Audio Autopsy, 1984: The Difford & Tilbrook Duo LP, Labelled With Squeeze
You're Squeeze. You break up after 5 albums. If you're the two writing all the material anyway, just record the album you'd make with "Squeeze," and slap your names on it! Cool for these cats!
Their debut was my first introduction to Squeeze, in 1978, working for a large record store in Houston, TX. With, apparently, like-monikered bands in the U.S. and Australia (particularly a “Tight Squeeze” band in America), the British new wave band (that’s also how they were first marketed) was dubbed “U.K. Squeeze” in the United States. The “U.K.” appendage was mercifully dropped for all subsequent releases.
That similar “U.K.”-added fate (and rationale) also befell Andrew Gold and Graham Gouldman (wanna be wowed by someone’s rock music resume? Read the 77-year-old Gouldman’s) and their great and vastly overlooked Wax U.K./RCA Records effort in 1986.
The first several thousand stateside retail copies of the self-titled debut Squeeze album were issued on “Limited Edition See-Thru Red Vinyl,” as the affixed sticker proudly bellowed. This one, of course (or one just like it), was the one I took home….the white label A&M Records promo.
Sometime in 1983, Squeeze fell apart (they got back together in short order), and the two key songwriters, Glenn Tilbrook (who, generally, wrote the music) and lyricist, Chris Difford, released a self-titled album on A&M in 1984.
In fact, Difford defined the musical relationship between the two succinctly in May 2022 to GuitarWorld: “I’m primarily the lyricist of the partnership, and spend my time writing lyrics. The process is pretty much the same as it’s always been. I send Glenn the lyrics and he writes the music. It’s like Bernie Taupin and Elton John, but without all the money. [Laughs]”
I could give you a brief history of Squeeze, but Glenn beat me to it, and did it all in about the time of a standard album track:
The Difford & Tilbrook album was released in July 1984 on A&M Records (U.S. and UK). According to Jason Damas of Allmusic.com, “Frustrated with [Squeeze’s] lack of commercial success, and encouraged by the success of a similar stateside duo, Hall & Oates, Difford & Tilbrook set out to craft an ‘80s contemporary blue-eyed soul record, emulating all the requisite synth washes and drum machines from early-’80s Hall & Oates albums like H2O and Private Eyes.”
Be that as it all may (or not) be, Damas continues: “The album tanked on the charts precisely because it still sounded like Squeeze smothered by Tony Visconti’s flat, lifeless production.”
To that curious end, Visconti indeed produced the album (as he did many a Bowie album, The Moody Blues, and others), but A&M rejected his mix, and brought in Eric Thorngren to do a new mix. Thorngren has mixed or mastered albums by Cyndi Lauper, Bob Marley, PIL, and Talking Heads.
Damas considers Difford and Tilbrook compositions “Love’s Crashing Waves” and “Hope Fell Down,” “two of the duo’s best singles [included in Squeeze concert setlists since 2010], and song-wise is a more consistent album than the schizophrenic, Sweets from a Stranger” [from 1982].
“Love’s Crashing Waves” reached #57 on the UK singles chart in 1984.
Damas also refers to the D&T album as “the lost Squeeze album, and the missing puzzle piece between Sweets and 1985’s Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti. “Despite being far from the duo’s best work (and it’s certainly the rarest), serious fans will want to seek this out,” Damas concludes. So we did:
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