When it comes to storytelling, very few pop groups have done it as well as Squeeze. But even the group’s songwriting mainstays Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook would be hard pushed to devise a plot twist like the one that has resulted in Trixies, their first album in eight years. Because, if truth be told, the band who have given us sky-high classics such as ‘Up The Junction’, ‘Tempted’, ‘Cool For Cats’, ‘Another Nail In My Heart’ and ‘Labelled With Love’ weren’t planning another album. And that was ok. They’d scaled the highs of pop stardom; they’d disbanded and reconvened; fallen out and made up. Along the way, they got to bear witness to the effect their songbook has had on generations of fans – their compositions covered by artists as disparate as Erykah Badu, Tricky, Patti Austin, The Shins, Joe Cocker, The Lathums and Questlove & Robert Glasper. Their songs even pop up from time to time on Desert Island Discs, most recently when comedian Bob Mortimer revealed that he had already requested that the title track of their 1993 album Some Fantastic Place be played at his funeral.
So, given that 2017’s The Knowledge had garnered some of the best reviews of their career, this felt like a good time to step back from the studio on a high and let their existing work do the heavy lifting for a while. After all, if Billy Joel can regularly pack out Madison Square Gardens over 30 years since his last album, then why shouldn’t this eight-headed iteration of Squeeze – whose live performances over the past decade have been harvesting superlatives across both sides of the Atlantic – build on their reputation as an essential live draw?
