Kitchen Sink Squeeze

Squeeze from 1979, from the Cool for Cats album.

Cool for cats, indeed. That’s only their second album, and they look it. They’re as fresh-faced as high-schoolers in that video. I’m always impressed when musicians are that young and that sophisticated about the songs they write. Mostly the lyrics. Lotsa musicians are capable of playing their instruments like demons and singing like angels before they’re old enough to drink. But writing lyrics, or much of anything literary, is not generally for the young, or the young of heart.

There’s a reason why most rock music is singsong doggerel. Tonight I’m Really Gonna Rock You Tonight shouted over three chords is about right when you’re brimming with hormones and luxuriant of hair. By the time the requisite amount of world-weariness is stored up to say anything really interesting, never mind profound, you’d feel silly still being a rock musician. If you were capable of feeling silly, I mean. Rock music’s HR department generally starts off every interview with, “Are you capable of feeling silly? No? Great, this is the profession for you.”

“Up the junction” is a UK expression. It means something like up the creek without a paddle. It’s interesting that the title of the song, which is generally beaten half to death in the choruses of the average ditty, doesn’t even appear until the last line of the lyrics. And there is no chorus. Notable, that. It just sort of climbs a little staircase of chords to increase the tension in the song as it bumps along.

I’m not put in mind of other musicians when I listen to this. It’s Tony Richardson. He directed well-known Kitchen Sink dramas like Look Back in Anger:

Difford and Tilbrook, Squeeze’s songwriting duo, are too winsome to “eat the scenery” like Richard Burton always does, or take a hard line like John Osborne, who wrote the play Look Back in Anger is based on. But there’s definitely a taste of Kitchen Sink honey in Up the Junction. The examination of working class life, hinting at the inevitability of everything, good or bad in a Clapham life, followed by a general disaffection with the life that’s doled out, which leads unerringly to a crackup, is pure Kitchen Sink stuff.

John Osborne’s endless stream of rat-a-tat pissing and moaning could never compete with this couplet:

The devil came and took me
From bar to street to bookie

And Squeeze finishes up with the kind of denouement any writer dreams of writing, and usually misses by a mile:

Alone here in the kitchen
I feel there’s something missing
I’d beg for some forgiveness
But begging’s not my business
And she won’t write a letter
Although I always tell her
And so it’s my assumption
I’m really up the junction

Toe-tapping flash fiction, that.