Up The Junction MOJO

15 SHARP TURNS

From Nick Lowe, Squeeze, Madness, Billy Bragg, Andy Partridge, Graham Parker and more

DISCUSSING THE GENIUS OF SQUEEZE IN THIS MONTH’S MOJO, Madness lead singer Suggs zeroed in on one of their greatest gifts. “Glenn and Chris wrote narrative songs about everyday life when most people were writing about the freeway in LA,” he told us, nailing the kitchen sink, London-accented realism of Tilbrook and Difford’s finely-wrought music.

Squeeze, though, were not the only band to have such an unflinching vision of British life in the late ’70s and early ’80s. This issue’s MOJO CD, Up The Junction , brings together a motley bunch of wordsmiths and scoundrels who came of age around the same time that the pub rock scene morphed into punk. Some carried with them a psychedelic hangover, a surrealist tweak to their tales of ordinary madness. Others – not least Suggs’ own band, Madness – mapped out a territory that was bracingly familiar to their fans: the mundane daily grind, illuminated by the sharpest wits; the pubs and clubs and liaisons therein that offered a possibility of escape, if only for a moment. This is Up The Junction – 15 slices of life for Friday nights, Saturday mornings and everything that comes after.

1 THE SOFT BOYS

I Wanna Destroy You

Formed in Cambridge in the mid-’70s, Robyn Hitchcock’s Soft Boys brought jangling psychedelic bona fides to the scene, exemplified by the anthemic punch of I Wanna Destroy You, from 1980’s second LP, Underwater Moonlight . And while many Soft Boys songs tended towards acid whimsy, here was a direct protest song: “A pox upon the media/And everything you read!”