Squeeze on 'Trixies', Their Biggest Ever Tour and the Importance of Grassroots Venues
Tuesday, 23 June 2026
Written by Jeremy Blackmore
Photo: Dean Chalkley
Squeeze co-founder and lead singer Glenn Tilbrook has spoken of his excitement at joining hundreds of artists in celebrating the role of grassroots venues as part of Everywhere At Once, which will run between June 26 and 28. The UK-wide live music event will bring festival season directly to more than 400 grassroots music venues across the country, with some 2000 artists performing, representing the full spectrum of the country’s music scene.
Tilbrook will perform with his son Leon on the Theatreship in East London’s Canary Wharf and told Stereoboard he hoped the “inspirational” event would raise awareness of the vital role of grassroots venues for musicians. They’re the kind of rooms where Tilbrook cut his teeth as a teenage live performer, playing as a duo with Jools Holland and learning his craft.
“When I started out, the first gigs I did, me and Jools used to play as a duo, or occasionally a trio with our drummer,” he says. “It was hard for Squeeze to get gigs, but it was easier for us. As long as there was a piano in a pub somewhere, we could do a gig around that. That's really how we got started. I was lucky enough to experience a time when there were plenty of venues and when there were plenty of shows, and it was easier to get your foot on the ladder and just to get the experience of playing in front of people who maybe were or weren’t interested in you.
“You could be a thing going on in the corner while people went about having a nice time, but that was okay. You still got to play, and the thrill of just playing in front of people and getting to not be nervous. My first show with Squeeze, I remember I was shaking for two weeks before the gig. I was so nervous, but you conquer that and get through it.”
Tilbrook, who still plays solo shows at small venues in between commitments with Squeeze, says that they don’t just support musicians, they become part of the fabric of local communities. They give people a chance to meet, connect and discover something new. “We need to cherish them, if we lose them, we lose far more than somewhere to see a band,” he said.“They instil a love of music. The pub locally to me where I play a lot is a great place to meet people.
“It’s great it can survive, but there are so many places that haven’t. So many places have gone under. It’s been a double whammy of the economy, and then Brexit, and then COVID. A lot of places have found it really hard to survive and didn't survive, and then people’s changing habits. So, show your support for your local venue. You never know where the next great artist, or the next great night, might come from.”
Later this year Squeeze visit much larger spaces as they embark on their biggest ever UK tour, including the O2 Arena in London, just across the Thames from the Theatreship. They will be showcasing their latest album ‘Trixies’, a collection of songs that date back to the band’s earliest days, the time when Tilbrook and Holland were still playing in the pubs of South East London.
In 1974, a then teenage Tilbrook and Chris Difford wrote an ambitious batch of songs based around a fictional nightclub called Trixies. But while the early Squeeze cut a bunch of demos, they lacked the virtuosity to perform such an ambitious set of songs. In the meantime, the music world shifted to punk and new wave. The songs gathered dust in the proverbial attic until this year, when a road-hardened, eight-person line-up, the current iteration of Squeeze, brought ‘Trixies’ to life.
The album, released in March, was warmly received by fans and critics and became the eighth UK top 20 album of their careers – and arguably their best. Tilbrook has had time to reflect on the success of the album and the memories those songs have conjured up. “It really has been an amazing journey for us,” he says. “What I love about ‘Trixies’, and what I think the album and us [playing those songs] live have been able to do is it conveys that period of time. There was the New York Dolls, I guess you could say, but there was no punk rock, and we weren’t listening to that in particular. We were listening to David Bowie, Wings, Sparks and Stevie Wonder.
“It was a great period of music and what I’m amazed about is how transparent musically and sometimes lyrically our influences were. On individual songs, I can always pinpoint who that was influenced by. I never thought I’d make any of the songs like anyone else, but my influences, I was wearing them on my sleeve, and that translated to the way that I wrote, and I think that’s quite sweet. I don’t really do that anymore, because I’ve got like 55, 60 years of music inside me that pours out in some way or other.”
At the heart of ‘Trixies’ is Tilbrook’s angelic high tenor, barely aged, and Difford singing an octave below, sharing engaging stories set to infectious melodies. Difford’s vivid character sketches and darkly humorous lyrics are paired with Tilbrook’s dazzling command of the early 1970s musical spectrum and his remarkable guitar playing. He deploys a full range of guitar styles on ‘Trixies’, channelling Mick Ronson on the Bowie-esque The Place We Call Mars or a T-Rex strut on The Jaguars.
But this isn’t an exercise in mimicry. Difford and Tilbrook create something truly original while staying true to the songs’ original influences. It’s unmistakably Squeeze. “I think part of the stuff that makes ‘Trixies’ so great is all the experience we have now is what we brought to that table,” Tilbrook says. “We took the songs that we wrote and have gone, ‘Ah, it could be like this! How about that?’ We are the people we are now, so, the experience was really helpful with knowing how to bring those songs through.”
‘Trixies’ paints a vivid tale of big city nightlife, whether inspired by the West End of London or Damon Runyon’s books celebrating the colourful world of Broadway that grew out of the Prohibition era. “Chris is three years older than me, and so he’d had a bit more of life to draw on,” Tilbrook notes. “He worked at Biba’s department store, which thrived at that point, and they had a great gig venue up there, the Rainbow Room, which I did go to. I saw Kilburn and the High Roads.
“But I think that Chris is drawing on an age of films that were shown on the TV then. We grew up with a diet of older films and gangster films with Humphrey Bogart. All that stuff fed into an imagination of what those sorts of things could be like, and it was created through the vision of movies.”
Revisiting their earliest forays into songwriting prompted Difford and Tilbrook to write a fresh batch of songs, which they recorded in tandem with ‘Trixies’. They return to the studio this week to continue work on a new album from those recordings. “We’ve got some absolutely amazing stuff, and I think the writing process was buoyed up by doing ‘Trixies’ [at the same time],” he says. “Moving between our current world and the world 50 years ago was actually really great.
“I picked up a lot of stuff from what we were doing when we were young, but it’s made me much more enthusiastic about leaning into that, and we have done with a new set of songs. I don’t think we’d have done that without being immersed in Trixies. It’s really been a golden period of creativity for us.”
Tilbrook thought that after 2015’s ‘Cradle To The Grave’ and 2017’s ‘The Knowledge’, Squeeze might be done with making records. But it took a lengthy spell mixing ‘Live at the Liverpool Philharmonic’ [recorded in 2019] for him to consider how Squeeze could get better still.
“I was very, very analytical about what we were doing and what we could do better,” he syas. “I think over time, since Owen [Biddle, bassist and producer] joined and we’re a nine-piece band now with Danica Dora and Leon, we’ve changed the concept of what Squeeze is. We’re now a really strong vocal group, and that shows on ‘Trixies’. We did more arrangements because we can sing them, and that's going to lean through to what we’re doing now.
“That’s been such a melodic gift for us to work with, because previously it’s just been me and Chris, and that’s been our sound, and a great sound it is. But to have all that other stuff happening around is really incredible and it’s like a new career, and we can do it really well now — concentrate on getting everything right and working really hard so it sounds effortless.”
The Tried, Tested, and Trixies Tour gets underway in Glasgow on November 12, wrapping at the Brighton Centre on December 5. Fans can look forward to hearing songs from ‘Trixies’, all the hits and probably a few surprise deep cuts. “It’s amazing to be doing such a big tour at this time in our lives,” Tilbrook says.
“I think it connects to a few things. It connects to where our career is. It also connects to the fact that a lot of the older guard now are not working anymore, so we are now the old guard. We’d better be able to step up. And we can.”
Squeeze Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu November 12 2026 - GLASGOW OVO Hydro
Fri November 13 2026 - BLACKPOOL Opera House
Sat November 14 2026 - NOTTINGHAM Motorpoint Arena
Mon November 16 2026 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE O2 City Hall
Tue November 17 2026 - STOCKTON Globe
Thu November 19 2026 - HULL Connexin Live
Fri November 20 2026 - LEEDS First Direct Bank Arena
Sat November 21 2026 - LIVERPOOL M&S Bank Arena Liverpool
Mon November 23 2026 - MANCHESTER O2 Apollo
Thu November 26 2026 - LONDON O2 Arena
Fri November 27 2026 - CARDIFF Utilita Arena Cardiff
Sat November 28 2026 - BIRMINGHAM Utilita Arena Birmingham
Mon November 30 2026 - SWANSEA Building Society Arena
Tue December 01 2026 - PLYMOUTH Arena
Thu December 03 2026 - PORTSMOUTH Guildhall
Fri December 04 2026 - BOURNEMOUTH BIC
Sat December 05 2026 - BRIGHTON Centre
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