Squeeze’s Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook look forward to the future

'We've done 11 shows of Trixies so far and the reception it has received has been remarkable'

Published Aug 31, 2026  •  Last updated 13 hours ago  •  4 minute read

Squeeze's Glenn Tilbrook & Chris Difford. Photo by Credit Dean Chalkley

By Stuart Derdeyn

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Squeeze is mounting one of its biggest North American tours in support of the band’s latest album. Yes, this is the same Squeeze that attained cult status on these shores through such hit singles as Tempted and Cool For Cats decades ago.

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The album in question is Trixies.

The first new music from the venerable English new wave act in eight years is also the first studio recording of the rock opera that founding members Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook originally recorded on a series of cassette demos on a loaned-out Revox tape machine in 1974.

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Inspired by the burgeoning glam and prog rock of the era and the heady concept albums it spawned, Difford (age 19) and Tilbrook (age 16) launched their songwriting partnership penning a collection of song stories set in a fictional dive club called Trixies.

Released in the same year that Squeeze is celebrating five decades in the biz, Trixies is getting some of the group’s best reviews of its career. It exists as another 13-track masterpiece of pop tunesmithing from the songwriting duo.

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“We’ve done 11 shows of Trixies so far and the reception it has received has been remarkable, as it has translated into the live setting so well,” said Tilbrook. “We always knew the songs were there, but when we went into the studio with John Cale to do our first record punk was changing everything and we were into that. In retrospect, the writing on Trixies is easily some of the most sophisticated of our careers until we got to Cool For Cats.”

Tilbrook notes that the writing far eclipsed the technical capabilities of its creators to reproduce the way it deserved. Without doubt, Trixies’ tracks from Don’t Go Out In The Dark to the “new” single Why Don’t You are clearly Squeeze, but you have to remind yourself that you are listening through ears that have long been familiar with the group’s smart, literate and hooky style.

“These are very much the same songs that we wrote then, although we have added parts we felt were needed to round things out,” says Tilbrook, “When we first wrote this collection, I didn’t even know what the names of the chords were. Now I can teach the songs to the rest of the band and it’s how we wanted it to sound back then.”

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Trixies was never some lost-to-memory musical treasure that suddenly surfaces. Difford and Tilbrook always knew the songs were there, they just had forgotten how good they were. Inspired by the positive reviews that 2017s The Knowledge received and caught up in something of a streaming-fuelled New Wave revival that had seen Squeeze songs covered by everyone from trip hop hero Tricky to Questlove and Robert Glasper, the band were musing on making another record.

When a friend forwarded a cleaned-up copy of the old cassette sessions, Tilbrook was moved by how strong the songs were. This was something great that should be heard in the context of today.

“When I head those demos again, it was clear that Chris and I couldn’t sing or play properly yet and neither could the band,” he said. “It wasn’t bad and it was enough for us, but it wasn’t what the songs deserved. If we had tried to record it at the time, we wouldn’t have been able to do it and that really made it a joy to come at them now.”

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Anyone who caught Squeeze opening for classic rockers Heart a few years back knows just how good the present lineup of the band sounds.

Over the years, an array of talented players have served in Squeeze such as TV presenter and pianist Jools Holland and Elvis Costello and the Attraction keyboardist Steve Nieve, among others. The present band of drummer Simon Hanson, keyboardist Stephen Large, multi-instrumentalist Steve Smith, guitarist Melvin Duffy, Trixies producer and bassist Owen Biddle and keyboardist Danica Dora has been stable for the last decade and has been blowing away a whole new generation of fans.

Tilbrook says it has been both a surprise and an inspiration to both he and Difford to look at the future of Squeeze in a different light as they weren’t sure how long this latest formation of the band would run. Squeeze had disbanded and reformed a few times over its history, but always seems to comeback stronger than it left.

“I really think Trixies has got legs, and we have been looking at growing it into a musical,” he said. “I remember a teacher playing the class Jesus Christ Superstar in school and thinking that (Andrew) Lloyd-Webber was really onto something and maybe that set a spark for my own interest in that kind of storytelling.”

Squeeze brings the Tried, Tested and Trixies Tour to Toronto on Aug. 31 at the RBC Amphitheatre Tickets at ticketmaster.ca.

Sderdeyn@postmedia

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