was it more sort of aspirational, largely out of imagining a Damon Runyon sort of scenario, as was mentioned in some of the press materials?
Difford: It was from his storytelling, really, and the beautifully put together “Guys and Dolls” and the musicals of the time. I’m very attuned to musical theater, and always have been. When I was a teenager, I used to really enjoy soundtrack albums and diving deep into the world of Judy Garland, but also into the world of Damon Runyon and all these kind of fantastic American storytellers, the Raymond Chandlers of this world. We didn’t really have that kind of writer in the U.K., that I could have found, anyway… I was not influenced by a nightclub that I could think about, because I hadn’t been allowed to go to any of those. I was too young, and it would’ve been too scary for me.
Tilbrook: I’d never been to a nightclub when we wrote this, so I didn’t know anything about ’em. Chris was three years older, so he might have been. Subsequently, I think the year after (writing the songs), there’s a place called the Rainbow Rooms in Bieber’s department store in Knightsbridge, where we went to see a gig, Chris and I, and it was the closest to Trixies that I’d ever seen. It was sort of ‘20s-themed, and a posh place. I think the thing about Trixies is that it’s quite ambiguous about what it is. The whole thing never really explains it. There’s not a story; there’s a set of characters, and the story is half in your head, and I love that.
Your bass player, Owen Biddle, produced the album. Was there one among you all that was kind of most passionate about getting this record done?
Tilbrook: Owen’s passion was absolutely immense. I did bits and pieces by myself, but it was under Owen’s reach, and we were excited by it, but his excitement was infectious.
Difford: I would say he was the main spark plug to get this engine going. And he’s an adorable person, and he’s a very good balancing act between Glenn and I. He listens to both of us, and I think that’s really important; as a producer, you’ve got to be able to listen to the members of the band, particularly the people who wrote the songs. And he’s a sweetheart, really, very educated and very, very smart. So I’m very lucky to have had him in my life. … The year before last, I was on a tour bus with Owen and played him some songs from our early career, and he was really taken by them, as I was too. I hadn’t heard them for a while. One of the songs was from “Trixie,” and I explained what it was. Then when we did get together in the studio the following year, he said, “Well, let’s have a look at it all.” So Glenn set up the piano and he played all the songs from memory, which is kind of what he does, which is extraordinary. It just turned out to be the record that we needed to make.
You said you weren’t really able to play the songs properly in 1974, because your writing reach exceeded your playing grasp. Were you at least able to make them sound good on the demos at the time?
Tilbrook: Well, most of the demos we have (were not full band)… There’s one song we couldn’t find a demo for, which is “The Place We Call Mars,” but we’ve got demos of everything else. Only three are band versions, and they are “Don’t Go Out in the Dark” and “Trixies Part One” and “Part Two.” “It’s Over” and “The Dancer” are Chris songs, so there’s demos of him doing them on acoustic guitar. The rest of the songs are my demos, around about the time that I wrote them, playing on an RMI piano. The RMI piano is such a big sound for “Trixies” because that’s what it was written on, and nothing speaks to me of the ‘70s, or the up-to-the-mid-‘70s, more than an RMI piano.
There was a quote of yours where you said that prior to this, you thought that there might not be another Squeeze record. And now it looks as if we might get two, since there has been talk of an album of fresh material in your future, too, so we’re getting a good deal out of this. Did the impulse to do old and new kind of come simultaneously, or were you working on this for a while before it sort of reinvigorated that desire to do an additional new record?
Tilbrook: No, when it became more of a solid idea that we were gonna do “Trixies,” I very much wanted then to simultaneously work on a new record, because I think that to just do an album of old songs, however lovely that is, would represent a possible… If this was our last album or something, it’d be a weird ending for me. I didn’t want that to be the case. I’m very excited by how Chris and I can write nowadays, and the new album, I think, is every bit as good as “Trixies.” It’s just written at the opposite end of our career. So it was very important to do that, and I think it gave us a really nice sense of balance, to be in the present and in the past at the same time.
Where is that future album at, as of now?
Tilbrook: We recorded all the tracks at the same time as “Trixies” and did some overdubs, but at a certain point we said, “OK, we’ll parcel that off and finish ‘Trixies.’” We’re really in the hands of the record company, because we thought it might be an interesting double album, but they said no, and I respect and understand that. So, two separate albums.
Difford: I think that it’s a good idea to have new songs all the time in your career, because it freshens up your set and gives you a new sort of way of looking at things. But we’ve gotta get to the end of the promotion of this album, which would be the end of this year, I would imagine. And then I think we need to take a deep breath and look at what we need to achieve, because it’s a very high bar. And I think just an album of more songs couldn’t be further from what we actually do need. I think we need something a little bit more demanding.
Any idea what you need to do to meet that high bar?
