Way back in 1974, a couple of wannabe songwriters named Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook wrote an album’s worth of songs about the goings-on at a fictional London club called Trixies. They were immediately proud of the songs, but various circumstances—including the fact that Difford and Tilbrook were too young to get real gigs in clubs—led them to shelve the Trixies project. And on that shelf the songs remained after Difford and Tilbrook formed and fronted a band called Squeeze.
Squeeze, as anyone who’s read this far knows, has served up a half-century’s worth of Tilbrook’s insanely catchy melodies and Difford’s clever lyrics full of sly wordplay and tales of heartbreak. Earlier this year, Squeeze finally released Trixies. It stands up admirably against the rest of Squeeze’s catalog—one critic called it Squeeze’s masterpiece—and its songs will form the centerpiece of the concert when the band returns to Clearwater this month.
British popsters Haircut 100, best known for 1982’s “Love Plus One,” and new wave showman Adam Ant open.
Squeeze w/Haircut 100/Adam Ant
Time Wed., Aug. 19, 6 p.m. 2026
Location The BayCare Sound, 255 Drew St, Clearwater
“It’s been a strange kind of magic going back to the songs we wrote in 1974,” Tilbrook told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay in a Zoom interview from London. “We’ve always known that they were good songs. But it’s an idea whose time never came when we were first together.”
When they finally got their chance to make records, Trixies didn’t feel like a natural feature on the musical landscape.
“By the time we got a record deal in 1977, you wouldn’t want to go anywhere near something like Trixies,’” Tilbrook said. “It’s so against-the-grain and weird compared to punk and new wave, which we felt energized by, and part of. So it got, not forgotten about, but buried. And there’s never been a good time to do it. Until now.”
Squeeze’s recording career got off to an unspectacular start. The band’s first album (called Squeeze everywhere but America, where it was titled UK Squeeze) was a promising but frustrating record produced by John Cale of Velvet Underground.
You’d be hard-pressed to find two bands more different than Velvet Underground and Squeeze, and Cale wasn’t a natural fit for Squeeze’s nascent new wave compositions.
“He’s a genius, really, and I don’t use that word lightly,” Tilbrook said. “He has such great musical knowledge. And the best parts of the record, he really inspired us. There’s a song called ‘The Call,’ that sequence at the end there, it’s quite dark but really effective.”
Most bands, at least in that era, formed their debut albums from the songs that worked best for them when they played live. Cale didn’t let Squeeze do that.
“I don’t mean this in a mean way, but I don’t think he liked a lot of the songs Chris and I were writing at the time,” Tilbrook said. “So he threw them all out, and we wrote songs to please him. So it feels like sort of nobody’s child to me, that first album.”
The second Squeeze album, Cool for Cats, is an undisputed classic of the era. Tilbrook said that one, which is packed with such infectious Squeeze songs as “Goodbye Girl,” “Up the Junction” and “It’s Not Cricket,” is closer to what the band would have offered for its debut album if they hadn’t worked with Cale.
Just coincidentally, Cale isn’t the only connection between Squeeze and the VU. Difford and Tilbrook chose the name of the band as sort of a mocking tribute to the album Squeeze, the final Velvet Underground studio record, which is generally considered awful. All the original members had left VU, so Squeeze is essentially a solo album by Doug Yule, who had replaced Cale in the band. Yule himself has expressed dissatisfaction with the record.
Not long ago, Tilbrook happened to hear the album, for the first time in decades.
“I heard it, about six, seven years ago, for the first time since I was a teenager,” he said. “I actually asked the person what it was, and then said, ‘Oh my god, I love this. This is great.’ It’s not the same as Velvet Underground, but it is. It’s poppier, and that appeals to me.”
Anyway, fans probably won’t hear much from that first Squeeze album at the Clearwater concert. “Take Me I’m Yours” is probably the only song from the album that will be familiar to anyone other than very hardcore Squeeze followers. (It was used in a commercial for Dockers pants in the 1990s.) But the show’s not going to be 100 percent Trixie’s either. Just as they did a couple of years ago at the same venue, in a long and invigorating show with Boy George opening, Squeeze will showcase a lot of its classics.
The set list wasn’t determined at the time of CL’s interview with Tilbrook, but it will likely include such fan favorites as “Cool for Cats,” the MTV hit “Hourglass,” and “Tempted,” which is probably the band’s most widely known song.
Still, it’s likely to be a Trixies-heavy set.
“I think we’re really going to have to calibrate that.” Tilbrook said. “We’ve got to judge how much people are going to be interested in that. We did some dates in Europe, in mainland Europe, and we did the whole record and it went down really well. So I’m tempted to start doing that and see how well it goes.”
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This article appears in August 06 – 12, 2026.
