"After the world shrugged at The Knowledge in 2017, someone told Tilbrook: 'Nobody is interested in a Squeeze record. What matters is Squeeze's story.' That stayed with me, he says. So not only does Trixies contain a story—it's a concept-album-cum-musical about a fictional nightclub—but there's also a great tale around the album. It was written when Difford and Tilbrook were teenagers in 1974 but left unrecorded because they couldn't properly play the songs they had written."
"You can certainly hear the 1974 in it: The Place We Call Mars doesn't just borrow a planet from David Bowie, it appropriates a vocal intonation and a squealing, Mick Ronson-esque guitar solo. Hell on Earth has more than a little of Sparks in its staccato keyboards (Difford said he originally wrote the music on an RMI piano, as used by Ron Mael)."
"It really sounds like a musical. There is a lot of description of what is happening, and plenty of archetypes: the brassy stomper, the rock'n'roll song, the wistful ballad and so on. You can picture them being performed from the front of the stage by a character gazing up at the gods while behind them dancers act out the scenarios."
Squeeze released Trixies, their 16th album, as a concept album-cum-musical centered on a fictional nightclub. The songs were originally written by Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook in 1974 but remained unrecorded because they lacked the technical ability to perform them properly at that time. The album incorporates 1970s influences from artists like David Bowie, Sparks, and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Structured like a theatrical production with archetypal song forms—brassy stompers, rock'n'roll numbers, and wistful ballads—the album tells a story through lyrics written from a teenager's perspective. While the internal rhymes and clever clichés work well theatrically, the standalone album lacks sufficient dramatic hooks and narrative depth.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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