Squeeze: "Up the Junction"

14 June 1979

"Funnily enough, the story line of this cleverly detailed song is just the sort of domestic drama that romantics usually write about. But Squeeze take it on the chin and find irony and humour in the situation."

— Cliff White

Comparisons with The Beatles are a potential landmine. If just bringing them up isn't already a cliche then it's beset with simply living up to the comparison. I really liked Oasis in 1995 but even as a high school student I knew that labelling them "the next Beatles" was lazy, pointless, stupid and nothing but a turn off for anyone who was new to them. Claiming that the Gallaghers were as potent a force as Lennon and McCartney only made Oasis seem like less of a big deal and it was easy to see they didn't have talent nor the smarts to pull it off and they clearly didn't have their fingers on the pulse of current pop in anywhere close to the same way.

But the situation may have been a tad different back in 1979. The Fab Four had been passe for much of the seventies so comparing them with an emerging new wave band may have had more modest aims: look, a songwriting partnership just like John and Paul! As if almost cryptically, Cliff White says Squeeze are already on par with The Beatles while adding in parenthesis "I hope that isn't taken as an insult". Oh for the days when being likened to pop's standard bearers could be interpreted as insulting.

I've had my problems with Squeeze over the years. While I've admired some of their work, I keep finding myself focusing on what annoys me about them. In truth, it mostly comes down to "In Quintessence", the opening track from their fourth album East Side Story. Spinning a tale of a lad who reckons he knows it all yet knows absolutely nothing, who thinks he's God's gift to women yet is repulsive to the opposite sex, there's something unlikable about the way they brush this character off so heartlessly. There's cod psychology when they should have tried for a bit of empathy. I listen to now and side with the layabout they're ripping into. If you ask me the members of Squeeze are much bigger prats.

But their character sketch songs weren't always so nasty. Chris Difford wrote and Glenn Tilbrook sang "Up the Junction" in the first person but it feels too much like the novel, TV play and film that it may have been based on to be a personal account. The jolly tune doesn't mask a pitiful story since there's little self-pity involved ("I'd beg for some forgiveness but begging's not my business", also one of many great lines and a reminder that Difford could pen some spot on verse taking the mickey out of young people for kicks) but there's some real heartbreak nonetheless. Happily, matters don't get bogged down in cleverness: the awkward, pseudo-rhymes ("I got a job with Stanley, he said I'd come in handy", "she said she'd seen a doctor, and nothing now could stop her") give it a pleasant naturalness, with the urgency to get these feelings down outstripping form. How very clever of them to dumb things down a bit.

It's easy to get caught up in the clever verses and words that don't quite rhyme but "Up the Junction" is also a perfect example of just what a tight unit Squeeze were. The music, being very much in the mould of rocks pub and punk (I've always been convinced they fall into the pub rock scene but perhaps they were simply pub-adjacent), is low on flash but they get everything out of Tilbrook's bouncy composition. Fantastic band interplay with only Jools Holland, less the dapper and jovial host of everything musical telly and more the kind of can't be arsed keyboardist that bands used to employ, out to prove he's a star.

The public were delighted enough that they gifted Squeeze their second number two hit on the bounce following "Cool for Cats" back in March of the same year. This impressive run failed to translate into a sustained imperial period with bookend singles "Goodbye Girl" and "Slap and Tickle" only performing modestly and the Cool for Cats album stalling outside the Top 40. A number of new wave acts — Blondie, The Jam, Madness, Gary Numan, The Police — at around this time enjoyed hit singles that carried them into further success in the eighties but Squeeze weren't able to pull off a similar feat. Punters who were charmed and/or touched by their two big hits didn't necessarily go any further and I can't say I blame them. Sure, the Cool for Cats-Argybargy-East Side Story run of albums is first rate and their entire back catalog is well worth exploring but there are doses of smarminess to deal with as well as the aching feeling that they just know they're the cleverest guys in the room. 

But not here, not on "Up the Junction". Their smarts don't get in the way of tenderness, the loving portrait of domestic ups and downs not being so precious that it's free of being made fun of. A perfect balance of closeness and distance, of comedy and sorrow, it makes for a perfect three-minute pop song. Those Beatles comparisons were spot on, if only just this once.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Sandy McLelland & The Backline: "Can We Still Be Friends"

Something during the summer of '79 was sure making Cliff White feeling sentimental. A fortnight after being reduced to tears by "Easy Come, Easy Go" by The Sutherland Brothers, he's similarly moved by Sandy McLelland's cover of the Todd Rundgren hit from Hermit of Mink Hollow. While it's possible things have changed an awful lot in the forty years since, I always assumed that girls always wanted to remain friends at the end of a relationship and I suspect this song's writer thinks so too. The Runt gives it a quivering reading with just a hint that he's sending up the screwed up priorities of his newly ex. (It's inappropriate to be fixated on shifting into friendship mode as soon as things go south, right?) Or maybe the original just gives the listener whatever it wants to hear — though not so much with this remake. McLelland pleads and only manages to come across as one of those pathetic guys who is convinced that friendship is the perfect gateway back in. The song itself is quite faithful to the original just lacking any trace of irony. And there I was thinking that Americans were the earnest ones.

The Police: "Invisible Sun"

1 October 1981

"These are the goods! After the most hypnotic intro of the week, the song develops the kind of creamy propulsion that might give psychedelia a good name".

— Ian Birch

I've never especially liked The Police but I've never really been able to adequately explain why — though, truthfully, I've never really taken the time to think much about it until this past week. I've often thought of them along much the same lines as I do The Who, Eagles and Pulp, bands who may all have very talented singers, musicians and songwriters and who all possess a unique style and image that I might admire but who I just can't bring myself to like. Groups, in other words, who are less than the sum of their parts.

There's more to it than that though. First, there's the name. While Culture Club gave off a vibe of cool open-mindedness about race and sexuality and Wham! was silly but exciting and Duran Duran seemed naff (and still does) but vaguely hinted at the pretension of being named after a book or a film (I can't be bothered to look it up right now but it was probably from something like To Kill a Mockingbird or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, something I should've read or seen by now but is probably too late to bother with at this point), The Police smacked of authoritarianism and rigidity. What kind of young person back in 1981 looking around for music to get into was looking at a group calling themselves The Police and thinking "maybe they'll speak to me." No wonder they — along with Dire Straits, who happened to also be band with a boring name — was the eighties group of choice for baby boomers.

But who cares about their name if their songs hold up, right? Well, The Police don't do so well on that front either. It's not so much the cod reggae of their early work nor the bland MOR of the Synchronicity album that leaves them wanting, more that their songwriter and leader had a lot to say but seemed to fritter it away on songs dealing with cheap hookers and sex with teenage girls and stalking. A more personal, direct songwriter might have made something of value of these topics but when not you're best suited to connecting with the masses. Dammit, Sting, sing about something that matters for once!

"Invisible Sun" comes right in their — in the words of future Smash Hits scribe and pop star Neil Tennant — imperial phase and it was a brave move to put out something of actual consequence as a single. Putting his patented vocalist paranoia to good use, Sting weaves an unsettling tale of getting caught up in a system in which everyone is expendable and no one really matters ("I don't ever want to play the part, of a statistic on a government chart", "They would kill me for a cigarette, but I don't even wanna die just yet"). He drew inspiration from the situation in Ulster during The Troubles; drummer Stuart Copeland saw it being about Beirut. Indeed, it could just as easily be about Warsaw, Johannesburg, Gwangju, Kabul or any other parts of the world that had been living through hell at the time. Rising to their charismatic frontman's challenge, Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers deliver a simple, restrained performance, keeping the atmosphere as bleak as possible. The grainy, black-and-white video features shots of people meandering through desolate, bombed-out streets; they're probably stoic British souls trying their best to get through the Luftwaffe but they could be anyone at any time. We only see close-up shots of Sting's face in little more than silhouette form: don't look at me, he seems to be saying, take a look at what's going on around you.

A number of years later Sting began to get deeply involved in protecting the Brazilian Rainforests. His work drew both praise and criticism and he made the point that he wasn't exploiting the cause by making an album about it — as, indeed, plenty of other artists were happy to do in the post-Live Aid late-eighties. A shame since it may have inspired something as outstanding as this.

~~~~

Also of some cop

Squeeze: "Labelled with Love"

Between Nick Lowe's lifelong fetish for the genre, Elvis Costello's occasional dabblage — including his cover of "A Good Year for the Roses", also released this fortnight — and the present number from Difford, Tilbrook and co., it seems that an interest in country music was something that many within Britain's pub rock scene had in common. (Have the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris and The Dixie Chicks ever considered putting together Canvey Island Country: Nashville's Tribute to UK Pub Rock to return the favour? They really ought to) A good thing too. (But, first, a little context: twenty years ago the airwaves were polluted by Fastball and their catchy but irritating hit "The Way" and when I first gave Squeeze a listen a couple years later all I could think of was the similarly smug armchair psychology at play in their many character sketch songs. And we're back) "Labelled with Love" dials back considerably on the smarminess in order to sensitively tell the tale of a woman at the end of her life. Maybe country music was good for the Squeezed: it hooked them on to everything great about their music while stripping away all the nonsense.