In Conversation With Colin: Chris Difford of Squeeze

2024 marks the 50th anniversary of Squeeze and, to round off a year of celebrations, one of Britain’s greatest bands are back with a live tour and not one, but two new albums. As they tease fans with fresh material, this could prove to be the start of yet another chapter for this perennial band.

Squeeze have always been among the most literate of bands. Their biggest hits, the kitchen sink drama Up The Junction and the country-tinged Labelled With Love, are like three-minute novels in terms of the depth of their storytelling.

Other songs like Tempted, Pulling Mussels (From The Shell) and Cool For Cats are sublime slices of pop. Such luminaries as Jools Holland and Paul Carrack have passed through the band’s ranks over the years, but its core has always comprised the vocal duo and song writing partnership of Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford.

I recently had a quick chat with Chris Difford backstage at Wolf Trap Amphitheatre in northern Virginia, mid-way through their US tour with Boy George as Chris looks ahead to their upcoming 50th anniversary tour of the UK, including three dates in Wales.

Long careers can only be sustained by fans that are prepared to go a similar distance, loyal Squeeze fans span the continents and have consistently remained faithful to the south London band. “American fans are different, their enthusiasm is very different from a UK audience” explains Chris. “I think the education of people in America is hugely different from the UK and that brings a lot of enthusiasm and excitement in audiences, and we have that in the UK but it’s just very different, it’s better dressed.

“We played the other night and there were three kids in front of me on stage who I’d say were young teenagers and I did the whole show just for them because I was excited to see someone younger than me in the audience” he laughs.

Chris Difford has been writing story-song narratives doused in British pop for six decades, a student of the human condition reporting his

findings with scrupulous honesty. Throughout his song-writing partnership with Glenn Tilbrook they’ve largely stuck to the same routine of Chris writing the lyrics and Glenn composing the music, an Elton John and Bernie Taupin kind of relationship. This successful combination has resulted in some of the most iconic pop songs from their commercial heyday, evergreens such as Slap and Tickle, Third Rail, Is That Love, Annie Get Your Gun, Black Coffee In Bed and arguably their best loved song Up The Junction.

“I always think the best songs they come to you, you don’t go to them. They come down a spiritual channel that evokes inspiration and becomes a song. If I get a lyric I don’t really need to go back and get a song-writing degree in whether it’s right or wrong I go with the feeling of it. Quite often it’s wrong and that’s fine too but when things like Up The Junction turn up you can’t deny the fact that it’s not really my song it came from somewhere else and I just happened to be around when it arrived. I can’t quantify it on a piece of paper or understand it, songs like Labelled With Love and particularly the earlier songs I have no idea where they came from apart from just being I suppose. And as you get older you sometimes over-imagine where the songs are coming from, but if you’re open enough to let them happen then they happen.”

Few bands survive long enough to salute their 50th anniversary, but the reality for Squeeze is it’s actually the song-writing marriage of Christopher Difford and Glenn Tilbrook that we’re really paying tribute to.

It’s all a long way from Deptford, London, where Chris remembers that first meeting with the 17 year old Glenn Tilbrook outside a Blackheath pub in April 1974 after placing a 50p advert in a shop window. “That was certainly a meeting of substance and I’m very grateful for that moment, it was wonderful really to meet Glenn and his girlfriend Maxine at the time. They came around to my house and I played them a lot the songs that I’d written and before we knew it we were admiring each other’s skills and writing songs. In those days there was lots of time to do things like that, when your young that’s what you want to do most.”

Over those first few months they penned somewhere around 50 songs, many of which have never seen the light of day. Chris remembers the first track that they wrote together although he admits he’d rather forget about it. “I’d rather not talk about it because it’s rubbish” Chris half-heartedly jokes. “It was a vague attempt at writing a song but the important thing is that was the first time that Glenn took one of my lyrics and put music to it and I suppose that was a taster for what was to come. It was called Hotel Woman.”

It’s a testament to Chris and Glenn’s productivity at the time that they had over 50 songs in the can and were able to reject most of them when it came to making up their first recordings. Their first hit single, Take Me I’m Yours would catapult Squeeze into the Top 20 and, on 6th April 1978, to Top Of The Pops, fulfilling a long-held dream.

“I remember the fact that it was very exciting going to the BBC for the very first time, it was an institution, which it still is. It was fantastic to be in a studio and to have cameras in front of you. It’s quite terrifying at first but we weren’t fashionable by any stretch of the imagination but we had something that was different I feel.

“Punk rock was coming down the pipe in 1977 but that wasn’t something that particularly bothered us, I was fascinated by it and went to see a lot of punk bands but I was just glad that we didn’t get spat on quite as much as everybody else.”

Four albums followed but the band split up for the first time in 1982, citing the strain of maintaining the success along with a feeling of fatigue and tiredness of it all leading to the first break-up. “All of that” agrees Chris. “We had made four albums in quick succession, toured constantly for five or six years and it really wears you out even when you’re younger. It seemed like a good time to stop the merry-go-round I suppose. But then we got off and we got back on again so it was short lived, only maybe a year or so that we split up.”

Though they initially regrouped with the 70’s line-up of the band, Squeeze would go through a multitude of personnel changes in the 80’s and 90’s. With tensions in the band once again frayed, Squeeze called it a day for a second time in 1999, with Difford telling a shocked Tilbrook that he wanted out. “That was a time for repair, for me anyway. I needed to go away and think about family and life outside of a few chords and a few songs, and I’m really pleased that I did that, I think it was refreshing to take a risk and I think risks are very important in life because they rejuvenate parts of your sub-conscious that maybe can be asleep for a long time.

“The constant change was tiring. You need stability when you’re on the road in knowing that you’re playing the right places and you’ve got the right songs and you’ve got the right band, and that’s what we have now, we have the right band.”

Eight years Squeeze were out of action, and during that time these old friends, who’d known each other since they were teenagers, didn’t speak a word to each other. It was the death of Difford’s brother in the mid-

noughties that led to Chris and Glenn hooking up with a view of reviving Squeeze. They officially reformed in 2007 for a series of live gigs, with an album, Spot The Difference, arriving in 2010. There have been a further two albums since then (2015’s Cradle To The Grave and 2017’s The Knowledge) and there’s another planned for this year’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Chris explains, “Over the years we’ve had lots of different people in the band, different musicians and lots of different managers and lots of albums, hundreds and hundreds of songs and I think it’s a combination of a kind of soup that keeps you together. I suppose the kind of success we had in the late 70’s and 80’s is still relevant today because we’re doing these shows and we’re playing those songs that people love…and that’s our agreement really when somebody buys a ticket we shake hands with them and give them what they want.”

For the brand new album, Chris says that he and Glenn and the rest of the current Squeeze line-up will be entering the studio early next year and, despite finding it difficult to get started Difford is confident they’ve got an album every bit as vital and infectious as anything from their commercial heyday. “We have brand new material to be finished. We started it and then we stopped and at the beginning of next year we’ll probably kick off the new-year with some more recording.”

There’s also another album being planned for release next year, a collection of songs discovered on a cassette that were written half a century ago that have never seen the light of day, “We’ve completely re-recorded it, it’s fifty years old called ‘Trixies’, it’s thirteen songs and Owen Biddle has produced it who is our bass player, he’s done a marvellous job of balancing the emotional books that come with song-writing and I think when it comes out eventually, God knows when but when it does come out probably summer next year, people will be very surprised, and I hope love it.”

Unlike the vast majority of creative artists, Difford isn’t searching for new ways of working, but he admits after a near lifetime making music finding the right approach can be tough. “As a lyricist I still chalk away at the lyrics and enjoy that process very much, when I’m on tour I really miss it so it’s kind of like a close friend. I’m confident and very relaxed with the way I work whether it’s right, wrong or indifferent. I found a balance in my life that is important to honour and that is having enough fun in life balanced out with being in a band, because when you’re in a band you’re with a bunch of people you only really see in a dressing room or on a stage, you don’t go on holiday with anybody, it’s just the way it is.