Squeeze celebrates its 50th anniversary by finally releasing its debut album

The album is called Trixies. It is both the band’s first and its 16th release.

The first new music from the venerable English new wave act in eight years is also the first studio rendering of the rock opera that founders Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook originally recorded on a series of cassette demos on a loaned-out Revox tape machine in 1974.

Inspired by the burgeoning glam and prog rock of the era and the heady concept albums it spawned, Difford (then age 19) and Tilbrook (then age 16) launched their songwriting partnership penning a collection of song stories set in a fictional dive club called Trixies.

Released in the same year that Squeeze is celebrating five decades in the biz, Trixies is getting some of the group’s best reviews of its career. It exists as another 13-track masterpiece of pop tune-smithing from the songwriting duo.

“We’ve done 11 shows of Trixies so far and the reception it has received has been remarkable, as it has translated into the live setting so well,” said Tilbrook. “We always knew the songs were there, but when we went into studio with John Cale to do our first record, punk was changing everything and we were into that. In retrospect, the writing on Trixies is easily some of the most sophisticated of our careers until we got to Cool For Cats.”

Tilbrook notes that the writing far eclipsed the technical capabilities of its creators to reproduce it the way it deserved. Without doubt, Trixies’ tracks from Don’t Go Out In The Dark to the “new” single Why Don’t You are clearly Squeeze, but you have to remind yourself that you are listening through ears that have long been familiar with the group’s smart, literate and hooky style.

“These are very much the same songs that we wrote then, although we have added parts we felt were needed to round things out,” says Tilbrook, “When we first wrote this collection, I didn’t even know what the names of the chords were. Now, I can teach the songs to the rest of the band and it’s how we wanted it to sound back then.”