SQUEEZE
Babylon and On

Q Magazine, 1987.
Rating: **** (out of 5)
Reviewed By: Phil Sutcliffe.

Like most fans, I imagine, I love Squeeze best for their stories, those slices of life you know are true because they happened in your living room last week-although you can hardly credit that Difford and Tilbrook can wrap the emotional mess up in a neat three minutes and then have you singing along too, the buggers.

It's sheer craft, and it's rigorous as ever here on their second LP post-reformation: choice of detail, choice of word, the melody and sound that exactly catch the mood, empathy for the material running through the band all the way to drummer Gilson Lavis (who challenges Stewart Copeland as a percussive commentator on well-turned songs). I mean, some very famous lyricists have arrived at the line Then I saw her standing there, but Difford is the one, in The Waiting Game, who precedes it with I played with a handful of peanuts-there's our boy, behold, the party-pooper who's let worries about his unpunctual girlfriend give him a very nasty evening.

Precision. That's what they bring to a battered-wife song, Tough Love. No hand-wringing cliches. The man is a drunk junkie; the woman is determined not to lose him. Guilty man sits out the night in the car, then He wanders inside on tiptoes and brews up some coffee/He's shaking and sweating again. The chorus says She knows that tough love is needed to save the love of her friend. With a track called In Today's Room they even have the insouciance, the gall, to consider Time-you know, the relationship between the present and eternity, the Condor moment versus Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity-in terms of boy meets girl, and reach QED within the parameters of a potential hit single.

The only thing that can be slightly wearing about a dozen straight tracks of Squeeze is Tilbrook's earnest voice, oddly like Boy George's but lacking the colour. However, I suspect as co-producer he acknowledges this limitation and his vocals are brilliantly set aid subtle variations on the basic Squeeze pop group format. Apart from the acid rock appeal of Difford's coarse-cut back-ups there's an array of horn riff, string sweetenings, and imaginative keyboard work with Jools Holland and/or his lieutenant Andy Metcalfe particularly good on organ underpinnings and unlikely adornments from the, um, it has to be said, squeezebox. In their own way they're building a career as substantial and durable as, say, Randy Newman.

Squeeze Please Me

Los Angeles Times
September 20, 1987
Review by Kristine McKenna
Rating: ***

In the early '80s, Squeeze released three knockout LPs that established it as one of the Great White Hopes of pop. Top 10 classicists in the tradition of the Beatles, the Bntish quintet had all the giddy charm of pop at its best and scored a string of hit singles in Europe. In 1982, the group members decided they could no longer stand the sight of each other and went their separate ways, only to reunite for a disappointing comeback album in 1985.

Here, at last, is the comeback Squeeze fans have been waiting for. A vast improvement over their last record, which was flawed with meandering melodies and murky production, Babylon features tight, sprightly tunes you find yourself hummlng after a single hearing - the acid test of a pop song.

Squeeze's writing team of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook continues to be the group's trump card. Like Evis Costello, lyricist Difford is a master of clever wordplay, most of which dissects the attraction/repulsion of romantic love; Difford's songs are infused with the passion and fear that come with forbidden liaisons, jealousy, and worn-out affairs that have overstayed their welcome.

Whereas Difford used to spin winsome tales of the British middle class struggling to get laid and/or right with itself, he's been a pop star for too long to write about that world with the first-hand knowledge he once had. Too talented a writer to stoop to rock-star "road songs," he's found a new way to connect with his listeners. The telling details that placed his earlier songs squarely in a shabby bed-sit in Brighton have given way to one man's internal dialogue on the subject of love. These new songs exist almost entirely in the head and hence have a universality that is icing on the cake. What really gives these songs staying power is the fact that they sound so great.

People Magazine
Picks & Pans
November 2, 1987
Review by Eric Levin

Reviewers are forever urging bands to "stretch" and "grow" and musically shed their skins, like molting snakes. All very worthy, if torturous, advice, but utterly beside the point in the case of Squeeze. Squeeze, it is a big thrill to report, is still inimitably, immutably, incorrigibly Squeeze. After a two-year absence it's great to have them back on disc, even with another of those terminally cute album titles that make people smile indulgently when friends tell them to buy it. Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook will not be compared here with Lennon and McCartney. They're probably sick of those comparisons, since only one of the eight albums they've made together has gone gold - a "greatest hits" package that suggests people have liked the singles better than the albums. As songwriters, Difford and Tilbrook don't need to stretch toward more ambitious formulas or unleash brow-busting "concept" albums. The well they've been tapping for 12 years is bubbling still. Squeeze is a jaunty band, rhythmically brisk, melodically sinuous, with one of pop's most infectious lead singers in the elasticvoiced Tilbrook. Guitarist Difford sings lead about once an album, and his dry, froggy voice provides welcome contrast, as on the acrobatic line of Strlking Matches, a chugging Squeezian groover about a memorable morning after. A few well-placed horn riffs by Tilbrook on the scampering "Hourglass", some female background vocals and good keyboard detailing by Julian Holland are as close as Squeeze comes to demonstrating growth. The only thing about the band that needs to grow is the size of its audience. Why it hasn't remains one of rock's minor mysteries.

In the early 90s, "Babylon and On" was reissued on CD in a 2-pack with "East Side Story". Click HERE to read a review of that package.