SQUEEZE | LIVE REVIEW
St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Tue 10 Oct
Timeless but never in step with fashion, perhaps one of the reasons Squeeze continue to pack out big old venues like St David’s Hall is the fact their music and style has never been framed by the eyeliner and padded shoulders or safety pins and bondage trousers of their contemporaries. Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford started their musical journey way back in 1974, and through periods of solo stuff and hiatus are back with the first proper Squeeze album since 2015’s Cradle To The Grave. And the acid test, as with all bands that include bonafide chart smashes in their arsenal, is whether the newer stuff is worth the bother.
Opener Please Be Upstanding from new album The Knowledge harks back to their powerpop days of yore and fellow new album offering, the brass-laden A&E, mixes a slick soulful lament with not-too-subtle social commentary – a theme nailed home by the choral and operatic Rough Ride. “Compassion and loyalty are so yesterday’s news / no one cares what you have to say,” bemoans Tilbrook.
Fast songs, slow songs, a throwaway garage band charm with stadium band moves and patter – the Cardiff set reveals why Squeeze are so hard to pigeonhole and impossible not to love. New tracks like Albatross reveal a folky, accordion-driven wistfulness encompassing the Britain of Ray Davies, whereas fan favourite Tempted, from 1981’s East Side Story, is total pop sheen – white boy soul via the Overground line to Deptford, before the faux-country of Labelled With Love takes it on to Nashville.
Backed by drums, additional percussion and keys, the oft-labelled Lennon-McCartney of kitchen-sink drama-pop are perhaps best suited to aiming their lyrical dart at the more microcosmic mundanity of everyday life and doomed romance rather than the state of the nation in 2017. This is underlined by a slew of classics like Slap And Tickle, Goodbye Girl, Up The Junction and the stone cold genius of Is That Love.
The inevitable encore features Cockney knees-up classic Cool For Cats, driven by Chris Difford’s wryly poetic words mixing suburban boozer high jinks with silver and small screen pop culture. It gets the venue rocking, in a sort of last orders at a wedding party style when everyone is hammered and old enough to know better.
Now is time to use the words ‘national’ and ‘treasure’ and now is the time to see Squeeze live.
words JAMIE ROBERTS photos GARETH GRIFFITHS