Squeeze | Badly Drawn Boy
Piece Corridor Halifax
Friday 1st August 2025
Lennon and McCartney will all the time be the Premier League Champions of British songwriting, however Squeeze duo Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook are actually excessive up in that league, which is why their clever pop/rock can nonetheless pull massive crowds.
Hardly ever, a day goes by when any self-respecting biggest hits radio station doesn’t play a minimum of one Squeeze hit like Up The Junction, Cool For Cats or Labelled With Love, which all characteristic tonight in a 20 tune set.
Badly Drawn Boy – aka Damon Gough – got here on stage as help, carrying his trademark beanie, armed solely with an acoustic. This was a seated crowd who appreciated high quality songwriting, and his Mancunian honesty received them over. He sardonically described the stunning Shake the Rollercoaster as “a big gamble that didn’t come off”, however Silent Signal from the About A Boy soundtrack proved to be as superb because the day it was recorded. The looped guitars of As soon as Round The Block, from this Mercury Prize successful The Hour of Bewilderbeast, was a barely messy, however enchanting, method to shut his set.
The lady standing subsequent to me described her husband because the “greatest Squeeze fan ever” so that they have been in heaven because the opening chords of the usually bittersweet Black Espresso In Mattress struck up, adopted by 1987 single Footprints as this actually tight model of Squeeze established their model of clever pop/rock. What made Squeeze completely different to their New Wave contemporaries was having a high class lyricist like Difford, and Is That Love was as poignant as ever, earlier than the group jumped to their ft for Up The Junction – Difford’s highly effective piece of social commentary mixed with a high class Tilbrook melody. The deeper voiced Difford took lead vocal on the extra rock and roll influenced In Quintessence.
Most of the bands who play the Piece Corridor are within the veteran stage of their careers, which is not any dangerous factor, so it was nice to see Tilbrook’s emotive voice had held up on a sprightly Pulling Mussels (From The Shell). The keyboardist broke out his accordion as he wandered around the stage throughout Goodbye Woman, and Difford was again on the mic for a sardonic Cool For Cats full with Tilbrook’s heavy metallic solo.
Like so many heritage acts, Squeeze are actually the 2 important males, however they’ve recruited an aesthetic group of actually tight musicians. They rock as laborious as well-known alumni like Jools Holland, particularly Simon Hanson on drums, and as Tilbrook launched Annie Get Your Gun, he informed the viewers: “we’re in a fairly relentless temper tonight”. In addition to all of the hits, Squeeze bravely delved into their in depth again catalogue, together with If I Didn’t Love from their 1980 album ArgyBargy, which was a giant US radio hit for them, and even threw in You Get The Feeling, written approach again in 1974 once they have been nonetheless pub rockers.
The stripped again nation rock of Labelled With Love was among the finest songs of the eighties and was matched by the equally craving Tempted – and any of the good Nashville songwriters would have been proud to have penned both of these two ballads. A blistering Take Me I’m Yours, full with band intros and solos, had the most important Squeeze fan ever rocking out once more as he appreciated a band who remained masters of pop storytelling.
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Phrases by Paul Clarke, you possibly can see his writer profile right here.
Photographs by Frank Ralph, you’ll find Frank at his web site | Instagram| and Fb
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