State of the Art 1982

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.