Posted on 03/25/2010 1:06:16 PM PDT by a fool in paradise
Pop group Squeeze have said hits like Cool for Cats and Up the Junction would not have happened if the band were starting out in today's music industry.
Singer Glenn Tilbrook... "If we'd been placed under the same commercial criteria, I think we'd have been gone after our first album."
Their second album, which came out in 1979, contained their biggest hits.
He was speaking as the group were honoured with a plaque at the site of one of their first gigs in south-east London.
Tilbrook and Chris Difford returned to the Greenwich Borough Hall - where they played in 1975 - for the unveiling...
Asked whether they would like to be starting out today, Tilbrook told BBC 6 Music: "I don't think there's the same freedom and I feel really sorry for people who are up and coming now."
Squeeze did not experience record label interference until their "sixth or seventh" album, he added.
"Which is pretty amazing, to just be left alone to make records and grow and develop as a band."
...The pair performed acoustic versions of Up the Junction and Take Me I'm Yours when they returned to Greenwich Borough Hall...
The plaque... says Squeeze "first gigged here". But Tilbrook admitted: "If truth be told, this was our third gig here.
"But the previous two had taken place in places that have been knocked down since, so this is the first place we could really commemorate."
Difford recalled they had some indirect help from David Bowie for the original concert.
"I've got a cassette of it actually. We had a much larger sound system than we anticipated because the guy who was looking after us was working for a company run by David Bowie...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
I didn’t pick up on this band until college and even then didn’t buy their albums but I’d hear them at parties.
Prior to that, I knew the name from a tour they did in the early 80s that got plugged on MTV, no joke Squeeze/The Hooters.
I never thought Squeeze was “great”, but they were always fun to listen to at parties, etc.
I never thought Squeeze was “great”, but they were always fun to listen to at parties, etc.
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Good solid pop music, back when that word ‘pop’ did not mean music, produced by men in back rooms, fronted by talentless hacks.
They are still on my iPod.
Cool for Cats is great Squeeze album. I saw them live at the Whiskey in the late 70s, with The Selecter as the opening act. Good show!
Funny the music you get a craving for every now and then.... Squeeze is one of those bands for me.
This isn't always a bad thing. The Beatles were a pop band. So was Elvis after he left Sun Records. So was Motown. Anything Lieber and Stoller ever wrote was a song-plugger's idea of what "rock and roll" really was (and that goes back to when they originally wrote Hound Dog).
Fabian, Donny Osmond, et al are bad examples of "pop". So are New Kids on the Block, N'Sync, and a whole lot of top-40 girly disco acts from the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s.
My sister-in-law had a few of their CDs that I put on my iPod.
Even the Monkees songs “catch” and were written by some good names.
There is a lot of stripped down, band authored power pop from the 1970s/1980s that gets too easily dismissed in the “history” of music.
Then again we might have been spared Men without Hats, Culture Club, and Flock of Seagulls.
Very cool. The Selecter have reformed. I saw them with The English Beat back in 2006 or 2007, I can’t remember which now.
We'd probably have to do the Hokey Pokey instead.
One step beyond....
Is that what it's all about? :)
Depends on your level of Madness.
No offense to any of these guys, but music is not that hard. You could take away the Beatles, the Stones, The Eagles, you name it, and the world would have done just fine.
Holistically, music and art is VERY important. Specific examples are not.
>>There is a lot of stripped down, band authored power pop from the 1970s/1980s that gets too easily dismissed in the “history” of music.<<
I agree. There is also too much “eclectic” stuff from the same period that gets way too much respect for being better than the crap that it was/is.
I have that album, yes, on vinyl. There is some great stuff there - and some real garbage.
Music critics (and the Grammy suits) try to ignore the past when they raved about acts like Midnight Oil, Timbuk 3, Scruffy the Cat, and “Edie Brakell” and the New Bohemians (she was never the ‘lead singer’, it was an industry stunt to put her name in front of the band and then she became famous and the rest of the guys were dumped).
All of this coincides with the first rumblings of grunge in the mid-late 80s.
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