In the liner notes to the Squeeze six-CD box set, Six Of One, Nick Hornby says that he only became a writer after listening to Squeeze's Sweets From A Stranger album and realising that he wanted to be the literary equivalent of Difford and Tilbrook. I suppose Hornby means it as a compliment - but he's hereby yellow carded, all the same, for daring to suggest that Chris Difford's lyrics are anything but literary.
When all is said and done and you're sick of telling people that Up The Junction is the only top ten single not to contain a chorus, it behoves us to locate Difford/ Tilbrook somewhere in close vicinity to Morrissey/Marr and Strummer/Jones - and, for that matter, Goffin/King and Leiber/Stoller. Where nice Nick Hornby has got it wrong - in a very condescending manner I might add - about Chris Difford's lyrics, is that he fails to recognise that writing about things behind the chalet, in the bedroom and out on Clapham Common is very literary indeed. He does, though, redeem himself later on by saying that East Side Story is as "domestic" as Blood On The Tracks.
It's funny if you look back at those 20-year-old videos of the band doing Take Me I'm Yours and coming across as punk rockers (it was 1977, I s'ppose), but they really only got into their stride during the "new wave" years and they have had that sort of Elvis Costello longevity - unlike Elvis, of course, they sadly haven't released anything really good in years. (Leftover trivia from a few weeks back: Costello wrote All This Useless Beauty for June Tabor).
From Deptford, London, Squeeze took their name from a Velvet Underground album title and, bizarrely enough, John Cale produced their first EP, Packet Of Three. Very much a singles band in the early days (Take Me I'm Yours, Goodbye Girl, Cool For Cats, Slap And Tickle) they only really got the hang of the 12-song album thing on 1980's Argybargy, and the first two tracks on that - Pulling Mussels (From The Shell) and Another Nail In My Heart still resonate today as prime examples of the very best of English popular music. Their Queen Is Dead or London Calling came with East Side Story, easily their best album and a body of work that is shockingly left out of every "Best 100 albums of all time" list you could ever hope to read. Produced by Elvis Costello and Roger Bechirian, it only took three weeks to record and while the singles off it, Is That Love and Tempted didn't surpass the singles off Argybargy, it remains a superior album and a great pop record. A further single off the album, Labelled With Love, was one of their biggest-ever hits; and, crucially, the album broke the American top 50. Unlike their just-as-talented contemporaries The Jam, Squeeze always enjoyed a fair level of success in the US.
It all went very strange, however, with the release of the mystifyingly bad Sweets From A Stranger, and after releasing a last single, Annie Get Your Gun, the band split in 1982. Difford and Tilbrook went on to record an album together which wasn't much cop. Sadly they decided to reform in 1985 (complete with a returning Jools Holland) and while they didn't exactly sully their reputation, albums like Cosi Fan Tutti and Babylon And On couldn't match the heady successes of the early 1980s.
The six albums contained here, from the debut Squeeze to Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti, represent a fascinating glimpse of a band who, despite everything, were never really acknowledged back then the way they are now - both as originators of Britpop and the inheritors of a classic song-writing tradition.
Six Of One is out now on the A&M label.
