Squeeze: Trixies review – finally completed first album proves teenage dreams are hard to beat

In interviews to promote their 16th album, Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook have been upfront about the reason for its existence. After the world shrugged at The Knowledge in 2017, someone told Tilbrook: “‘Nobody is interested in a Squeeze record. What matters is Squeeze’s story.’ That stayed with me,” he says.

So not only does Trixies contain a story – it’s a concept-album-cum-musical about a fictional nightclub – but there’s also a great tale around the album. It was written when Difford and Tilbrook were teenagers in 1974 but left unrecorded because they couldn’t properly play the songs they had written. It’s both a new record and something for the fans who always want the old stuff.

Album artwork. Photograph: PA

You can certainly hear the 1974 in it: The Place We Call Mars doesn’t just borrow a planet from David Bowie, it appropriates a vocal intonation and a squealing, Mick Ronson-esque guitar solo. Hell on Earth has more than a little of Sparks in its staccato keyboards (Difford said he originally wrote the music on an RMI piano, as used by Ron Mael). Might the hard-rock tango of Why Don’t You owe a debt to the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s version of Next, from 1973?

It really sounds like a musical. There is a lot of description of what is happening, and plenty of archetypes: the brassy stomper, the rock’n’roll song, the wistful ballad and so on. You can picture them being performed from the front of the stage by a character gazing up at the gods while behind them dancers act out the scenarios. It’s been described as Runyonesque, which is true in the sense that Oasis are Beatlesesque, but the lyrics are written by a teenager – a precocious teenager, yes, but still someone writing about things he had never experienced. Hence the lyrics being a clever arrangement of cliches but not much more, albeit the intricate internal rhymes are already present.

They’d all be diverting with a staging behind them, but they lack the drama and hooks for a standalone album. There are great bits where you can hear what the band Squeeze would become, but they’re bits. Fun and a good idea, but you won’t be throwing out East Side Story to make room for it.