Ah, Squeeze. In ’82, they still might have been called UK Squeeze. There was another band in the US called Squeeze, (looks it up: Tight Squeeze) and they altered their name to avoid lawyer trouble and so forth. The suits got braver after a while and they dropped the “UK” eventually.
They were calling this sort of thing New Wave at the time. It’s the unholy love child of the Beatles and The Ramones. Like a lot of New Wave bands, Squeeze eventually didn’t feel like they had to thrash quite so hard to get over, and adopted a more sophisticated style of songwriting and performing. Lotsa New Wave bands morphed seamlessly into to the New Romantic movement. Squeeze’s contemporaries The Police and Elvis Costello kinda took the same approach, but ended up in Tin Pan Alley somewhere.
I used to play this song on the bass and sing the lead vocal. It’s got more chord changes than I generally wanna deal with while I’m pretending I know what I’m doing. It’s got more words than a Harold Robbins paperback, too, and until just now watching this video with the subtitles, I had no idea that one of the lines was “A panda for sweet little niece.” God only knows what I sang in there instead. No one ever called me out on it, though. I can mumble with the best of them.
A guy once ran up to the stage when we finished playing Pulling Mussels from The Shell, and shook my hand like a pump handle. He said, “That wasn’t any good, but I can’t believe you had the nerve to try it.”
Etch that on my tombstone.
5 Responses
I thought it was Pulling Mussels For Michelle
I am enjoying how many wonderful musicians and bands you have introduced me to in the last few months that I never even knew existed.
On an unrelated but not an important note the local Dollar Tree dollar store sells frozen bags of shelled mussels 4 oz each for $1.25 they are from Chile.
Saw Glen Tilbrook do a solo live show in SF about twenty years ago. Just him and an acoustic guitar pulling off those great Squeeze songs. His sense of time was “set your watch to it” level.
And his singing? Someone once said that Tilbrook sings like he’s got a smile on his face the whole time.
Tilbrook showed up on Daryl Hall’s “Live From Daryl’s House” a couple years back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F1P2PzKkcY
Hi El Polacko- Thanks for reading and commenting.
We’re in the same club. I saw Difford and Tilbrook perform as a duo in a tent show about the same time frame. Tilbrook is the greatest busker I’ve ever seen, bar none.
https://www.sippicancottage.com/2011/05/another-nail-for-my-heart.html
I like.
I was thinking about how I’d describe it to someone non-musical, but the best I could come up with was “Crowded House after a small amount of good cocaine.” Yes? No?
Hi Warrant242- I always thought the two bands were similar, although Squeeze had way more hits, IIRC. And according to what I’ve read about Tilbrook, drugs were definitely involved.