A pop-blast from the past
A couple of days ago when I was working with my music blog I got a mail that sent me right back to the eighties. It was from the people around the band Squeeze, and obviously they had recorded a new song, the first one in fourteen years actually, and they had just started touring again. I quickly listened to it, and although the arrangement was different from the older stuff, it was all there, the Squeeze vibe, like if it was just yesterday that they released their classic pop songs. Glenn Tilbrook’s voice sounded just like before (at least I told that to myself) and that playful Squeeze-pop melodic song was there. It may not be a classic like the famous predecessors, but a good enough song for me to get excited about. So I decided to write a post about them on the music blog and present the song, “Tommy”.
Squeeze was one of main bands to satisfy my pop vein during the first half of the eighties, when I was a teenager. Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook’s was at the front and seemed to be able to produce an endless stream of beautiful and playful pop melodies, which stuck in my head, and in a way defined what pop was then for me. “Cool For Cats”, “Tempted” (with Paul Carrack’s brilliant vocals), “Labelled With Love” and “Black Coffee In Bed” are some of the songs that have their given spots in my playlists with pop classics. Just to remind you, here’s the Motown-inspired “Black Coffee In Bed” from 1982:
They then dissappeared from my radar during a long time, even if they continued in various constellations, but eventually they broke up in the end of the nineties. In 2004 I watched a show on VH1, as a part in the VH1 series where they tried to reunite bands for an exclusive concert, but in Squeeze’ case the attempt failed.
And now this week, more than thirty years later from when I heard them the first time, I get to hear something new from them again. The song is sort of a pre-release, streaming though a Soundcloud-player (you can listen here below) and they have announced that the real release will be in December and people will be able to download it for free. I took a peak at the number of plays and saw that it was a quite modest number, around 600-700. Seeing that song had been there for a couple of weeks meant to me that very few, if anyone, had written about the song yet, so of course I couldn’t resist writing about these old favourites of mine.
It feels a little strange, sort of time-twisted, when I press the publish button, realizing also I’m one of the first to present the song to a wider audience. Knowing very well how Internet and music works together and the amount of songs that get’s published continuously, I wasn’t expecting a horde of people coming over to listen and read this, but I was expecting that some more people would have picked this up. The blog is a relatively small one compared to the giants on Hype Machine, but I do have a pretty fair idea how many people who listens each day through different channels, and also about the exposure a post gets, but even if they can count 100-150 more plays on their page today it’s not much compared to many other posts about far less known artists, many completely unknown, I present.
It’s not so surprising, though. Today it means that no one, no matter what your name is, or what you’ve done before, you can’t expect that some kind of general audience is waiting for you out there, especially if you’ve lost contact with the one you had before. You have to go out searching for them, find your niche, even if you’re in a classic band like Squeeze.
Well, they aimed right with me at least, and maybe you who are reading this? Here’s “Tommy”:
