Squeeze: Take Me I'm Yours

-OK.

-Yeah.

One, two...

Sorry, sorry.

You know, the count?

Yeah, the count thing, yeah, how does that go?

One, two...

# I never thought it would happen

# With me and the girl from Clapham

# Out on the windy Common

# That night I ain't forgotten... #

Bob Dylan said a song is anything that can walk by itself, you know,

and Squeeze have written some songs that walk by themselves.

# So here in the bar

# The piano man's found Another nail for my heart

# And here in the bar

# The piano man's found Another nail for my heart... #

There's probably a lot of people

that don't even mention the name "Squeeze,"

they don't necessarily know who you're talking about.

But they do know the songs.

# Pulling mussels from a shell

# Pulling mussels from a shell... #

Squeeze was definitely considered sort of a...

solid, seminal band, who, you know, who could really write.

They've written lots of songs that I just -

I've loved so much I just wanted to hear again or play again,

and have enjoyed playing, loved playing, and love listening to.

# There's no other

# Tempted by the fruit of another

# Tempted but the truth is discovered... #

I don't think there's many groups that had,

that could write at that level.

The songs were about London, the songs were even about,

if you wanted to be particular,

the songs were actually about South London.

# In and out of Wandsworth, With the numbers on their names

# It's funny how their missus Always looks the bleeding same

# And meanwhile at the station, There's a couple of likely lads

# Who swear like how's your father And they're very cool for cats

# They're cool for cats (Cool for cats)... #

I was painting what I was seeing lyrically

and I think Glenn was doing the same with the music.

We had a sound that was all our own, no-one else sounded like us.

# It's really been some welcome You never seem to change

# A grape to tempt your leisure Romantic gestures strange

# My eagle flies tomorrow It's a game I treasure dear

# To seek the helpless future My love at last I'm here

# Take me I'm yours

# Because dreams are made of this

# For ever there'll be A heaven in your kiss... #

I was brought up in South East London, I had an elder,

elder brother who was seven years old than me.

I remember him buying the Beatles first EP,

and that making a big impression on me,

although I was a bit of a Cliff and the Shadows fan,

being you know, five, six.

I remember pestering my mum to get some sort of instrument

and eventually, an aunt gave us a piano,

so that was the first instrument I had,

and I used to love playing that.

And then a year later I got a guitar.

The first song that I ever wrote, I dreamt.

I can play the song now and it's... I was 11!

# Now you've gone You've taken my dreams away

# I'm left alone And I just don't know what to do

# Lonely with you

# When you left me Life was hard

# When you left me Alone by myself to die... #

For a chorus, you know, it's not bad.

My first introduction to music was in my parents' house

in Greenwich, and my brothers were older than me,

ten and 12 years older than me,

and so they would battle for the stereogram.

So that one minute you'd be listening to the Rolling Stones

and Bo Diddley, and the next, it would be the Beatles and the Searchers.

I used to write poetry on my school book,

and an English teacher picked up on them,

and instead of telling me off, like all the other teachers did,

he actually said it was quite an inspirational thing for me

to be doing at that age, and I guess somewhere in the subconscious,

something said to me these poems could become music at some stage.

When I was at school, and I was probably 14,

I read Pete Townsend's interview in the Melody Maker

about going around the world and meeting women

and making money and taking drugs and all that sort of thing,

I thought, "Hold on a minute, this is the job for me."

I did think that was an appealing side to what I wanted to do,

but that was very much secondary to the thrust

of wanting to play music, you know.

I really wanted to be in a gang, you know,

I wanted to be in a band, like The Who and The Small Faces,

and I couldn't do that on my own, so I put an advert

in a sweetshop window, just to see if I could form a band really.

I'd been together with Maxine, my first really proper girlfriend,

for about a year and a bit, and we saw this advert

in Blackheath village that Chris had put up,

saying he wanted a guitarist for a band,

whose influences were the Kinks, Lou Reed and Glenn Miller.

I pretended that I had a record deal and that I had tours booked

and all sorts of things.

I just laced it up as much as I could just to see who would

pick up the phone, you know.

And Glenn was the only person that picked up the phone.

I don't think I would have answered it by myself.

Maxine said, "Go on, give it a go, you know,

"you've got nothing to lose."

Between when we met, and three years after,

that was the most we ever hung out, and pretty soon after we met

we wrote one song and without ever discussing it,

it was the way that, it was the template for the way that

we carried on working, which was Chris gave me lyrics,

and I beavered away with tunes, and I was absolutely happy with that.

We met in April of '73,

and by July, August, together we'd written fifty songs.

And we talked about Top of the Pops a lot

and how we'd really love to be on Top of the Pops.

That seemed to be our goal.

When we first decided to form a band,

and we didn't have a name for it at that point,

Jools was the first to be recruited because Jools and Glenn

were friends at school.

And he played boogie woogie piano, which I'd never heard of.

So it was unique, you know,

he had a fantastic style, and very charismatic kind of guy.

The elements that we all had,

we felt though, as though we were, we were pretty clever.

We were quite... I wouldn't say we were big headed,

but we had that thing, which a lot of people in bands have,

they play in a pub and stuff and they start

when they're sort of 16, and they assume they're gonna be big.

And with us it worked out, and it was true.

And then our first bass player was Harri.

We had a good following.

all the Deptford and Greenwich and Blackheath

and Lewisham following, and they loved us.

And then we had various drummers.

Eventually Gilson joined the band after an ad in the Melody Maker.

I think I was the only one that actually owned their own drum kit.

And I borrowed my mum's car, Mini,

and I took the seats out to get my kit in there,

and drove down and auditioned with them,

and got the job, and that was it.

So Gilson came and joined, and that changed everything.

That then formed us into the thing that we needed to be.

# Backtrack, back on the track

# No-one understands me-he

# Backtrack, back on the track Back to the way we used to love

# Back on the track, Back on the track

# Backtrack, backtrack, Backtrack... #

It was the Jubilee, 1977, around that period.

Punk was just coming along, the old guard were being pushed out,

if you like, all that early King Crimson stuff that I listened

to at school, suddenly was put at the back of my record collection.

And the Clash were now at the front.

# Backtrack, back on the track No-one understands me-he

# Backtrack, back on the track... #

There were so many groups that had just come up

in the first flush of punk, and people that didn't know

how to play really, hardly at all.

And they really were, I think, a cut above, just their solidity,

and the fact that they were writing their own stuff

and it was very much its own thing.

We really were the thing that was supposed to be punk,

but we weren't quite aware of it. We didn't have Mohicans,

but our musical spirit was

in that it was a bit of like we couldn't care less.

We made our own records on Deptford Fun City.

By that time we had a manager, Miles Copeland, who was managing us,

had connections in the music industry,

and so he invited A&M Records down, and they'd just signed

the Sex Pistols, and Derek Green from A&M Records signed us.

John Cale produced the first album, who was with the Velvet Underground,

and Miles Copeland, the manager, was friendly with, knew John Cale

and he was the one who put Squeeze and John Cale together.

John Cale sort of threw everything out,

and made us write new songs for him.

He just looked me straight in the face,

he said, "You've gotta stop writing love songs."

He said, "What do you know about love?"

He said, "I want you to write something about something

"that you've never been attached to."

And I said, "What?"

And he said, "Well, imagine being whipped by women,

"and being sexually harassed and being tied up

"and tied to a chair, of women licking you all over,"

and, I've gone, "Well, I've hardly been born,

"what are you talking about?" I had all that to come, you know.

Sex Master, I mean, hah! yeah we had a go!

# Cos it's here in my mind

# How do you stretch out And who makes the climb?

# Ponces by evening and Roundheads by day

# Electric erections Please teach me again

# Frustrated client Seeks a man of the world

# Must be frank And know his hand relief well

# Sex master keep you Back after school

# Sex tells you with A very strict rule... #

And I just thought, "This isn't gonna get us on Top Of The Pops at all."

We delivered the album to A&M Records,

and they said we love it but there's no single on there.

And John had gone back to America by then.

And then we did the single, Take Me I'm Yours,

and that was very much run in the way

Glenn wanted to run it musically,

and he wanted to use a sequencer and altogether

a more sophisticated approach somewhat,

than the rest of the album.

So we got a load of synths in, and played about

in the studio for a day,

and Take Me I'm Yours is what came out.

# I've come across the desert To greet you with a smile

# My camel looks so tired It's hardly worth my while

To tell you of my travels Across the golden east... #

The whole Squeeze formula was the singing where Glenn

and Chris sang at the same time.

Glenn would sing, and Chris would sing one octave lower,

and that was the Squeeze sound.

# Take me I'm yours Because dreams are made of this

# For ever there'll be A heaven in your kiss... #

The first time I heard the record being played,

it was probably on John Peel or on a programme like that,

and then going on Top Of The Pops for the first time.

Great, we'd made it, you know, we got picked up in Rolls-Royce cars

that the record company had sent, you know.

The only time a Rolls-Royce came down my estate was,

you know, somebody had died.

I walked down to the local pub and when I walked in there was

a lunchtime stripper, and she was taking her clothes off

to Take Me I'm Yours, and I thought, "We've cracked it."

Now we're getting somewhere.

When we recorded the first album,

Miles and Squeeze had had it in their back pocket

that we would go and tour America, so we hired a van,

we put all the gear in the back,

and we literally drove all the way around America

for six, seven weeks, staying at little motels,

playing horrible little clubs.

We went for three weeks, and stayed two months,

and really lived in each other's pocket,

and if we were tight before, we were really tight when we got back.

We just played and played and played.

So we took that experience into the studio.

# And Davey Crockett rides around And says it's cool for cats

It's cool for cats (Cool for cats)... #

When we got to record the Cool For Cats album,

we had a lot of the songs already written, and by that time

we were a little bit more focused on what we wanted as a band, I suppose.

The sound was becoming more apparent to itself.

With Jools on the one hand, with his eccentric keyboard,

the magnificent drumming of Gilson,

which added so much to the songs,

and Glenn was really beginning to find his feet, I think.

I took sort of control of things at that point.

And we were a band of very strong personalities,

and I don't think I made myself very popular.

He took on more control of the melodies, and the way

that records should be, the production, I guess, you know.

I was a little bit more interested

in just going to the pub and having a drink.

# She changes the mood a little I've been posing down the pub

# I see in my reflection I'm looking slightly rough... #

And we were always in the pubs.

That was our world from which we sort of came up

from above the parapets, you know.

Most of what I was writing on the Cool For Cats album,

and albums that followed, were from the imagination,

but taken from characters that probably that I'd met.

He, as a poet, and an artist,

was responding to his world around him, and he was writing

that world down and putting it into words and making it into songs.

We were absolutely reflecting what we'd seen,

and bouncing it back.

I think one of the outstanding features of Squeeze

was that they reflected their environment,

that the songs were about their own geography.

# I never thought it would happen With me and the girl from Clapham

# Out on a windy common That night I ain't forgotten... #

Up the Junction was pretty much inspired by Play For Today,

that I used to watch when I was a kid.

Those kind of kitchen sink dramas

that were on Wednesday nights in black and white.

They would be half an hour long

and they would tell a story from beginning to end,

and I would watch those and marvel at the way

that they were put together and there were some fantastic writers

that wrote those in those days.

So, the idea of storytelling being something that began,

had a middle and an ending,

was always in my life from a very early age.

Chris had written story songs before

but this one, to me, really stood out.

This is a copy of the handwritten lyric of Up The Junction,

and it's nice to see it again,

and it brings back a lot of memories of the way I used to write.

I used to write in, you know, with a pen,

and on this piece of paper, it resembles every piece of paper.

Every lyric that I wrote was like this in those days.

I never thought it would happen when me and a girl from Clapham

out on the windy common, that night I ain't forgotten.

When she dealt out the rations with some or other passions,

I said "You are a lady." "Perhaps, she said, "I maybe."

We were already in the studio recording, and at lunchtime

the band went out to get their cheese and ham rolls,

and I stayed behind and looked at this lyric,

and it was one of those lovely occasions where

I didn't really have to work at anything.

And it must be a real struggle sometimes for Glenn

to get my lyrics, and think, "How am I gonna put music to this?"

What emotion does it seek?

Some of the best stuff I've done has been to work

instinctively and to not think through the process.

It's not conscious thought,

it's not this has to be this or that or,

it's just about finding something that fits

and flows, and that's the way that it works best for me.

Music, like, you know, in a way is, it's kind of jolly,

but you really feel a sense of heartbreak in it.

And I think that's a very difficult thing to pull off.

# I worked all through the winter The weather brass and bitter

# I put away a tenner Each week to make her better... #

I'm, in key change, it worked out brilliantly, it was total accident.

# And when the time was ready We had to sell the telly

# Late evenings by the fire With little kicks inside her

# This morning at 4:50 I took her rather nifty

# Down to an incubator Where 30 minutes later

# She gave birth to a daughter Within a year a walker

# She looked just like her mother If there could be another... #

When I was at school, we used to read all the books that

they made the movies of in the '60s.

We didn't get to read the great literature, we read Sillitoe

and Waterhouse, and all those things.

I was part of that experiment, and Chris had that,

but he had it in a three-minute song.

I knew it was a great song because people really enjoyed

the lyric of it, and when we played it live, people enjoyed it.

And that's the greatest test, isn't it?

I mean, if you write a great song, people in the audience smile

and they love it, and they take the story home with them.

That's really the job that you have as a songwriter,

for people to own the stories themselves.

# 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. #

And I remember we were doing very, very well in Britain,

we were number two in the charts,

and we were travelling around and playing drinking dens

in North America, and it was so weird.

Up the Junction was selling like 15,000 copies a day,

which is a lot of records, and the industry was on fire in those days.

People were selling lots of records.

The industry's completely changed now.

If I sold, you know,

15,000 records a day now, I'd be Adele.

That's a fine thought.

Between Cool For Cats and Argybargy, I had met a girl who I married,

and she lived in New York,

and when one of the gang gets married, the dynamic does change.

And although everybody was very supportive, I sensed the change.

As great as our writing was,

Chris and I were already heading in different directions, you know.

I didn't feel particularly close to anyone in the band,

but we were a great band, so I didn't really worry about all that,

and as long as we got on with the work and then we'd ping off

and have our social lives, increasingly more separately.

Glenn was like a satellite that would come round the planet,

and every now and again, I would kind of tap into whatever

it was he was beaming down, and then he would go off again,

and likewise I would do the same.

# The case was pulled From under the bed

# She made a call to A sympathetic friend

# And made arrangements

# The door was closed There was a note... #

When I wrote the lyric for Another Nail In My Heart,

I imagined it being like a bar room song, I guess.

I didn't expect it to have a guitar solo after the first chorus.

# So here in the bar The piano man's found

# Another nail for my heart... #

I think that I thought with Another Nail, it's time for me

not to be a Blues guitarist, or Jimi Hendrix,

but it's time to work out a tune, to make the tune

an absolutely vital part of the song.

Great guitar player. He's a tremendously underrated

guitar player, because although he features them

as part of an arrangement.

He doesn't go in, I mean, I've seen him

take longer solos, but he goes in for the melodic solo,

that's incorporated in the composition.

# That stupid old bug That kills only love

# I want to be good Is that not enough?

# So play me the song That makes it so tough

# Another nail for my heart... #

Glenn Tilbrook is one of the greatest singers in pop music

that ever has walked the earth. He's unbelievable.

I'm sure it's annoying to all his peers, he still sounds amazing now.

He hasn't lost any of that tone, it's incredible.

# I've had a bad time Now love is resigned

# I've been such a fool I've loved and goodbyed

# And here in the bar The piano man's found

# Another nail for my heart

# And here in the bar The piano man's found... #

He always sounded like he was smiling when he was singing.

He just always sounded quite happy about whatever was going on,

and it just made you feel good.

A Squeeze song would come on the radio and it just made me smile.

And part of it was just, just his voice,

just something about the sound of his voice.

The thing that I think that Glenn is so good at

in singing Chris's words, is that he can take idioms

that are not found in ordinary pop lyrics

and make them really singable.

# They do it down on Camber Sands They do it at Waikiki

# Lazing about the beach all day, At night the crickets creepy... #

Pulling Mussels from the Shell was written

as a sort of very stoned dirge, I think.

You know, it was, it was a good tune

but it was about three quarters slower than it ended up being.

When I wrote Pulling Mussels, it was all white notes.

# They do it down on Camber Sands They do it at Waikiki

# Lazing about the beach all day, At night the crickets creepy... #

The great thing about writing with Glenn in those days was,

you know, he would disappear for a few weeks,

and you wouldn't know what was going on,

and then suddenly a cassette would arrive

with all these demos on of these great songs,

and it was like Father Christmas coming,

it was just brilliant, you know, to hear your lyrics put to music.

And I would say, "Yeah, that's really brilliant,"

and you can hear, actually, from the brilliance of this demo,

how much it actually sounds like Squeeze.

I mean, we didn't really fall very far from the tree with this demo,

I think, apart from Jools's fantastic piano playing,

and Gilson's wonderful drumming, John Bentley's amazing bass playing.

Apart from that, it sounds exactly the same as Squeeze.

# A He-Man in a sudden shower Shelters from the rain

# You wish you had a motor boat To pose around the harbour bar... #

But I still have a fondness for these demos.

They're almost like... songs in short trousers.

# But behind the Chalet My holiday's complete

# And I feel like William Tell Maid Marian on her tiptoed feet

# Pulling mussels from a shell... #

And the band injected that sort of vigour into it,

that sort of verve, but the song was there, the song was there already.

One of the things about being dictatorial is that

unless you have immense charm, you're gonna create enemies,

and I certainly think I did that.

But everyone, I think, was happy with the band, except for Jools.

His piano playing was great on Pulling Mussels,

and all that stuff, it was fantastic and could only have been him.

But a lot of the other stuff, the keyboard overdub,

some of the hooky stuff, the melody lines in Another Nail,

and that, I was doing.

So you know, that must have been

either frustrating or annoying, sometimes.

When I joined Squeeze, you know,

he was as much a part of it as Glenn and Chris really, to me,

you know, his style, not only style of his playing,

but his image, and his style, and his energy,

was a major factor towards the whole thing of Squeeze.

# I take Sally-Anne, You take Sue

# We'll get a wiggle on what to do

# Doing the mess around... #

The songs we were doing, we mostly did Chris and Glenn's songs,

and of course they were great, they were fantastic songs.

But I've always ultimately been driven by the music that

I play, that's what, rather than, you know, the idea of just

being in a successful group is great, of course you like that,

but the real thrust of it has to be the music that you're playing.

He's such a gifted guy who was playing what he saw as, you know...

..what was pop music,

some of which he liked and some of which he didn't.

Jools started to think about making his own albums,

and quite rightly so, because he had

a canon of his own work that he needed to express.

He was never gonna do that under the Squeeze banner,

because it was a vehicle put together by Glenn and I for our songs.

At that point, I thought the group was written in stone.

We got John Bentley in,

and John really took us to another level, too.

Everything was perfect as far as I was concerned,

so when Jools left I was really upset.

And I remember going to Gambardella's cafe

in Blackheath Village with Jools, and he said,

"you know, I'm gonna have to leave the band.

"I've been offered this TV show," and I cried.

You know, it was, I remember crying,

and thinking, "This is the end of the band."

It never was what it was again,

you know, there was something there, a dynamic that just shifted.

The saddest thing for me, and I loved the Squeeze music,

was the people. Cos I loved the people,

and we used to have such great laughs together, you know.

But of course, the more success there is,

generally the less of a laugh there is.

# You won't get dressed You walk about

# Now, is that, is that

# A teasing glance has pushed me out

# Now is that, is that... #

Squeeze had gone through this big turmoil.

Jools had left the band

and they were ready to record a new album, they had no keyboard player,

and as they were going into the studio, almost the following week,

to start to record East Side Story, they kind of offered me the job.

Now, I don't know, I didn't know whether I was joining the band,

if I was doing the album, or what I was doing,

but I was really just interested.

Paul brought such a lot to the table.

His sense of musicality is absolutely total,

and he can empathise with other people's ideas.

I think the next record that we made, East Side Story,

was our first sort of mature album,

and I think we were pushing forward still, at that point.

The original plan was, I don't know realistic this was,

whether it was ever real, but there was a sort of notion that

East Side Story was gonna be a double album,

and there would be a side produced by Nick Lowe, a side produced by me,

a side produced by Dave Edmunds,

and a side produced by Paul McCartney.

And I don't really know how far that conversation went,

whether it was just something that was said

over a couple of drinks, or whether it was ever more than a notion.

Elvis is a huge music enthusiast, you know,

which an awful lot of musicians are not.

But the second part of what it brought is the approval, you know.

"I'm Elvis Costello, and I'm cool and edgy,"

and therefore some cool and edgy people will say,

"OK, I'll give Squeeze a try." That's how those things work.

I think when you're working with somebody externally too,

that you both admire, it really raises the game.

Elvis Costello gave us the courage, I think, to step up and say,

"OK, we're not just this really great pop band,

"but we can do this, as well."

# She unscrews the top of A new whiskey bottle

# And shuffles about in Her candlelit hovel

# Like some kind of witch With blue fingers in mittens

# She smells like the cat And the neighbours she sickens

# The black and white TV Has long seen a picture

# The cross on the wall is A permanent fixture

# The postman delivers The final reminders

# She sells off her silver And poodles in china... #

Labelled With Love, all right,

was inspired by looking at a photograph

in a photographic book, Cartier Bresson,

and there was this woman sitting at a bar and, you know,

I just suddenly got his image of this person sitting in a pub

and, um, you know, how in the Second World War

she might have gone off with an American pilot.

# During the wartime an American pilot

# Made every air-raid a time of excitement

# So she moved to his prairie and married the Texan

# She learnt from a distance how love was a lesson... #

When I saw Labelled With Love,

and, indeed, really with any of the songs that we wrote,

there was never a direction from Chris as far as to what it should be.

It was a totally open book for me,

which was a lovely position to be in.

It would just be what it conjured up in me,

and to me it just seemed like it was a country song.

# Drinks to remember I, me and myself

# Winds up the clock and knocks dust from the shelf

# Home is a love that I miss very much

# So the past has been bottled and labelled with love

# The past has been bottled and labelled with love

# The past has been bottled

# And labelled with love. #

I just thought that Labelled With Love was a good story song

and it didn't really matter what rhythm it was in.

I think we were all of us getting a little worn out

with that dumdumdum new wave rhythm.

It...it hemmed in the story telling and they had taken their time

over a couple of their earlier...

Like, Up The Junction isn't really very fast.

It's got a much more like the Kinks sort of feeling of space.

And we both, you know, all of us sort of jammed a lot of words in.

Sometimes that can be exciting,

sometimes it gets in the way of the communication.

All I could do was think about, "My God,

"this lyric's going to have to be sharp to get it past him."

It's like having an inspirational teacher when you're at school, isn't it?

# I bought a toothbrush, some toothpaste, a flannel for my face

# Pajamas, a hairbrush, new shoes and a case

# I said to my reflection "Let's get out of this place"

# Passed the church and the steeple, the laundry on the hill

# The billboards and the buildings

# Memories of it still keep calling

# And calling... #

We were recording a version of Tempted,

which Glenn was singing, and Elvis said, "Why doesn't Paul sing this?

"It seems natural for Paul to sing it."

They had this resource in the band of Paul Carrack

and that seemed, of all the songs that they had,

the one that he could really transform.

I was delighted cos I just thought it was such a great song.

I mean, I suppose privately Glenn might have thought

it was a bit of a liberty for me to suggest

he didn't sing a song that he had written but...

Of course, I was immensely disappointed

and then as soon as he sang it, it was...just had to be.

It just was so right.

It was so great, it was so natural.

I would never, ever, ever have sung it like that.

# I bought a toothbrush, some toothpaste, a flannel for my face

# Pajamas, a hairbrush, new shoes and a case... #

Tempted was literally written on the back of a fag box.

I was going from Blackheath to Heathrow Airport

and I just wrote down what I saw.

# Passed the church and the steeple, the laundry on the hill

# Billboards and the buildings

# Memories of it still keep calling

# And calling

# But forget it all I know I will

# Tempted by the fruit of another... #

Tempted, as a lyric, really, is, again,

written for somebody else, in my imagination.

It's not particularly about me, you know, I was very loyal.

I wasn't tempted by any fruits of any...any other person.

You know, it's just a lyric about an emotion that people go through.

# Tempted by the fruit of another... #

Paul had real difficulty getting around the lyrics

of the second verse in his voice, in his vocal style,

which was why the vocal arrangement idea came in of this sort of crazy,

pseudo-Temptations arrangement.

# The people keep on grabbing

# Ain't wishing I was well

# I said, "It's no occasion

# "It's no story I can tell..." #

It makes me laugh every time I hear it and I can't believe we got away with it, really.

It has a charm, cos it's obviously done with the affection

for those original records.

# Your body gets much closer

# I fumble for the clock

East Side Story is a fantastic piece of work

and I'm proud of it all more than any other album in that respect,

but that's down to the amount of focus that Elvis Costello gave it

and the amount of work that Glenn and I pushed...put into it.

It was also nice for me to work with someone who I really respected

and trusted and, you know, so I could just be part of the band.

I really kept them to the strength of the material

because that's all I really knew how to do.

I didn't really know anything about sound.

I was kind of a musical advocate.

I wasn't even a musical director, cos they didn't need one.

# She rips her skirt and tears her dress

# Climbing over his garden fence

# Mud on her mourning as tears still fall

# She's in no mood for his love at all

# She feels messed around... #

Around the East Side Story album, Glenn and I had a...

a relationship that was beginning to suffer from fatigue, really,

cos we was constantly touring and there was no respite from it.

Played Madison Square Garden,

we done everything that we set out to do,

Top Of The Pops, television, everything.

We were getting bigger and bigger as a band

but it seemed like all the drive had...had gone out of it.

But there was no-one to tell us to take a holiday

or something like that, you know, it was just the momentum as always -

right, we need an album, we need a tour, we need, you know,

that, that, that, that, that and we did all that and at the end of it

you're just very tired.

Paul Carrack couldn't stay in the band

cos he wanted to do a solo album, so then we were wounded yet again.

So we limped off to find another keyboard player

and make another album, which was Sweets From A Stranger.

# The hurt and the anger

# And the joy of the pain

# Joy of the pain... #

Then Sweets From A Stranger was a period where everything was sort of

drugs and doing vocals at nine in the morning,

you know, not a good idea.

# Now she's gone

# Now she's gone

# And I'm out with a friend

# Out with a friend

# With lips full of passion

# And coffee in bed... #

My drinking started to wound me quite a bit.

But also I'd discovered other drugs and, um, it became...

I became, um...

dependent.

And I was drinking, I was going downhill and I think other people

were in...taking to life's pleasures a bit too much in other areas.

# Oh, now she's gone... #

And I remember being on a train going across Europe with Glenn

at the end of that album just saying, "Enough, can we take a break now?"

And we both said, "Let's...let's call it a day."

# And coffee in bed. #

The first stage of Squeeze from '78 to '82

produced all the hits and we would be talking about Squeeze now

in these terms, if the band had split up for ever

in 1982 and had never come back.

# Crashing waves upon the rocks

# Is seen by some By you, it's not... #

We went off to record a solo album called Difford and Tilbrook

and I don't think we talked once

during the whole recording of the album.

It was like a busman's holiday. There we were back together,

same communication problems.

Glenn got married and that, too, fractured our relationship.

It was a very tense time.

When we went on tour my wife came with me and that made ME happier.

Chris wasn't someone to go out and socialise anyway with me

and hadn't been for a long time, so, in a sense,

not a lot had changed for me. I just had someone to enjoy it with.

# But you won't drown Love is your town

# When love is found for all to want... #

And at the end of that two-year period,

we then had an opportunity to get Squeeze back together again.

And it was almost like somebody had drawn the curtains.

Suddenly, light came back in on our songs and our career.

Wherever our heads were at, we could still play and...

and it sounded great, you know, it was really...it was really

sparky and fiery in a way that it hadn't been towards the end.

So it was a good move.

Jools came back into the band, Gilson had sobered up his life

and came back into the band.

We did a couple of shows, we got a new bass player

and before we knew where we were, we were making another album.

# I'm guilty, yes, guilty

# But there's no place like home

# There's no place like home... #

It was. It was lovely to be back and to be all

rowing in the same direction, as well.

I think we all... We all did quite a bit of growing up

in the sort of lay-off period.

By the time we got back together, we'd all learnt a lot more

about what we wanted to do and what wanted out of it.

I think when you go into something,

it's better to be clear about what everybody's expecting

out of it then nobody's, sort of,

cross or disappointed about it afterwards.

Jools was back in the band.

He was flying in and out of the band doing The Tube

and, um, we got our second lease of life so we were really lucky.

The whole thing started to, um, lift again.

# I'm guilty, I'm guilty

# So let me be stoned... #

My memory of them at that time was like, "Yeah,

"they're making it happen."

As a fan, it just felt like,

you know, they just picked up where they left off

and they're...and they're moving forward.

Of course, the musical landscape had changed enormously by the time

they came back, and I don't think Squeeze ever recovered their ground

commercially and you had to be much more aware of visuals.

It wasn't always... It wasn't any more just about the songs.

Obviously that, you know, via MTV and the, you know,

the rise of people like Madonna and, um, and Michael Jackson, you know.

These people who were just inconceivable without the visuals.

# The hourglass has no more grains of sand

# My watch has stopped no more turning hands... #

We always had fun in our videos.

The one we did for Hourglass was great and, again,

that suited us cos it was fun.

When Squeeze started being pushed into that mould,

I certainly wasn't very comfortable with it but, you know,

we made a fist of it and did our best in all those circumstances

but that was never something... never something that I enjoyed.

# I spent too much money I looked far too glad

# Now I have so little of what I once had

The recording of the video for Footprints was in Salt Lake City,

up in the mountains, on the snow covered mountains,

which represented the cocaine of my life at the time, I suppose.

Glenn and I had had the most awful falling out that day,

prior to the shoot.

We were walking from the minibus to take the first shot

and Glenn pulled me to one side and we had the most awful set-to,

and the rest of the day was completely ruined.

It was just, like, driven by drugs.

It was everything you imagined other bands did, you know.

# The party's over It's going home time... #

Wow. Er, I rather like that video.

Seeing it, it's weird isn't it? In spite of everything I've said,

I thought the band actually felt quite together at that point.

It felt good to me.

# Is it love?

# Is it love? #

We'd grown somehow, not with the record sales to match it

but selling tickets, you know, we were doing amazing business.

The trouble was, we were touring so much

and I had other things that I wanted to do,

I had more music that I wanted to do,

and also I was doing a film somewhere else,

playing and making my own records, and one thing had to go.

His public and private personality were blossoming and they were

growing and he was starting to outgrow his place in Squeeze.

I thought, "Well, I'm going to have to...

"I'm going to have to bow out again", so I did.

He had his eye on other things and I felt like he'd used us.

And that anger, plus some other issues I had with him

stayed with me for quite a while.

Glenn had this great ambition for us

to live together in Los Angeles in a house in the Canyon and write songs.

What I didn't realise was that Chris

wasn't in a state really... really to do that.

I was there one night and I said, "No, I want on be on my own."

So I rented a place about 20 miles away

because I just wanted to be on my own so I could take drugs and drink.

I had to reach out for help and the only way of doing that for me

in those days was to write it down in a lyric.

That was how I was communicating, not just to the world outside,

but to people around me, close by.

This lyric, The Truth, when I got it from Chris it was...

He was obviously not a happy chappie.

Musically, we went all round the houses before we got it simple.

So this is The Truth.

# I lied to you, I've cheated too

# So what friend can I be?

# But still you stick through thick and thin

# Hoping that you'll change me

# I towed the line then fell behind

# Our love began to wane

# The pressure grew and then I knew

# That things were not the same

# The truth

# It's the toughest thing to explain

# The truth

# Playing tricks with me again

# When the truth has to be told

# My blood runs hot and cold

# The truth is not my middle name... #

The Truth says everything about what was going on in those days for me

and the way that Glenn put the lyrics to the music

is just beautiful,

it's exactly what it should be, it's a fantastically powerful song.

It's about being deceitful, it's about what...what the truth is

and it's something I could identify with.

I figured something that Chris felt

and how hard it is to tell the truth sometimes.

# When the truth has to be told

# My blood runs hot and cold

# The truth is not my middle name... #

I think he was getting ready to fess up and, you know,

throw the towel in with drinking and that.

I just couldn't take it anymore

and I just put my hands in the air and got...

A good friend of mine lifted me up and took me into rehab.

When he came out, it was a very emotional time

and it was great because there was something of Chris there

that I recognised.

I felt really happy for him and we were communicating

and in spite of all the stuff we'd been through

there was enough there for us to latch hold of

and actually begin to enjoy again.

At that time, there was just, like, lots of ideas flying around.

It's literally like I'd cleaned out my head

and gave it some space for some new words, you know.

# She gave to me her tenderness

# Her friendship and her love

# I see her face from time to time

# There in the sky above... #

This song was about Maxine who had died from leukaemia

a couple of years before,

who'd been the person that I went out with,

my first love, and the woman who'd said,

"Answer the ad, go. Go and meet this guy." You know.

I started the lyric, I didn't lift the pen off the page,

and when it got to the end I finished it,

I faxed it to Glenn and that was it, that is exactly the lyric.

It was really, really moving.

Um...

And I sat down and the tune just tumbled out.

It was... It was really great.

It was er... It was er... It was fantastic.

It was one of those times where you don't even think about

what you're doing.

# Her smile could lift me from the pain

# I often found within

# She said some things I won't forget

# She made a few bells ring

# So simple her humility

# Her beauty found in grace

# Today she lives another life

# In some fantastic place... #

That just, in Chris's way, expresses something really sweetly.

Very cunningly, he put a guitar solo in Some Fantastic Place,

which was actually one of the first guitar solos

he ever wrote for one of our songs, but we never used.

So he lifted it from a song that we'd written in 1973.

It just worked really well.

It was just one of those happy accident coincidences,

and it worked.

And it's my favourite song.

# I can see you... #

For me, Some Fantastic Place is the perfect Squeeze album.

I think it's scandalous how few records it sold

and how the singles just disappeared,

and I think it must have really been getting to the band by this stage.

They must have been realising it's over for us,

in a way, in terms of being... having commercial success.

The record company were pushing all the time.

They had... They wanted us to have hits, they A&R'd,

they would come down to the studio and say, "No, that's not right."

"Do you think we could get it mixed by so and so?"

You know, that whole genre of making music had started to take effect...

HE COUGHS ..which didn't suit Squeeze at all.

Rather than being left to our own devices, as we were largely,

we started working with a succession of people,

and whether I was involved or not is almost irrelevant

because the brief is it's got to be big and, you know,

contemporary-sounding.

# I love you today

# I don't care what the world has to say

# Heaven knows that I'm in love

# I love you today

# I don't care what the world has to say

# Heaven knows I'm... #

The record company threw a lot of money at Heaven Knows.

They spent a lot of money on the video.

It became used in a movie

and I think Glenn really didn't like the fact that

the band were being led really by a record company.

It was like a circus, you know,

we were jumping through hoops to try and please the people who thought

they knew how we should sound, and you end up pleasing no-one.

# I love you, I love you today

# I don't care what the world has to say

# Heaven knows that... #

Glenn and I, our communication had got worse again.

I think he wanted one thing, I wanted another,

but I wasn't sure what the other thing was

and we had yet another American tour, tour number 59,

or whatever it was, and I just thought, "I've got to stop."

And I felt really disappointed when Chris told me.

It was all I'd ever known.

So it was... It was not nice, but...

..it really was for the best.

As Glenn puts it,

I left the building and left him to turn the lights out.

# Heaven knows you've got to open up somehow

# I can take it on the chin... #

I sort of thought to myself, well, you know, I've got to figure out

what I'm going to do now and I thought,

"Well, let's just try and make a record,

"write with some other people, write by yourself."

# You showed interest in me

# When I was outside looking in

# How is it you got to be? #

Various things that have made me feel really insecure were gone.

This huge cloud had lifted.

Glenn and I didn't speak to each other for nine years.

We went in different directions

and I watched his career from over a hedge a bit,

watched him recording solo albums

and I went to see him play a couple of times incognito,

just to see what was going on,

just to make sure what I was missing, or what I wasn't missing.

And I went off and went into management,

but the songwriter side of me was the thing that I needed to nurture.

# I love my sweet brother

# His voice makes me cry

# We sing for forgiveness

# As time passes us by

# My brother was gifted

# He had a great voice

# Not like the other young Battersea Boys... #

My brother died about five years ago

and he was just the biggest Squeeze fan, loved the band,

and when he died it kind of opened some communication to Glenn.

He was very genuine and I said it would be great to get together,

you know, and we sort of talked about it and then

we talked very loosely about getting back on the road and then

we had a lunch where we agreed terms...

and it kind of started there.

So on a limited edition basis, with all the exit doors open,

we agreed to do some dates.

# Tempted by the fruit of another

# Tempted but the truth is discovered

# Tempted by the fruit of another

# Tempted but the truth is discovered

# What's been going on? #

I think the most important thing was to honour our songs,

our songwriting, and to cover our own songs in a way that would

make us feel proud and make our audience sit up and listen.

The truth of it is, if the song is alive to you,

the ideas or emotions in the song are alive to you,

then even if people's initial reason for wanting to hear it

is because it's a memory to them,

it creates a new memory at the moment of performance,

and that's my theory and I'm sure that's what they feel when they return

to those songs, cos they would be rewarding cos they're strong.

# Take me I'm yours

# Because dreams are made of this

# For ever there'll be a heaven in your kiss... #

The 50p that I took out of my mum's purse

to put that advert in the sweetshop window in Blackheath

to form a band in 1973,

I mean, it's the most amazing 50p I've ever spent in my entire life.

So I'm extraordinarily grateful that Glenn was the only person

to pick up the phone.

I would never have come up with those stories, those lyrics.

I might have written great tunes

but I don't know if anyone would ever have heard them,

because I think they would have been accompanied by

some very dull observations.

Thank you!

You've got to keep it fresh, you know,

and I think that's hard to do, that's hard for any band to do

and I think we've got to work hard at that all the time.

And if we can't do that, we've gotta man up

and say it's time to pull the plug again.

I don't think any band can just balance on their history,

you know, you have to put out new stuff and although it's not,

you know, there are very few bands of our age that manage to do it

successfully, I think, but that's just what you live with, I think.

You know, you've gotta keep your own um spirit alive.

Yeah. I agree with that.

Goodnight.

THEY LAUGH

This has been Noel Coward and Arthur Mullard

and we're bidding you good night.

HE LAUGHS

# Cool for cats

# Oooooh ooooh

# Oooooh ooooh

# Oooooh ooooh... #

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