“WELL, he put an advert in a sweet shop window, and I was the only person to answer it.”
Glenn Tilbrook is reminiscing about how he met Chris Difford and how they went on to form Squeeze.
He was 16 and Difford was “three years older — with all that extra experience”.
The year was 1973 and the fateful sweet shop was in Blackheath Village, south-east London.
“We first met in a pub,” Tilbrook, now 68, tells me via video call from his studio.
“Then I agreed to go over to Chris’s house where he played his songs and I played mine.”
In a separate call “from the next room”, Difford, 71, picks up the story: “Last week, I was looking at my diaries from ’72 and ’73 — I guess I was always knocking around with people who wanted to form a band.
“At school, my careers teacher told me a job was going at the Peek Freans biscuit factory and that I should take it. I said I wanted to be in The Who.
“I did have my own band but it was like The Velvet Underground without the songs, just a bit of a noise. Then my guitarist decided to do something else so I put the ad in a sweet shop window.
“When Glenn and I got together, everyone I’d been working with just fell away into the background.”
So began a songwriting partnership which, despite a few bumps in the road, has been the cornerstone of Squeeze for more than 50 years.
“Then I started meeting Glenn’s friends,” continues Difford, “including Jools Holland who was in the first line-up.”
With a strong dose of irony, Squeeze took their name from The Velvet Underground’s dismal final album, which was made after all the original members, Lou Reed among them, had left.
Noted for Difford’s wry, storytelling lyrics set to Tilbrook’s intuitive knack for rock and pop hooks, they rode the crest of the New Wave in Britain, alongside the likes of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and XTC.
They delivered much-loved songs such as Cool For Cats, Up The Junction, Tempted, Labelled With Love, Take Me I’m Yours and Pulling Mussels (From A Shell).
They became quintessentially English forefathers of Britpop.
But this particular chapter of the singular Squeeze story is all to do with one of Difford and Tilbrook’s earliest collaborations — unheard until now.
In 1974, right at the start, they dreamed up a concept album called Trixies about an underground nightclub, originally thought to be in New York City but, as it transpired, more likely to be found on the main drag of Deptford Broadway.
The pair only got as far as recording a cassette of demos on a borrowed Revox because, as Difford confesses, “the songs were too good, too adventurous for a young band like Squeeze. At that time, we had our limitations.”
All these years later, a vibrant new recording of Trixies is being released as the 16th Squeeze studio album, making full use of the decades that Difford and Tilbrook have spent honing their skills.
Born out of the fearlessness and ambition of youth, it is a remarkably accomplished piece of work, populated by vivid characters in evocative settings, framed by sophisticated song structures.
“It’s been an emotional journey,” admits Difford. “When Glenn started playing those songs from memory on the piano in this room, it was hard to hold back the tears.
“Here was a reflection of two young people who had just met, who were writing songs together and getting on really well. It was a lovely, lovely feeling to export myself back to that time.”
Tilbrook describes convening with Difford and the band’s American bass player and producer Owen Biddle, who joined in 2020 and would mastermind a whole new sequencing of Trixies from his “outsider” perspective.
“I played the songs through and it felt astounding,” continues Tilbrook. “They were so much better than we thought, which was a wonderful surprise.”
He also found the process emotional and says: “Imagine being able to see inside your 16-year-old mind. We had our lives ahead of us and were producing these songs just to play to our friends because, at that point, we couldn’t get any traction as far as a career was concerned.”
On the genesis of Trixies, Tilbrook says: “I write on guitar and piano but I’ve always gravitated towards the piano.
“I was living with my girlfriend at the time, Maxine, and her parents had a piano. I carried on writing on it until Maxine and I split up.”
By this time and despite attending different schools, Tilbrook was well acquinted with new Squeeze recruit Jools Holland, their keyboard player until 1981, and again from 1985 to 1990.
“I met Jools in 1972,” he says. “He was trying to sell a guitar for a fiver to a friend of mine.
“As I was the guitar expert, I advised my friend very strongly that it wasn’t worth a quid let alone five, and he didn’t buy the guitar. Jools tried it on for the money.
“But it was really great to meet him. He was the first person I knew who could play besides me, so we very quickly formed a friendship.
“We started playing together a lot but were never really able to write together. We did a couple of things but neither of us were impressed.”
What we know for sure is that Tilbrook had found his ideal songwriting partner in Difford and that Trixies is proof positive of their rare chemistry.
So why after more than 50 years was it right for Trixies to finally emerge from the shadows? Or should I say from a dusty cupboard?
Tilbrook explains: “We’ve never been a consistently successful band, although we’ve had enough success to justify carrying on.
“But our last album (2017’s The Knowledge) did nothing and highlighted the pointlessness of just releasing an album.
“There’s so much competition these days and one of the record company guys said to me, ‘A record isn’t enough, you need a story.’
“What could be a better story than Trixies because it’s absolutely true and the songs stand up? We would never have done it in a million years otherwise.
“We’ve always known about the songs but they seemed from another time. Now, that is their magic ingredient.”
With Tilbrook responsible for the music, I ask him which big acts of the early Seventies influenced him.
“Trixies was a product of what I’d been listening to during a three-year period,” he replies. “There’s anything from T.Rex to Wings to Stevie Wonder to Sparks.
“You can hear David Bowie in there, too, but The Place We Call Mars is not Life On Mars even if it has a weirdly similar feel.”
As for the lyrics, they are a product of Difford’s vivid imagination, aided by some key inspirations.
He says: “From my early teens, I was infatuated by musical theatre. The songs were outside the realms of normal pop music.
Difford remembers visiting a record shop in Gerrard Street, Soho “which sold film soundtracks, Judy Garland records and stuff like that”.
He cites David Bowie, “who I’d been to see in a small club in South London” as well as the theatrical approach of Belgian singer Jacques Brel whose songs could be “filthy and exciting”.
Difford adds that the strong storytelling aspect of Trixies was also prompted by Damon Runyon, whose short stories depicted the seedy underbelly of 1930s New York City.
But he’s quick to point out that his imaginary club is actually closer to home, typical of Seventies Britain and populated by rogues and gangsters.
He says: “There was one on Deptford Broadway where Marvin Gaye famously turned up and took to the dancefloor, surrounded by local talent.
“I think he’d gone down there to pick up some drugs but it was an amazing club where people were constantly being hauled out and shot.
“It was a dark place to be. Trixies is like that, maybe crossed with Biba which was a more fancy club above the (fashion) shop.”
What about the decor? I ask. “I can see it now in my mind,” he answers. “It would be dimly lit — on the tables, there would be Spanish wine bottles with candles in them.
“There would be paintings on the walls of the pyramids — places that no one would ever go to.”
Tilbrook adds his impression of Trixies: “Chris’s story is non-specific. All the things that might have happened there are left to drift through your imagination.
“To me, it has an air of the 1960s nightclubs run by the Kray twins. You’d have high life and low life mingling and loving the thrill, excitement and danger caused by different classes getting together.”
The album begins with intimate scene setter What More Can I Say, including the lines, “The cocktails have been shaken/The girls have all been taken/The dawn is slowly breaking.”
On acoustic-guitar led You Get The Feeling, we meet one of Difford’s characters, a cabaret singer — “Nobody knows her real name/They call her Lucy Bourbon.”
Things take a sinister turn on the Bowiesque The Place We Call Mars when blood is spilled while Good Riddance is noted for glorious harmonies.
Elsewhere, the brief, riff-heavy Why Don’t You rattles along while another upbeat track is dedicated to Trixies’ ‘house band’, The Jaguars.
So, what’s club owner Trixie like? I venture. “He’s kind of effeminate, very grand in his expectations of who comes to the club,” says Difford.
“It’s important to him that on one table you’ve got the Krays and, on another, you’ve got Judy Garland.
“He has a passion for the lead singer of The Jaguars and wants them to have a career. In my mind anyway, he manages to plumb them in to a friend of the Krays.”
We’ve heard much about the fictional Trixies but what of the relationship between Difford and Tilbrook? “The bond between us is the songs, which I cherish,” says Difford. “That’s my entire life right there.
“Whenever I hear us play a song we’ve written and the band dedicate themselves to it, I can be very moved.
That said, he adds: “The business around songwriting can be very distracting and annoying. You don’t have that as a teenager because you’re ambitious and you want to be off and running.
“But I’m 72 this year and I can look back down the tunnel at Trixies and think what a journey this has been regardless of any external noise.”
Tilbrook has this to say about his bandmate: “I love him to bits but we’re not friends.
“What we’ve achieved together is phenomenal and I’m happy to respect him.”
Next up for Squeeze is a short European tour starting at London’s Koko followed by a run of big UK dates in the autumn, including a night at the capital’s O2 Arena.
In tandem with Trixies, they’ve also been recording a studio album of new original songs, their first since 2017.
Thinking back to that sweet shop ad and his first meeting with Difford, Tilbrook says: “I know for a fact if we hadn’t met our lives would be so very different.”
