Squeeze frontman Glenn Tilbrook never expected an old cassette tape to become one of the most emotional moments of his career. More than 50 years after he first wrote the songs as a teenager, Trixies has finally been realised – and in the process, the British music legend found himself reconnecting with a version of himself he barely recognised.
By the time Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford had written the songs that would become Trixies, they were barely old enough to drive.
Tilbrook was just 16 and Difford was 19. They had ambition, ideas and a growing belief they could write songs that mattered, but what they didn’t yet have was the experience to play them the way they imagined.
So the cassette was packed away.
Life, meanwhile, had other plans. There were international tours, enduring classics including Up the Junction, Cool for Cats and Tempted, awards, sold-out concerts and a place among Britain’s most admired songwriting partnerships. More than five decades slipped by before that forgotten tape resurfaced.
When it did, Tilbrook discovered something he hadn’t expected.
“The writing was sophisticated,” he told Starts at 60.
“We’d always been aware of the songs, and listening to them on the cassette reminded me that our writing was sophisticated, but we weren’t sophisticated singers or musicians. The band couldn’t really play the songs properly. We weren’t very good, but the writing was great.”
It’s a very honest assessment from someone whose career has produced some of British pop’s most enduring songs, and he laughs as he imagines what might have happened had a record company discovered them back then.
“If someone had signed us at that point, they probably would have said, ‘Okay, the songs are great. Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to get a bunch of session guys in and you sing.’
“But now we can play it properly, and we can realise it in all its glory, and that’s been the revelation, really.”
Recording Trixies wasn’t simply about finishing an old album.
It became something far more personal.
Tilbrook has previously admitted revisiting the songs brought him to tears, and he says the emotion surprised him.
“I think it’s a bit of both,” he says when asked whether it was the music or the memories. “It’s incredibly poignant to have this set of stuff that we did when we didn’t know anything, and we had no experience of life other than our very immediate surroundings, and yet we did that. That feels sort of miraculous, really.
“What are the chances of a couple of guys meeting up who live half a mile away from each other and, within a year of meeting, producing something like that? It’s staggering. I can say that because I sort of don’t feel connected. I know it was us, but all that time ago, it feels like it’s not you.”
It’s a feeling many readers will recognise. Looking back across half a century, the young person you once were can seem almost like somebody else entirely, yet those teenage instincts were unmistakably there.
Listening to Trixies, there are unmistakable traces of classic Squeeze, but also flashes of artists who shaped British music in the early 1970s.
Tilbrook agrees.
“You’re right,” he says. “Bowie, Sparks, Stevie Wonder… all those things were very specific influences on specific songs. The thing about all the Trixies songs that I recognised when I started playing them again is that all the influences come from three years between 1971 and ’74.
“That was all the experience I had of listening to music before. We had such a limited amount of information that we drew all that out of what was going on.”
Perhaps the most uplifting aspect of Trixies is what it represents.
Not necessarily nostalgia, but rather ‘completion’.
Asked whether finally finishing a project that had sat untouched for more than 50 years carried a message for anyone with dreams still sitting in a drawer, Tilbrook didn’t hesitate.
“I certainly think that’s the case,” he says.
“I know we’re the same people that we were then, but it doesn’t feel like it. Fifty years of experience, as we all know, brings many different perspectives that you didn’t have then. We were the raw material of ourselves.”
It’s one of those phrases that lingers: the raw material of ourselves.
For Tilbrook, music became the path that transformed that raw material into something extraordinary.
“I think we were, in fact, a rock and roll cliché. We had nothing going for us. We had no other prospects. There wasn’t anything else we were going to do,” he explains.
“I don’t know where it would have ended up had we not had this sort of gift together.”
One of the interview’s biggest surprises came when conversation turned to his songwriting partnership with Chris Difford.
Together, they’ve written songs for more than half a century – longer than many marriages – but their relationship isn’t what many fans imagine.
“Our secret’s quite weird,” Tilbrook admitted. “I think we were friends for two or three years maximum when we met, and then that sort of stopped. Our relationship has been professional and respectful, but we’re not really mates.
“But it’s okay. It works, in a way. We know how good we are together.”
That mutual respect has produced songs that have become woven into people’s lives for generations.
“It is always amazing to me that, in however small a way, we have become a part of some people’s lives – and quite an important part for a few people,” he says. “That’s really gratifying, to know that what you’ve done has reached out and touched someone. I never lose sight of that.”
Squeeze return to Australia in April next year for the Tried, Tested and Trixies tour, their first visit since 2018 after a planned return was derailed by the pandemic.
Australia also offers something more personal.
Tilbrook’s eldest son now lives in Melbourne, and after the tour he’ll be staying on to spend time with him.
“It’s lovely,” he says simply. “It’s family, isn’t it?”
As our conversation draws to a close, I ask what 16-year-old Glenn would make of the man he’s become and his answer arrives without hesitation.
“My life has been everything that I would have hoped for it, and that’s so unusual given where I came from,” Tilbrook says.
“We’re lucky that it worked out. We worked hard at it – I’m not taking that away – but there’s always an element of luck. And what a life: to be able to be creative.”
At 68, Tilbrook still walks the dog, still watches what he eats, still relishes stepping onto a stage, and still finds joy in writing songs.
Maybe that’s the greatest lesson of Trixies. Sometimes the dreams we leave behind aren’t lost at all, sometimes they’re simply waiting for us to become the people capable of finishing them.
Squeeze bring their Tried, Tested and Trixies Tour to Australia in April 2027, performing:
Tickets are on sale now. For tour information and ticket links, visit Squeeze Official or Destroy All Lines.
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