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bands live long enough to salute their 50th anniversary, and at various points in Squeeze’s life, it looked like they’d be among those that wouldn’t make that milestone. After all, since forming in 1974 they’ve split twice, in 1982 and 1999, with its core members – Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook – barely speaking to each other in the years in between.
But there’s something about these two titans of English pop that keeps them in each other’s orbit. Rolling Stone wrote in 1981 that “the British New Wave has finally found its own John Lennon and Paul McCartney” and that comparison has hung around the songwriting team of Difford and Tilbrook ever since. But whereas the Lennon/McCartney partnership burned out in 1970, never to be reignited, Chris and Glenn are still writing songs together in 2024, half a century after a 16-year-old Tilbrook answered an advert in a tobacconist’s window for a band into “The Kinks, Lou Reed and Glenn Miller”.
“It was an unusual set of influences,” Tilbrook tells us as we catch up with him pre-Christmas, nearly 50 years on from his first meeting with soon-to-be bandmate Chris Difford. “But then I remember loving Glenn Miller’s song I’ve Got A Girl In Kalamazoo.” He starts to sing: “‘Don’t wanna boast/ But I know she’s the toast/ Of Kalamazoo-zoo-zoozoo-zoo…!’ It was the quirkiness [of the advert] that appealed to me.”
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