[Over at my blog, I've been taking votes for the Greatest R&R Songwriters of all time. Because I am nomininating, among others, Difford and Tilbrook, href="http://www.uksqueeze.freeserve.co.uk/dandt.html">these guys, so I guess I can drag out an old post I wrote about their band (as part of my effort to write about as many of the songwriters mentioned as I can). It originally appeared on Blogcritics here.]
Surely you remember Squeeze? A band that is never given enough credit for their talents, Squeeze tends to get thrown into the slush pile of funny looking 80's bands that had a hit or two.
Unlike some other bands of that era that got famous because of their style or gimmick or just because they hit the right place at the righ time, Squeeze was oozing with talent.
Difford, Tilbrook, Holland and all those other guys who didn't matter as much as those three combined to make some of the greatest songs to come out of an era when great songs were not nearly as numerous as their overstyled, synth pop counterparts. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I loved the whole synth pop-new wave thing. I was just able to recognize that while most of the music of that genre was filled with fun beats that you could bop your head in time to after a few shots of tequila in a grungy-on-purpose club, Squeeze was different.
While a lot of people joined the Squeez fan-wagon when East Side Story (1981) came out (and some, not until Squeeze Singles in 1982), I had a head start on the band due to my employment at a radio station in 1980. Ok, I wasn't an employee so much as a phone volunteer, one of those people who answered the 24-7 request line and handled the contests and listened to a lot of heavy breathing and requests for sexual favors that were unheard of in my little, naive corner of the world.
Article comments
1 - Dawn
I hadn't really thought about how their lyrics until you pointed out the above examples - although "Tempted" has great lyrics, I always just appreciated their quirky new-wave synth sound.
I think they deserve a place on your list without a doubt (I also like XTC and kind of always thought they were underappreciated in the same way.)
2 - Eric Olsen
thanks Michele! But leave my muscles IN the shell, please
3 - JR
I thought this post was going to be about Journey. Now those guys wrote a lot of great tunes.
4 - michele
The referenced Journey song is the only Journey song I like.
5 - Dawn
JR - Something scarier than your politics - your musical taste!
6 - SFC Ski
Squeeze is one of the best pop bands of all times, one of the few to achieve the title of Beatlesque and deserve it.(XTC is another one.) It's a shame that some of the best UK bands were on the verge of breaking up by the time they the charts in the US. I have a copy of a live show broadcast on WBCN in 1985 that shows just how diverse and talented these guys were,
7 - Dave Nalle
I've seen Squeeze in concert almost a dozen times. They have the best lyrics of any band I've heard, and the single best written set of lyrics ever in Up the Junction, which also includes what I consider the best line ever written in a pop song - "the devil came and took me from street to bar to bookie". It's the perfect combination of meaning and meter.
Squeeze's songs - even more so than XTC's , though thye have gotten more recognition for this - are literally poetry set to music. This is mostly Difford and Tillbrook's work, of course. The band as a whole has been just as good without Jools Holland the last couple of times I saw them.
But let me make a side comment on Jools. He's the best Jazz piano player of all time, bar none. He's like a pasty, white reincarnation of Jelly Roll Morton with an even more inflated ego, but less child molestation. If you haven't seen his TV show, keep an eye out for re-runs on the BBC channel. It's the finest music show ever broadcast and occasionally you get to see Jools play and be amazed.
Dave
8 - Mark Saleski
the other thing greate about Squeeze is the vocals. instead of singing in harmony they're singing on octave apart. pretty unusual, and very distinctive.
9 - alienboy
Squeeze were another of those uniquely English bands that didn't really become as big as they might have.
For anyone that cares, there is also a brief review of Madness here
10 - alienboy
Ah, Squeeze. Another of the English sound groups that should have been way bigger than they were.
The 80s were, in some ways, the last great rock era (which is not to say that there are no great bands arounds these days, that would be ludicrous) and there were many great groups around then.
Another great English band were Madness, and a brief review can be found here
11 - SFC Ski
In the '80's it seemed like we were spoiled for choice, especially because it was the last decade of truly independent and music oriented (as opposed to SoundScan oriented) radio. Now I feel I have to sift through a lot of junk to find a good band, and the only way I usually do is more often via Internet posts or Internet downloads, rarely via radio, though WMNF in Tampa does a pretty good job of exposing listeners to new stuff.
12 - alienboy
Another great and uniquely English band.
Where have they all gone?
Coincidentally, I just reviewed Madness here