Begging's Not My Business

Squeeze : The Knack

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Spring is the season of rebirth and in the Spring of 1979, Squeeze bounced back from their dreadful John Cale produced debut album with Cool For Cats, a pop album full of catchy songs about sex obsessed young men and the trouble they find. The album contains four U.K. hit singles, launching the band into the spotlight. The most memorable of the songs is "Up the Junction", the last of the tunes the band recorded for the album. 

Glenn Tilbrook recalls to The Guardian :

I came up with the little keyboard melody that Jools plays at the beginning, just before I sing: “I never thought it would happen with me and the girl from Clapham.” We made the video in the kitchen of John Lennon’s old house, where he’d done the Imagine video, with the white piano and the door that read: “This is not here.” What a place to visit when you’re starting out! We’d spent all day making the video for Cool for Cats, and had had quite a few beers. Then the director said: “Oh yeah – and we’re going to do Up the Junction, too.” That’s why we look so bleary.

Chris Difford adds :

I never “got a job with Stanley, who said I’d come in handy”, but I loved those Ian Dury-type rhyming couplets. The line “I’d beg for some forgiveness, but begging’s not my business” still makes me chuckle. It sums up male stubbornness.

I actually bought the album after 1980's Argybargy and found a lot of the lyrics sophomoric; the keyboards intrusive. Almost every song is about sex. Of course the average age of the five members was 22. Critical acclaim, which would include comparisons to Lennon and McCartney, were still a year away. 

"I don't particularly want to be taken seriously by the NME or anybody like that," Glenn Tilbrook told Smash Hits in March of 1979.

"No, neither do I," Chris Difford agreed. "It doesn't worry me personally whether people take us seriously or not. We'll either get through to people or we won't. I don't think there's much we can do to influence that course of events in so far as releasing records that we think will be taken as serious artistic statements".

Give The Dog A Bone

Squeeze : Cool For Cats

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On March 9, 1979 Squeeze released the single "Cool For Cats" b/w a reworked version of "Model", from their debut album. It would enter the U.K. charts at #33 on March 18 and peak at U.K. #2. Only the following single, "Up the Junction", would score so high. Guitarist and lyricist Chris Difford sings lead on this track, sounding a bit like a Cockney man telling stories in a pub.

The title is a reference to the UK TV series Cool for Cats, which ran from 1956 to 1961. In the September 1979 New Music magazine, Chris Difford explained: "I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase 'Cool For Cats,' but it was the first Rock 'n' Roll television show in England during 1959. That's where the album and single title originated - I just worked it into some personal experiences within the lyrical content."

On most Squeeze songs, Difford first wrote lyrics and Glenn Tillbrook wrote the music." One where it happened the other way round was "Cool For Cats", Difford tells Classic Pop Magazine. " Glenn had the music for that one and didn’t have a lyric idea, so he gave it to me and I started writing an idea. I sang it and it became a hit but, like all things in Squeeze, it wasn’t planned, it just happened."

My Top Ten : Chris Difford of Squeeze

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In 1979, to help promote the album Cool For Cats,  Chris Difford provided Smash Hits Magazine with a fairly eclectic list of his ten favorite songs which we can see now thanks to Brian at Like Punk Never Happened.