SQUEEZED
Chris Difford and Glen Tillbrook
My first interview for RockBill, a magazine that mysteriously hired me as its editor-in-chief at the ripe age of 23, was with the British pub pop band, Squeeze. The two mainstays, Glen Tillbrook and Chris Difford, had written several bobbity semi-hits such as “Tempted,” “Cool For Cats,” “Goodbye Girl,” and, my favorite, “Black Coffee In Bed.” I met the blokes in a motel in Albany, New York. Their shared room was strewn with Guinness bottles, a just-bought Ella Fitzgerald record (yes, a long playing vinyl album), and a well-worn biography of Winston Churchill, along with the debris of clothes, personal grooming products, and greasy fast food paper bags. Posh. We talked a lot about the Beatles, an obvious influence, the unfettered joy of live gigs, and the endless struggle to resist becoming a “product” of the musical-industrial complex. The boys, though exhausted from life on the road—they had a gig to get to 500 miles away within 24 hours—livened up when talking about their experience with American bigness. “In Britain,” said Chris, “everyone cringes about, but you’ve got more room to breathe here, don’t you? Riding on the tour bus, passing all these farms, wheatfields, silos, highways—our driver playing ‘Home On The Range’ on his harmonica—I was about in tears watching this big country rolling by.” On the other hand, Glen pointed out, “America is so big that it makes it easy not to meet people. You have to drive to get anywhere and aren’t likely to meet chaps you know on the street. It’s easy to be anonymous in America.” A few stouts later, when the talk inevitably came to nuclear apocalypse, as it always does, there was some joking about making the Top Ten as the world ended. Better never than late, one of us said as I stumbled away, my rock and roll cherry popped.
