Squeeze-y does it: how a great British band reclaimed their hits

BRIAN BOYDon music

IN THE roll call of great English songwriters that begins with Ray Davies and takes in Bowie, Townshend, Weller, Morrissey, Albarn, Gallagher and Turner, two names are always missing. Names that irrefutably belong at the top table.

Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook have been responsible for a quietly unassuming but magnificent body of work. Most people wouldn't know the East Side Storyalbum, but in terms of classic English rock-pop albums it's up there with The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and The Jam's Sound Affects. And the singles are legion: Another Nail in My Heart and Pulling Mussels (From the Shell) to name just a couple of mini-masterpieces.

The camera may have panned away from them a long time ago, but they’re still an ongoing touring and recording unit. Like most great bands of a certain age, they’ll probably never revisit their glory songwriting days, but you still hear them being played on radio and in the US – which, unlike The Jam or The Smiths, they actually managed to break – and they’re used quite a bit on TV ads.

It was at the end of another recent successful US tour that the band found themselves back in their hotel watching television. An ad break came and they noted with weary resignation how yet another one of their songs was being used in a high-profile ad campaign. It was just another in a long line of cases of their songs being farmed out to advertising companies without their permission.

It doesn’t happen so much these days because of all manner of legal clauses in recording contracts, but any band signed in the 1980s was usually presented with a recording contract the size of a book, thrown a massive advance cheque and told to just sign on the dotted line if they wanted the cheque in their bank account that afternoon.

While nine times out of 10 the label will have to write the band off as a bad loss and swallow the expense of the big signing-on fee, in Squeeze’s case – with songs of such quality – that contract is still pumping money back into the record company’s coffers.

The band decided to stage a quiet revolution. Because the focus is off them, the consequences of their action have been ignored by the right-here-right-now music press. Squeeze realised the hits they had written they didn’t own, and there was little point trying to interest advertisers in their new material as that didn’t have the same commercial attraction. They decided to go back in to the studio and re-record the hits note for note. They would own the recordings of these 2010 versions. They gave the album the arch title Spot the Difference.

With CD sales falling yada yada, “sync deals” (having your song used in an ad campaign, in a film or a TV programme) is, for some bands, the only money they make these days outside touring. What Squeeze can do now is approach the sync gatekeepers themselves with the 2010 version of Up the Junction, and that way they have control over how and where it is used – and full control of the pay cheque.

Unlike such as George Michael and Prince, they don’t see themselves as “slaves” or “victims” of their old record label. “We signed a six-inch-thick record deal when we were kids,” says Difford. “But I got a record deal out of it, so I can’t complain. And I’ve had a very good career in the music industry. But it is important for us to own our own songs, so by re-recording them (outside of the old record deal) we got ownership. Now if people want to put our songs in TV ads and films they can deal with us.”

A simple solution to a complex problem. No finger-pointing, no recriminations, no blaming the label that helped make them stars in the first place. And the best part of it all is that some of the versions on Spot the Difference sound even better than the original. Check out Tilbrook’s far superior vocal on the new Black Coffee in Bed.