MOJO WORKING
FACT SHEET
Title: Trixie’s Due: TBC Production: Owen Biddle Songs: TBC The Buzz: “We’ve finished one record and the other one is sort of three-quarters done. We’d cut Trixie’s maybe for a week, and then do the new album, and then go back. The beauty of that is we can carry on writing, and come up with lots of other ideas. I don’t think we’ve ever had this kind of lead up to making an album ever.” Chris Difford
“THE FIRST TWO years we were together, we managed to get three gigs,” says Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook, looking back to the early days of the group he and Chris Difford formed as teenagers in Deptford in 1973. “So we weren’t exactly busy doing anything other than writing. It’s extraordinary how productive we were then.” Belated fruits of those days will be released in freshly recorded form later this year on new, hour-long album Trixie’s. Where have these songs been all this time? Zooming from home in Sussex, Difford holds up a venerable Philips Standard Quality C60 cassette. It contains demos which were recorded, intriguingly, on a 4-track owned by The Only Ones’ Peter Perrett 50-odd years ago. Difford discovered the songs in his loft, but it was only when an old friend found a better quality copy that they properly listened in late ’23. “We were surprised at how advanced it was,” says Difford. “I felt very emotional, listening to these young guys and the songs that they’d written together.”
Work began at Tilbrook’s Raindirk desk-equipped studio in Charlton in February ’24. ”When you walk into it, you’re walking into Glenn’s mind,” says Difford. “It’s full of his memorabilia, like a Squeeze museum.” Ex-Roots man and Squeeze bassist Owen Biddle, who Difford and Tilbrook are quick to praise, produced: working days started late morning and finished before six.
“We don’t want it to be a pastiche of a ’70s record,” says Tilbrook, “but we have used stuff that was available at that time. An RMI piano, which Jools [Holland, original Squeeze keyboardist] had, features a reasonable amount – it has a charming sound, very unique.”
As for a concept, Difford says, “I was very deep into reading Damon Runyon books at the time – seedy New York life in the ’40s and ’50s, nightclubs and gangsters. So the songs are built around what I imagined that would have been like musically.”
“If you put the songs next to Squeeze’s first album, which I love, this is better, without a shadow of a doubt,” says Tilbrook. “Squeeze actively dumbed down for the first record, which was no bad thing.”
