Interview with Glenn Tilbrook in R2 (Rock'n' Reel) Magazine #44 [March 2014]

GLENN TILBROOK

This year’s football World Cup finals is sure to inspire a few musical offerings in support of the countries that will compete in Brazil, but don’t expect former Squeeze songwriter and frontman Glenn Tilbrook to add his pennyworth.

“I’ll let someone younger do that, something more vibe-ey,” he told R2, as we talked in his mobile home outside the venue for his show in Worcester recently.

As a long-time Charlton Athletic fan--and current season ticket holder--Tilbrook had seemed a good candidate to come up with the next ‘Three Lions’ or ‘World In Motion,’ having marked the South London club’s appearance in the First Division playoff final more than 15 years ago with the song ‘Down In The Valley,’ with Squeeze co-songwriter, Chris Difford. Yet that ditty remains a one-off excursion into the world of football anthems.

“It’s really weird, the intro to [‘Down In The Valley’] is one of the best bits of music that I’ve ever written, and then it turns into something that is not really great, to be honest. But it was done out of passion for the club and Chris, bless his heart, doesn’t really like football, but his brother does, so he wrote it for him and me. It was nice of him,” the 56-year-old added.

While ‘Down In The Valley’ might not rank among Squeeze’s finest moments, there are more than enough classic pop tunes in the band’s locker to allow Tilbrook the luxury of touring with one of Britain’s most cherished pop groups, whilst maintaining a successful solo career, and it seems that all is well on both fronts.

“For some reason, I’m selling more tickets now than I ever have done--Squeeze are in that position too--but this time round, we’ve sold more tickets than we used to sell when we were popular, so it’s great. I think the thing I like about this version of Squeeze is that we’re not being complacent about it, and I know that if you take your eye off the ball, you’re not only standing still, you’re sliding backwards, and that’s very easy for a band like Squeeze to do, so you have to be constantly aware of keeping on top of it, and that’s a task in itself,: he explained.

Formed in 1974, Squeeze penetrated the U.K. Top 30 half a dozen times in the late-1970s and early 1980s, with ‘Cool For Cats’ and ‘Up The Junction’ only kept off the top spot in 1979 by Art Garfunkel’s ‘Bright Eyes’ and Tubeway Army’s ‘Are Friends Electric,’ respectively

This first incarnation of the band played their final show at, of all places, Jamaica’s Sunsplash Festival in November 1982, a concert that Tilbrook recalled on stage in Worcester a couple of hours after our interview, when he introduced ‘Dennis,’ a song from his new album, Happy Ending, by relating an anecdote of how Dennis Wilson had sought the group out backstage at the Sunsplash to urge them to think again about splitting up.

Sadly, it was too late even for the intervention of The Beach Boys drummer yet, just three years later, Squeeze reformed and continued, with limited commercial success, for 14 years until the new millennium found the song writing pair going their separate ways once again, before reforming for their third and current line-up in 2007, with harmony seemingly restored. Tilbrook is relishing the variety that being part of his old band provides him.

“The first time we split up, I didn’t think we’d get back together again at all. I didn’t really want it, I was happy with my solo work being smaller and, on the financial side, I was doing fine. Squeeze comes along and it’s bigger than anything that I’ve done, the money is great, it’s really good, and that all enables me to do [my own stuff], and I like the freedom that that gives me, there’s no denying that, but I don’t want to let that become a deciding factor in whether it carries on, because it’s got to have some heart and soul to it, otherwise it’s not worth it,” he said.

For such a singles-orientated outfit, the most surprising aspect of this Squeeze line-up is the absence of any recorded material, though Tilbrook is keen to put that right in the next few months.

“We’ve been back together six years and we haven’t done a record yet, which is still my line in the sand. I know that records are very hard to define in terms of how important they are, or not, these days but the next Squeeze record is tied in with [Going To Sea In A Sieve,] Danny Baker’s autobiography, [which] is being made into a comedy drama series, six hour-long episodes, and we’re writing songs for that, two songs per episode so in effect, ITV has become our record label for Squeeze, and that means that we’re guaranteed to get a hearing,” he enthused, adding that his association with the radio presenter goes back a long way.

“I read the book and I know Danny, and I called him up and said, ‘Look, I’ve never thought of this before, but I know the world that you grew up in, ‘cause it’s the same one as me and Chris. We’re the same age, we’re in South-east London, the bomb sites, the deprivation was the world that we grew up in,’ and my thought was that we could turn it into a musical, make that work. But he said, ‘We’re already well on the way for doing a TV series but, you know what, I love the thought of it having songs in it.’

“We talked about it more and more and I think the idea is for the songs to have their own narrative and to tell their own story. It’s not going to be characters bursting into song--the songs can exist in their own space within the show--and I think that’s a really great way to look at it. It leaves us pretty free to do our own interpretation of that world,” he said.

Tilbrook’s talk of a possible musical prompted a question about a previous attempt to wrap a story around a bunch of Squeeze songs, a la Sunshine On Leith, Mamma Mia and We Will Rock You, yet the experience seems to have left Tilbrook a little disillusioned.

“We get one shot at that sort of thing, and then you’re done. Everybody’s has done ‘Juke Box Musicals’ and I’m not going to sound too high and mighty about it, but it doesn’t take much wit to come up with one of those for Squeeze, and not much effort either. It got so far as a read through, and it wasn’t good, so we pulled.

“If we’re going to do something like that, it’s got to be really good. Otherwise, I’d rather just leave the songs alone, or let someone smart do something with it. I don’t want it to be a ‘five-minute, back of a fag packet’ sort of script,” he said.

In these days of apparent overnight success, followed by an equally rapid rejection, Squeeze’s four-year road to the pop charts looks like an eternity. Tilbrook has no regrets about what the band’s slow progress in the beginning.

“Squeeze didn’t emerge fully formed; we didn’t emerge with a smash hit. We were allowed to develop our own thing. I think it would be very hard for a band like Squeeze to come through now. We did go through the pub circuit, playing our songs, covers, learning how to deal with an audience and how to get them on our side, and all that stuff-- it wasn’t exactly Hamburg for us, that sounded like a real hard school to go--[but] we knew all that before we had a record out.

“I think what record companies have done to a band like the Kings Of Leon is awful. I haven’t heard the latest record, so I can’t comment on that, but their success increased as the records got duller and duller. The first two albums are great, and they were a great band to see, but it somehow gets perverted by that whole process, he said.

Tilbrook’s new album, Happy Ending, is his first long-player for five years and, as a relative newcomer to providing words for his music, Tilbrook the lyricist sees the collection as a positive development in his song writing.

“I’m really pleased with how my writing’s going. It’s the first album I’ve done all the lyrics and I’m happy with where that’s heading,” he said, before acknowledging the inspiration of his former writing partner.

“The ghost of Difford looking over my shoulder [is] there all the time. He really is. I think I’ve said that he’s the person I think of when I write lyrics, and he’s the most critical person, the imaginary Chris. And he’s the biggest influence on me too.”

Happy Ending by Glenn Tilbrook is out now on Quixotic Records. Visit www.glenntilbrook.com for more details.