Turning Transatlantic: BRITISH VOCABULARY BUILDING WITH SQUEEZE

Turning Transatlantic: BRITISH VOCABULARY BUILDING WITH SQUEEZE

by

Toby Goldstein

When the British Rail local pulls out of London’s Victoria Station, crosses over the Thames, and 15 minutes later arrives in Clapham Junction, you’ve changed worlds. Instead of the dignified, stately vision of London familiar from spy movies or Masterpiece Theatre, you’re faced with the graying towers of subsidized housing, long bare patches of barren ground, and whatever crumbling pre-war blocks survived the Blitz. The streets of South London areas like Clapham, Battersea and Deptford get their color from a population attuned to the everyday business of living. The working men’s pubs sell cider on draft, and the fish ’n’ chips still come wrapped in newspaper. Squeeze calls these districts home, and with increasing success, write about what they know best.

Three thousand miles from neighborhood ground, lyricist Chris Difford sits in the Gramercy Park Hotel restaurant and, between spoonfuls of soup, recalls how he came to write the marvellously evocative “Up The Junction.” “It was on the first American tour, when we were all pretty homesick, and I just felt like writing about something to remind me of where I lived. It’s quite a strange song, because my life has almost followed the path of that song in a way. It’s quite frightening! I even looked around for a basement flat—I’m being haunted by it. I’ll write a song about divorce soon and see what happens. Play with the devil,” he decides in a none-too-cortfident tone.

In spite of their home-grown excellence, Squeeze are becoming more worldly, one inevitable by-product of success. Difford, his melodic counterpart Glenn Tilbrook and the three other members of Squeeze have played three full tours in America and will embark on a comprehensive fourth starting in April, in support of their new album, East Side Story. Squeeze’s latest album, produced by Elvis Costello (with whom they now share management), signals the band’s intent to start sliding away from precision pop tunes to a singable, yet grittier sound. That direction was evident when they supported Big El on his recent cross-country swing, enlarging their sound to fill halls before Elvis, rather than clubs on their own.

Tilbrook, whose boyish features and light voice are living rosy-cheeked cliches of cuteness, explains the group’s decision to work with Costello. “The last two albums before East Side Story we co-produced with John Wood. The first one was done by John Cale, about which we’ll say no more. We had made two real good pop albums and we could have gone in the studio and made another one, but I think it’s time for a change, and you have to face up to that challenge.

“Out of the limited amount of producers we worked with before, you definitely get your fingers burnt by going into the studio with someone you don’t know. We’d been friends with Elvis and the band for quite a time and we had the idea to go into the studio. We tried a couple of tracks and they worked fine, so we did the album. It’s a simple as that, really.” Tilbrook had already worked on Costello’s Trust album, sharing vocals on “From A Whisper To A Scream.” “Kinda like George Jones and Tammy Wynette,” he deadpans.

Adds Chris, “Also, having a new member in the band, it was nice having everything fresh and new. The album is co-produced by Roger Bechirian. Roger’s famous for working with Nick Lowe and producing the Undertones.” Glenn continues, “The interesting thing about them working together is that Elvis or Roger would have Some fantastically outlandish idea, and they’d keep each other in check, or else inspire each other. It’s a very creative atmosphere. This album’s got a gutsier sound on certain tracks, but then again, On certain tracks we’ve gotten a softer sound than we ever had. There are some real contrasts on the album.”

New keyboardist Paul Carrack, who replaced the zany Jools Holland towards the end of 1980, has helped give Squeeze that more expansive sound. Carrack, who hadn’t been doing much of anything since his group Ace (“How Long”) split up, was recruited into the band after Squeeze had held numerous auditions and were tearing their hair out.

Difford recalls, “Jools came to my house at eight o’clock on a Monday morning and got me out of bed to tell me he was going to leave the group. It was more of a shock getting up at eight in the morning than anything else at the actual time. So I smacked him round the back of the head and said, you’re making a big mistake., and that was that. He was adamant, for whatever reasons. But we’re all still chums, we still drink and talk about someone when he’s not around.

“We went through about 60 keyboard players after Julian left. And we always knew that Paul was there, but we never though of having him along, for some strange reason. Then Pete Thomas (drummer of the Attractions) and our manager (the awe-inspiring Jake Riviera) said, why don’t you try him, so he came down and just fitted in immediately.”

Yet another result of their professional association with Costello has been Squeeze’s exposure to hours of American country music, to which Difford easily relates, its straightforward nature compatible with his personal approach to lyric writing. “That’s the kind of writing I adore,” he emphasizes. “Very plain hamburger and french fry lyrics. Very accessible to everybody.”

Accessibility is one of the key words to use in any definition of Squeeze, a bunch of next-door types if ever there was one. Difford’s open features and slicked-back hairstyle complement Tilbrook’s charm, Carrack appears pleasant and unassuming, bassist John Bentley seems equal parts punk and rocker, and hulking drummer Gilson Lavis looks like a good-natured bodyguard. Nice boys, all of’em. No, insists Glenn, “just easy-going chaps.” In America, it is often hard to detect any difference.

Squeeze had the misfortune of releasing their first album, UK Squeeze in 1978, the height of Britain’s hard-core punk era. In America, they were cast in a punk band role on their first tour, while in England, they were dismissed for making melodies. Having several large British hits, especially “Cool For Cats” in 1979, may have enlarged their audience, but in England, Squeeze had remained classified as unfashionable teen-types.

Says Glenn, “ ‘Cool For Cats’ definitely broke the band in one sense that we’ve got across to the singles market. But the thing about establishing that type of audience is the majority are in the 10 to 14 age group, which at concerts is a difficult audience to play to. When you do get older people at your show, they feel they’re at the wrong gig-

“I think our image is completely different over here, simply because we haven’t had any hit singles at all. Also because we’ve played pretty regularly around clubs and people have actually seen us build up our following from 10 people in CBGB’s to 1500 at the Ritz and then doing the Palladium with Elvis. And Elvis as a songwriter is one of the few younger writers around that I’ve got a lot of respect for. ’Cause the fact is, that most people in bands don’t know how to write songs, as far as I’m concerned.”

Tilbrook’s singling out Costello as a younger writer indicates that his preference lies in the past, possibly stretching back to include the music hall and holiday camp themes evident on Cool For Cats and Argybargy. Older writers? Chris puts his foot in it... “Nick Lowe is one of the older ones, and Dave Edmunds is even older!” Chuckle chuckle.

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Glenn gets serious again. “Going backwards, there’s people like Lennon and McCartney who had a style and consistency in their songwriting. Then there’s other guys like Lieber & Stoller. They wrote very witty songs and they were able to imitate black music in a way that I was very comfortable with them whereas a lot of other people at that time really sounded false. Then going back further, there’s people like...” Chris: “Brahms.” Glenn: “Rodgers and Hammerstein and people like that.” Chris: “Sound Of Music’s never far from my turntable, Carousel...”

The banter is wonderfully low-key, subtle and perfectly timed, just the kind of word-play that has left Americans at the starting gate where much of British humor is concerned. Perhaps it’s Squeeze’s intent, in called their album East Side Story (the other tentative title was “West Of Eden”) to reinforce a bridge of language between our two curious native tongues that both claim to be English.

Chris points out, “I suppose this album has got a tinge of American influence in it. But then the others, in all fairness, have been very English.” Says Glenn, “I don’t think that’s a problem at all with the stuff we’re doing now. If you look back to Cool For Cats, which is not only very English but very London, almost Cockney-influenced, 1 can understand a lot of people having problems with some of the songs. People from the North of England have trouble understanding them! But I think we’ve got a bit more international then. Our songs are still expressed in an English sort of way, but it’s not in a way that alienates people.”

Chris agrees, “I think it would be false for the band to do a song with a lot of American phrases in it, ’cause we don’t talk like that. It wouldn’t sound like us.” He then describes an interesting story he’d overheard earlier at the bar, almost took notes on it for a new tune, until he discovered the narrator had been describing a book about Jackie Kennedy.

Squeeze may not be more self-assured about their talents than they were during the late 1970’s, when “you’re so Beatles” was a standard British put-down, but in no way would they identify with the platinum-rated bands that are still America’s darlings. Tilbrook admits he’s still got a lot to learn about our audiences.

“I think where rock failed is when it became an institution and it also became very conservative in its approach. We’re not exactly an outrageous group, but the fact is that we’re seen as outrageous in certain places in the States. I thought the change was gonna happen a couple of years after it happened it Britain. But it hasn’t changed a lot in three years and that’s really shocked me.

“I was in the bar last night, talking to a kid who’s my age who was saying he enjoyed our show, but the guys he really likes are Jethro Tull, then he talked for about half an hour about Genesis and Yes. I was really trying to understand. ’Cause he went on about the spectacle of being in a 40,000seater arena and havihg bricks demolished in front of him or 300 laser beams shot above his head. It wasn’t anything to do with rock music. It was theatrics...” Tilbrook looks across the table at Difford and then at himself, the two dressed straight off the casual rack in jackets and tailored trousers. And the idea of being lured by extravaganzas, in performance or composition, indicated one barrier where East and West would never meet.