2 hours ago
3
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 happened. “All our friends liked it,” says singer and lead guitarist Glenn Tilbrook, who turned 17 just before the recording. “But that was the only feedback we had.”
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’s best-loved bands, the pair have finally done their teenage vision justice. A fully rerecorded Trixies will be released in March 2026. 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.
“When Chris and I met in 1973, he started giving me lyrics,” says Tilbrook. “We’d 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’t 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.”
Back then, with Difford doing shifts at Ready Mixed Concrete and Tilbrook working in a hippy head shop, the sophistication of their songwriting wasn’t matched by their musicianship, which Tilbrook compares to “five-year-olds playing football”. Now, though, they can draw on years of experience to “get the best out of any song”. For Difford, revisiting their wide-eyed beginnings after the sort of success they always dreamed about has been emotional. “Extraordinary, really,” he says, “hearing the songs come back to life.”
Much of Trixies was written in Tilbrook’s bedroom in his girlfriend Maxine Barker’s parents’ house. Difford, nearly three years his senior, also moved in downstairs. Difford remembers hearing his bandmate’s melodies “flowing down the staircase” after leaving lyrics for him on a breakfast tray.
“One of the greatest things was the mystery of what was going to happen to my lyrics,” Difford says. “Then a cassette would arrive with maybe five, 10 songs.” 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.
“We had to dumb ourselves down to fit in,” Tilbrook says, “which, admittedly, we did with relish.” Now, though, we can hear the band they were before: slightly softer and influenced by “all the great stuff that was happening”, such as David Bowie, Sparks and Stevie Wonder. “I hadn’t heard as much music then,” Tilbrook continues, “so we were picking from a much narrower field and processing it in our own way.”
As a teenager, Difford had never been to clubs like Trixies, an establishment he created in his imagination. “Later, we did go to local pubs where villains were and felt the anxiety of that community,” he says. “But most of the songs came from dreaming and the excitement of being a young writer.”
Trixies is often darker than most of Squeeze’s output. In The Dancer, Difford writes with empathy about a nightclub performer who dances “with fists clenched down by her side”. The marvellous The Place We Call Mars opens with a bloody scene on a hospital floor.
“I was influenced by Bowie performing the Jacques Brel songbook,” Difford says, “but I was probably feeling that darkness in my own life, as a young man.”
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. “I thought: God, that’s it,” Tilbrook says.
So far, only Hell on Earth and You Get the Feeling have been performed live, but – inspired by seeing Elton John perform his classic album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy in 1975 – they plan to tour the entire album.
“I’m so proud of the little us that did the songs on Trixies,” Tilbrook says. “You can hear all our hopes and dreams.” Meanwhile, as prolific as they ever were, there’s another album of new Squeeze songs on the way. “Those little guys that wrote Trixies were on a journey,” says Difford. “The greatest thing is that we still are.”
