Suggs explains why the “genius” of Squeeze changed songwriting
As the last echoes of punk rock exerted their death rattle over the airwaves, 1979 was a pivotal year in the musical history of Britain, not least because it was the year that the airwaves were first introduced to the ska-fuelled schoolboy chaos of Madness – giving Suggs his first taste of the kind of omnipresence that the Nutty Boys have maintained for upwards of four decades at this point.
Madness, like every outfit who made their way into the pop charts with the aid of 2 Tone Records, had a lot to thank the punk rock revolution for. The sudden realisation of the mid-1970s that you didn’t need Led Zeppelin’s skill or, crucially, budget in order to create incredible rock and roll records was life-changing for an entire generation of budding young music obsessives, Suggs included. However, the Madness frontman was never likely to dye his hair green or preach the virtues of anarchy.
Instead, Madness took the grassroots attitude of punk and blended it with an expansive range of musical influences. Particularly during those early days, it was the off-beat rhythms of Jamaican ska and rocksteady that ushered them to the door of Jerry Dammers, but their penchant for storytelling songs was also indebted to influences which were much closer to home. Namely, Squeeze.
Like Madness, Squeeze’s Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook had a front-row seat to the explosion of London’s punk era, but the band’s output on legendary tracks like ‘Up The Junction’, for instance, owed far more to the likes of Bob Dylan or Roxy Music than the Sex Pistols. They were pursuing a storytelling style of songwriting, rather than the defiant, anarchic yelps that passed for lyricism in the punk realm.
Suggs was firmly among the cult audience that Squeeze managed to amass during the late 1970s, once recalling to Mojo, “I heard ‘Cool for Cats’ on John Peel. I loved the Dury-esque humour, the machine-gun rattle of the performance: it had an immediate spark and edge.”
Crucially, though, that legendary single had a sense of relatability that was lost in virtually all mainstream rock of the time.
“Glenn and Chris wrote narrative songs about everyday life when most people were writing about the freeway in LA, and chicks,” as the Madness frontman put it. “Each song is its own small work of genius.”
That genius seemed to be working overtime during the late 1970s, too, with the Cool for Cats album arguably representing the pinnacle of Squeeze’s output, and inspiring countless fellow songwriters to move away from phoney ideas of American freeways and instead focus their storytelling on the ordinary lives of ordinary people.
In many ways, Squeeze did for British music what the New Wave movement did for British Cinema back in the late 1950s. Difford and Tilbrook placed a focus on the kitchen sink realism of everyday life, in much the same way that Madness would go on to do with iconic tracks like ‘Our House’ or even something like ‘Baggy Trousers’.
Genius seems to be the only word befitting of their output, and Suggs’ adoration for them is undeniably evident when looking at Madness’ post-2 Tone discography.
