Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford at a festival in the early, formative days of Squeeze.
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there’s a stain on my notebook where your coffee cup was,
and there’s ash in the pages, now i’ve got myself lost.
GLENN TILBROOK in “Black Coffee in Bed” (1982).
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313: Squeeze // Singles: 45's and Under
Singles: 45's and Under
Squeeze
1982, A&M
Easy day at the office reviewing Squeeze’s first compilation, Singles: 45’s and Under. I’ve always thought of Squeeze as the smoothest, most traditionally pop of the British New Wavers. They’re like Costello without the pickled sarcasm; XTC without the berserk resistance to medication; Dave Edmunds with the ability to develop an original thought. As such, in my experience they’ve been a far easier sell to new fans than any of those guys because they simply sound cool and good as hell without making every song a litmus test of how much you can bear Tifford and Dilbrook’s star personas. Even on the Cool for Cats-era stuff when they’re drenching their music in Devo-levels of freaky squelch (see “Goodbye Girl”), there’s always a sturdy classicism to what they do, a sense of craft that a McCartney or a Bacharach would instantly respect, a lightness of melody that hovers over you all day after a single listen. While the countrified “Labelled with Love” has always struck me as a hair too precious, every other song is an indispensable gem, with “Pulling Muscles From a Shell,” “Take Me, I’m Yours,” and “Up the Junction” (the proto “Common People”?) standing out among the power poppers. Squeeze’s post-East Side Story years are a notoriously mixed bag, but you’d have to have a real bone-deep aversion to blue eyed soul or sophistipop for the languid charms of “Black Coffee in Bed” to elude you. Really, has anybody ever done this kind of thing better without feeling the need to beat you over the head with their genius?
313/365
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1978 Debut-Album era Squeeze
(I could not find color versions of these photos like the few floating around from this shoot that are in color… and unfortunately, the only versions I can find of some of these have watermarks covering faces -but I figured I’d share them -and I’ve got a few more to post later)
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