Squeeze: Trixies album review – Teenage kicks
Difford and Tilbrook revisit the past with a collection of songs written when they were teenagers, proving their knack for literate wit and post-punk entertainments
They arrived in 1978 with a literate spin on post-punk noise, fuelled by a soap-opera sense of drama, knockabout wit and an ear for top pop tunes. But who knew the Squeeze story did not start with their debut single ‘Take Me I’m Yours’? Four years earlier, in an act of fearless teenage ambition, Chris Difford (mainly words) and Glenn Tilbrook (mainly music) had set about writing a rock opera. In a dozen or so songs, they charted a seedy society of gamblers, drunks and good-time girls. Those songs were set in a Runyonesque nightclub called Trixies which, in real life, would have turned them away for being underage and, like an underworld secret, stayed hidden, never to be heard.
Now, to mark the band’s 50th anniversary, Difford and Tilbrook have returned to their formative efforts and discovered they were not bad at all. And all these years later, they have the musical expertise to do them justice. Trixies is much better than you would expect. True, you will find the odd dodgy line (‘The tables have been cleared/The strangers have been feared’) and you’ll learn little about gangland London, but no song passes without an instantly catchy chorus in a collection that is as lively as it is varied. Whether it’s the lounge-jazz balladry of ‘You Get The Feeling’, the Bowie-esque chord shifts of ‘The Place We Call Mars’ or the T Rex boogie of ‘The Jaguars’, Trixies is not just for members only.
Trixies is out now on BMG.