Former Squeeze mainstays Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook will reunite for a live acoustic performance Nov. 18 in London. The free show at Borders Books and Music store in Charing Cross Road, London, dovetails with the Nov. 15 U.K. publication of Jim Drury’s “Squeeze: Song by Song,” the first fully authorized story of the long-running English group, of which Difford and Tilbrook were founding members and principal songwriters.
The Borders event will be followed by a Q&A session with both performers. Drury is also the author of “Ian Dury and the Blockheads: Song by Song” and co-author of “The Stranglers: Song by Song” with that band’s Hugh Cornwell.
Tilbrook’s recent second solo album, “Transatlantic Ping Pong,” released on his own Quixotic label in the United Kingdom and on Quixotic via Compass in North America, featured a track co-written with Difford, “Where I Can Be Your Friend.” The song was the first collaboration by the duo, who first met in 1973, since Difford left Squeeze, prompting the band’s demise in the late 1990s.
“We avoided each other for a few years,” Tilbrook told this writer in August about his recent rapprochement with Difford, “and I think we probably needed to do that. Now we’re at a stage where we can work together. What we want from our lives is quite different now, and that’s hard to reconcile, but there’s no need to reconcile it — we can work on the good bits.”
“‘Where I Can Be Your Friend’ is a really sweet lyric addressed, I think, to me — a sort of apology from Chris about the way the band ended up,” he continued. “I didn’t fully appreciate some of the things he was going through at the time. So it was a really sweet thing for him to write. I do love him. Even though sometimes I’d like to punch him.”
Source billboard.com.
