Squeeze's
first
full-length album was released in 1978. For a lot of people who became
Squeeze fans a few albums down the road, U.K. Squeeze (or simply "Squeeze"
as it was called in Britain) can be a bit perplexing. It sports a
hot pink cover, and on the back the band members wear brief, clingy
black shorts, striking body builder poses. Glenn's shorts are stuffed
with what must have been at least one whole roll of toilet paper.
It is certainly different from Squeeze's later image, which has a
much softer edge and is playfully quirky rather than aggressive. The
album doesn't look like Squeeze as we know them now, and it doesn't
sound much like them either!
An
article in Music Connection (1988) explains some of the background
that influenced the album's production:
When
A&M London picked up Squeeze in 1977, after landing and subsequently
letting go of the Sex Pistols, the band was considered to be one
of the also-rans in the Great Punk Signing Spree, then at its peak.
The Pistols, Clash, Damned, Buzzcocks, Wire, Stranglers, and other
overtly subversive avant-gardists were far more compelling to English
A&R men than the relatively conventional Squeeze, whose songs contained
neither ideology nor venom. (A&M's other catch, the Police, were
also widely disdained.) To add some edge to Squeeze's debut album,
A&M hired noted hipster/conceptualist John Cale (the Velvet Underground)
to aggressively produce the London popsters. That he did, and the
resulting LP presented a somewhat modified version of the East London
quintet.
Modified
is right. The album cover had a decidedly punk look, and although
some of the music did have the frenetic pace of punk, the comparison
ends there. This didn't work out so well for Squeeze when they played
live; audiences got pissed off because they had been expecting a punk
band, whereas on the streets they were beaten up for "being punks".
Harry Kakoulli,
Glenn, Chris, Gilson (!), and Jools.
Cale
was very involved in constructing an image for Squeeze, even to the
extent that he wanted them to change their songs to better fit it.
In some cases this meant writing completely new material. Glenn commented,
"When most bands make their first album, they go in and do a lot of
stuff that's been going down well in their sets; well, that wasn't
the case with us. He told us to write new songs - which we did. He
was an inspirational guy to work with, but I felt that it was almost
like we were writing for what he wanted rather than what the band
itself was. When you're in a position to be making a first album,
it's (A) awe-inspiring to be making an album, and (B) difficult to
assert yourself against somebody who knows the ropes." I can imagine
it may have been particularly difficult in this case, considering
that Glenn and Chris were both fans of The Velvets!
The
idea of writing new songs actually makes some sense when you consider
Cale's own music career. His band, The Velvet Underground, was a part
of the whole pop culture/avant garde scene of the 70's that was spearheaded
by Andy Warhol. It encompassed art, music, film, and the famous dance
club, Studio 54. For that crowd the lines between performance, image,
lifestyle, and art (in Cale's case music) were purposely blurred.
This approach worked well for The Velvet Underground, but not for
Squeeze, who were much more focused on the music itself.
An early squeeze
concert. Glenn in the foreground, Chris, and Jools barely visible
between them in back.
John
Cale also wanted a harder edge for Squeeze, both in their sound and
their look. Chris Difford recalls, "I remember, he came up and
said, 'Lyrically, you're quite soft; have you ever thought about writin'
about musclemen?' I said, 'That's never occurred to me, actually.'
And he said, 'Well, go away and do it - I wanna see songs like that
on the album.' So my perception of what the band was at that point
was completely different from the way he saw it, obviously. He had
us doing some awfully strange things."
Glenn
said about that period, "A lot of people thought we were trying to
be a punk band, which I never thought that we were - although I thought
we were influenced by it to a certain extent. But we already had a
lot of musicality, which alienated us from those bands." Miles Copeland,
their manager at the time said, "These
guys were the right age but they were singing love songs. At the time
you had to play three chords, badly, and sing about politics."
The
songs Glenn writes have always been heavily influenced by 60's pop
music, but he loved a lot of different kinds of music, and Chris'
and his influences were quite varied. Copeland
took them to a punk concert and told them, "People won't understand
you coming in from all sorts of influences. You've got to narrow down
what you're doing, give people a chance to get to know it and then
broaden it." Glenn said it was actually very good advice, and
that getting in on the punk movement allowed them to "slot into
New Wave" when it came along on the heels of punk.
Young Squeeze: Chris, Gilson,
Glenn, Harry, and Jools
In spite of all the conflicts and misunderstandings caused by the
not-terribly-successful pairing of Squeeze and John Cale, that first
album did provide a starting block for the band. Squeeze released
two singles from the album, "Take Me I'm Yours" and "Bang
Bang" - the only two songs they wrote and recorded without Cale's
input. "Take Me I'm Yours" is still performed at nearly
every gig.
