The ‘physicalist’ Squeeze in 1982: compilation and disco medley

In this first section we focus on two ‘physicalist’ products issued in 1982, taking them as a platform from which to analyse in detail the ‘formalist’ content that made Squeeze a consistent and distinctive entity.

Issued in 1982, and coinciding with the band’s dissolution, Singles 45s and Under (Squeeze 1982, henceforth Singles) was the first compilation of Squeeze, issued on the record label A&M. Their eponymous first studio album appeared in 1978, the first of five studio albums issued annually until 1982. Named Squeeze in 1973 or 1974, the first three studio albums consisted of the same quintet of musicians (Difford, Tilbrook, Holland, Lavis, Bentley); the final two albums in 1981 and 1982 included substitute keyboard players in Jools Holland’s place, Paul Carrack and Don Snow, respectively.Footnote ² In retrospect, Squeeze’s former manager Miles Copeland III thought that Squeeze ‘from the start were really two bands’, Difford and Tilbrook on one hand, Holland the other (Copeland III, Reference Copeland2021, p. 117).

Singles gathered twelve tracks – seven on the vinyl first side, five on side two – eleven of which had been issued both as the titular singles and as tracks on their five studio albums, with the twelfth track, ‘Annie Get Your Gun’, a single which first appeared on the 1982 compilation itself. Single, album, and compilation were the three ‘physicalist’ products in which their studio recordings appeared or reappeared: Squeeze first issued a concert recording in 1990. However, Singles was an inconsistent product. The first three tracks of side two in the British and European editions ran ‘Is that Love’, ‘Tempted’, ‘Labelled with Love’, whereas the American edition ran ‘If I Didn’t Love You’, ‘Is that Love’, ‘Tempted’: thus, ‘Labelled with Love’ and ‘If I Didn’t Love You’ each appeared in only one, territory-specific edition.Footnote ³

Singles is decisive in our narrative, providing the template for the re-recordings of 2010. As a compilation it made decisions about inclusion and exclusion which, in time, correlated with decisions about concert performance: in our second section, we identify them as new works that became Squeeze’s legacy or heritage. Far outselling the five studio albums (Difford et al. Reference Difford, Tilbrook and Drury2004, p. 115, also Difford interview), Singles eventually achieved ‘platinum’ disc sales in both the UK and US creating, as James Griffiths says, ‘the illusion that Squeeze’s 1978-82 period was strewn with big hit records’, adding that:

If Singles was a particular and familiar ‘physicalist’ construct that repositioned earlier recordings, the B-side of the 1981 single ‘Labelled with Love’ (Squeeze 1981), ‘Squabs on Forty Fab’, also repositioned many of the very same recordings into a quite different form. Apparently made principally by Tilbrook, this was a gathering of tracks arranged into one medley, taking its cue from the immediately contemporaneous appearance – and popularity – of recordings called ‘Stars on 45’. Framed by elements of ‘Take Me I’m Yours’, across its 4 mins 46 seconds the track passed swiftly through ‘Cool for Cats’, ‘Up the Junction’, ‘Is That Love’, ‘Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)’, ‘Another Nail from My Heart’, ‘Slap and Tickle’, and ‘Goodbye Girl’, so that seven of the tracks selected were a year later to constitute the entire first vinyl side of Singles, with ‘Is That Love’ on side two.

These disco medleys took sound recordings as ‘formalist’ elements, arranged in order and aligned rhythmically. Original harmonic keys remained, so that the tracks contained abrupt modulations. ‘Spotting the difference’ was already at work: with ‘Squabs’ assuming a propulsive 140 bpm ‘Cool for Cats’, for example, is close to its original 144 bpm but ‘Up the Junction’, originally 120 bpm, is amusingly faster. Indeed with great wit, Tilbrook replaces a notable bar of Lavis’s drum beat in the original ‘Up the Junction’ (0:09–10) with two bars of drum-machine beats and a distant voice calling out, ‘All aboard!’ (‘Squabs’, 1:20–24).

Even on the A-side, when issued as a single and removed from its position as track three on side two of the vinyl album East Side Story, ‘Labelled with Love’ lost a significant detail: in its original album position, it cut abruptly into the previous track, ‘F-Hole’, at the point in ‘F-Hole’ where reference was made to country music, the words ‘I learned to play her favourite country songs/With one or two chords always going wrong’. These two ways of hearing ‘Labelled with Love’ point to a more general principle for StD as re-recording, that spotting the difference implies hearing more than one object across time and place. ‘Formalist’ object, the song or track, finds itself, as Barron’s ‘text-thing’, in differing ‘physicalist’ contexts. In what follows, we account for the ‘formalist’ aspects of Squeeze’s early output – voice, words, chords – and the process of conveying those aspects to the ‘physicalist’ recordings. As we shall see, the sheer labour of re-recording is a strict attendance to those ‘formalist’ aspects.

‘Labelled with Love’ is an imitation of American country music, but its words are a good example of early Squeeze. The theme of the track is a woman’s memories, and her relationship to alcohol: its three verses and repeated chorus contain many specific details. Furthermore, the words make consistent use of the half-rhyme or pararhyme, for example, in the first verse: bottle/hovel, mittens/sickens, pictures/fixture, reminders/china.Footnote ⁴

Consistent with James Griffiths’ conclusion (Griffiths Reference Griffiths2021, p. 264), we point to three elements of Squeeze’s output: Chris Difford’s words, especially in the band’s early years, the particular performative detail of the two voices doubled at the octave, and Glenn Tilbrook’s attention to harmony, especially a predilection for harmonic excursions. If all three aspects concern only Difford and Tilbrook, then the claim to originality resides with those two individuals, the remainder of the band supporting musicians, including expert musicians such as Jools Holland and drummer Gilson Lavis, both competent to the point of virtuosity. That is not to say that musicians and producers don’t make crucial contributions, but that those contributions are not sustained claims to originality.

The doubled-octave vocal is a coincidence, but no less distinctive for that. It’s partly about the octave distance but also, more importantly, about vocal character. Its locus classicus is perhaps a track not found on StD: ‘In Quintessence’, opening East Side Story. The effect sometimes appears during a track, as in ‘Is that Love?’, almost as a self-reference.Footnote ⁵ For StD, the voices’ ageing is a substantial issue, but Tilbrook and Difford maintained their vocal qualities and, of course, as we shall discuss, the songs continued to be performed in concert in the period since the first recordings. On re-recording, Tilbrook: ‘It’s just absolutely a matter of luck that we can still sing in the same key, and we sound the same when we sing’ (Ragogna Reference Ragogna2010). Difford:

Difford was in Squeeze a lyricist who supplied words to be ‘set’, the classical-music term, by composer Tilbrook, ‘like Elton John and Bernie Taupin’ (Copeland III Reference Copeland2021, p. 58). In the early Squeeze works, Difford’s words created a particular ‘poetic’ world largely by subject matter but also by consistent use of pararhyme. Of the StD tracks, ‘Slap and Tickle’ is its most sustained demonstration, but distinctive passages such as the openings of ‘Up the Junction’ and ‘Cool for Cats’ illustrate these poetic principles.

Tilbrook describes an imaginary compilation of Squeeze tracks entitled A Fistful of Chords (Difford et al. Reference Difford, Tilbrook and Drury2004, pp. 83 and 93) and his attention focuses on melody (arising from his own voice) and harmony, with an inevitable attention to voice-leading. Tilbrook’s attention to harmony is not especially unusual, since ‘song’’s premise of voice and instrumental accompaniment naturally tends in tonal music towards melody and harmony. However, Tilbrook is clearly focussed on harmonic exploration or excursion: Tilbrook has performed ‘Friday on My Mind’ by The Easybeats (1966) (Tilbrook, 2016), arguably the most harmonically daring of all pop hits. Tilbrook’s harmonic excursions can be understood as developing out of an interest in the sound of the juxtaposition of parallel minor and major, and its consequences; Tilbrook also very occasionally crosses into harmonic experimentation for its own sake. Of ‘Daphne’ on Ridiculous (Squeeze, 1995), Tilbrook commented: ‘Throughout my career I’ve had an ongoing love of music that changes from major to minor keys in a short space of time. I really like the mood it evokes’ (Difford et al. Reference Difford, Tilbrook and Drury2004, p. 213). Of the tracks on StD, tonic major juxtaposed with tonic minor is heard with great variety in ‘Is that Love’ from East Side Story (and StD), including C as relative major of A minor (e.g. at 0:38–40: precise references to StD versions where applicable) as well as A major as its parallel major (e.g. 0:27). Chord V, E, is briefly tonicized for ‘legs up with a book and a drink’ (0:58–1:04). The song concludes (2:27) with the basic expression of mixture, the tierce de Picardie. Other space-expanding mixture chords are heard in the gospel chorus section of ‘Some Fantastic Place’ (2:53–3:28), but its expansions begin in the guitar solo immediately preceding (2:19–52). There, E♭–A♭ is inserted into a G major context (2:26–30), the A♭ leading as a Neapolitan chord to D (2:29–30) thence to G. For the entry of a chorus, the music then (2:53) drops to E♭, ♭6 of G, for a self-contained section mostly transposed from the guitar solo, but deviating for ♭VII, a D♭ chord (3:13) that sets of a brief expansion of IV–V, A♭-B♭, at 3:19–27. To return to the home key and the song itself, Am–D is abruptly inserted (3:29) after E♭ as a temporary tonic. Outside StD, but important to note, Tilbrook also rarely goes beyond mixture and its consequences and into more complex harmonic exploration that loosens a confident sense of central key area: ‘F-hole’ from East Side Story and ‘House of Love’ from Play (Squeeze, 1991) provide examples.

The bridge section of ‘Up the Junction’ (1:11–30) illustrates both Difford and Tilbrook at their most inventive. Difford’s half-rhymes help create a world where something isn’t quite right: winter–bitter, tenner–better, ready–telly, fire–inside her. Tilbrook invents a passage of harmonic engineering to reach a key a tone below the home key, from E down to D, in order then to return to the key by an upward elevating modulation (1:46–50).Footnote ⁶ But there’s also a chromatic element: starting from the relative minor of E (C#m), at its heart is a minor-third shift, from B minor to D minor (1:17–20: ‘tenner each week to make her better’), steering from the sharp world of E to the flat world of F. ‘A fine moment in the structure of the song is the use of minor chords during the middle eight: pure genius’ (Difford and Tilbrook Reference Difford and Tilbrook2002). Conversely, the return to E, a modulation upwards, is easily achieved by a double plagal: D-A-E (1:46–50).

Tilbrook is also a punctilious guitarist, whose solos often seem an ideal insertion, worthy of exact replication or at most minor adaptation in concert presentation. This should not be underestimated as a way into understanding StD. Tilbrook makes a distinction between ‘improvised’ solos, usually blues-based – although these were his starting-point as a guitarist and something he’s perfectly able to do – and ‘composed’ solos, which he prefers: ‘I’m not that good at improvising stuff, so when I do a solo I will try and compose it’ (Bryan Reference Bryan2021: quote at 5:56–6:06). Asked whether he can play the solo of ‘Another Nail in my Heart’ ‘at the drop of a hat’, Tilbrook replies, ‘Oh yes, yes: it goes like that, so it goes like that’, a humorous line that yet offers a rationale for strict re-recording (Bryan Reference Bryan2021: quote at 6:56–7:00).

Our three marks of distinction – words, voices, and music (notably chords) – belong to the compositional and performative realms, or the two ‘allographic’ aspects of a recorded rock work, according to Albin Zak III: the song and the arrangement. However, a fourth element can be claimed – ‘autographic’, in Zak’s terms – based on experience in the recording studio, resulting in the band’s signature sound (Zak Reference Zak2001, p. 24). The voice is unusual in itself, belonging as melody, in the ‘formalist’ domain, but relying upon the ‘physicalist’ recording for its physical presence.

Recording had an effect on Squeeze’s sound from the start, shifting them from a standard rock band setup (drums, bass, guitar, keyboard, voice) towards a sound inclusive of electronic elements. The shift was initially pragmatic: ‘Take Me I’m Yours’ (Squeeze 1978) had a backing track using synthesisers because producer John Cale was absent and Squeeze continued working in the studio without him (Difford Reference Difford2017, p. 83). Musical autodidacts, the band now had to learn how to use the equipment, and Difford in particular was uncomfortable with this change in direction at first, but he later felt it was a ‘genius move’ as it ‘helped them stand out from the crowd’ (Difford interview). James Griffiths observes that ‘sonic experimentation was always a priority for Glenn’ (Griffiths Reference Griffiths2021, p. 105).

Three aspects of Squeeze’s signature sound developed over the first few records after ‘Take Me I’m Yours’: combinations of instruments, combinations of percussion, and panning and phasing. In terms of instrumental arrangement, multiple keyboard instruments or synthesisers playing complementary parts were often used, alongside merged combinations of other instruments playing in unison. Harmonisers or Artificial Double Tracking were used to create composite sounds (such as the drums on ‘Up the Junction’) or simulate double-tracked vocals (Jones interview). Examples are the unison guitar and bass, with added punctuating marimba, in the opening of ‘Another Nail in My Heart’ from Argybargy (0:00–0:07), the unison bass and piano in the bridge sections of ‘Is That Love’ from East Side Story (0:47–1:07; 1:49–2:10), and the distinctive use of organ and piano in ‘Black Coffee in Bed’ from Sweets from a Stranger, heard clearly in the opening (0:00–00:9), but also used at key moments as an answering phrase in the verses throughout (e.g. 0:22–0:26). The saxophone solo in ‘Hourglass’ on StD was originally on Babylon and On a remarkably convincing synthesised imitation.

The second aspect of the signature sound was the combination of different percussion elements, most often ‘real’ drumming and the CR-68 Roland drum-machine (Jones interview), but sometimes other elements as well such as the ‘bottle set-up’ used in ‘Goodbye Girl’ (Cool for Cats, Squeeze 1979 clearly heard at the start of the single version, or the marimba (Jones interview) used in the opening of ‘Another Nail in My Heart’ and at the end of choruses in ‘Tempted’ (East Side Story) (1:15–1:20; 2:25–2:30).

The final and perhaps most common aspect of the signature sound of the early years of Squeeze was the use of extreme panning and phasing effects. In the opening of the ‘Goodbye Girl’ single, for example, the sound of bottles panned hard left and right is heard, alongside other percussion tracks sitting between them in the mix. Like the double-octave voices, these moments of extreme panning are occasionally used throughout a track, particularly on the Cool for Cats album, but are more often used to delineate song sections and create contrast throughout the track. On those tracks included on StD, new sections are often marked by panning tricks, for example the start of different sections of the instrumental outro marked by drum panning in ‘Slap and Tickle’ (3:00–3:08; 3:22–3:24) and the second half of the guitar solo in ‘Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)’ featuring alternating guitar notes appearing in opposite speakers (1:59–2:13); the outro of ‘Take Me I’m Yours’ (2:42–end) and ‘Cool for Cats’ (2:47–2:54) marked by extreme panning and phasing, with additional panning and phasing effects in the solo of ‘Cool for Cats’ (01:25–01:53), and drum fills panned at key structural points (as we will see below in ‘Tempted’). On StD, these distinctive panning effects of the original early recordings are almost all faithfully replicated, with only a few exceptions: the StD ‘Black Coffee in Bed’, for example, contains panning tricks in the drum fills towards the end of the track (e.g. 5:24–5:26) not present in the original recording. As we shall discuss below, StD to some extent has its own panning aesthetic, extending the originality of the early Squeeze production style into the reimagined later tracks.

Our study has now attended to Squeeze as a distinctive entity, captured in a selection of recordings in 1982. Were the band to have ended at that point, our study would remain historical: an interesting body of work worthy of retrospective attention.

1982–2010: Squeeze the legacy act and the lure of re-recording

However, Squeeze kept going. Looking back to the 1990s, Difford thought that

In this mediating section, we focus on the tension between the recording of new work alongside the presentation of familiar work in concert: it is from that tension that for Squeeze the idea of re-recording became a valid proposition.

Emerging during the 1960s as inventors of sound recordings as new works, rock bands that stayed together rather than split up – The Rolling Stones as opposed to The Beatles – had over time the strong option of building their concert performances on back catalogue with its proven track record:Footnote ⁷ the resulting practice has been interpreted in terms of ‘legacy’ and ‘heritage’. Andy Bennett usefully draws out the contrast in rock music between the production of new works and their subsequent preservation in continued concert presentation:

The tension between producing new work and presenting back catalogue can be mapped out for Squeeze between 1982 and 2010. Following the 1982 split, there were two subsequent iterations of Squeeze. The second lasted from 1985–99 and generated, as sound recordings, seven studio albums, two live albums (1990, 1997), and two compilations (especially 1992). The third began in 2007 and remains active at the time of writing: it has generated three studio albums, two live albums, and one compilation, although one of the latter studio albums is our collection of re-recordings, StD. Footnote ⁸ Thus, one question that haunts StD is this: of the album’s fourteen tracks, why are eleven found on the 1982 compilation, with only three others added from between 1982 and 2010? Put quantitatively, the sixty-two tracks contained on the band’s first five albums between 1978 and 1982 had an 18% chance of appearing on StD twenty-eight years later, while the ninety-three tracks contained on the eight albums between 1982 and 2010 had just over a 3% chance.Footnote ⁹ StD presents a band that issued several durable songs in its first five years, followed by a prolonged and potentially dispiriting dearth: live performances became ‘greatest hits’ presentations with new tracks sneaked in. Difford’s memoir captures two attitudes to legacy performance: regret and obligation. On the one hand, writing of Difford and Tilbrook’s appearance at Glastonbury in 2017, Difford thought they ‘raced through our hits like men with trains to catch. I think we were both looking forward to some new songs joining the canon of our acoustic repertoire’ (Difford Reference Difford2017, p. 303). On the other hand, the audience reigns: ‘As I get older, I understand that we have a contract with those who buy tickets to see us. The songs they want to hear must be in our set and we must play them no matter what’. (p. 260)

‘We must play them’: Squeeze’s commitment to their legacy can be observed in the tracks chosen for concert performance. In the invaluable statistics gathered together on the website setlist.fm (accessed 27.5.26), the top fourteen tracks played (albeit between 1975 and 2025) are essentially the 1982 compilation. Eleven of the twelve tracks of the 1982 compilation are presented between 448 and 593 times; ‘Hourglass’, the 1987 hit single, eventually also re-recorded for StD, ‘invades’ as the twelfth song, played 487 times. The two tracks included on the US and UK iterations of the 1982 compilation – ‘If I Didn’t Love You’ and ‘Labelled with Love’ – battle it out for positions 13 and 14, with 315 and 261 performances respectively. Curiously not including ‘If I Didn’t Love You’, StD adds to the 1982 compilation ‘Hourglass’ and two further tracks: ‘Some Fantastic Place’ (19th in set-list terms, played 261 times) and, also from the Some Fantastic Place album, ‘Loving You Tonight’, well down the list at position 65 and played live only 30 times.

Through those years of concerts, Tilbrook felt that Squeeze had become ‘complacent’ (Cashmere Reference Cashmere2015, passage at 6.38–42), and part of his solution was to build the band for StD and subsequent concert performance around his own band The Fluffers, which included drummer Simon Hanson and keyboard player Stephen Large in the positions originally occupied by Lavis and Holland.Footnote ¹⁰ Just before StD, Andrew Jones had produced the debut recording of Glenn Tilbrook and the Fluffers in 2009. Thus, Tilbrook’s answer to Miles Copeland’s issue of Squeeze’s being ‘really two bands’ was to make it his own.Footnote ¹¹ The combination of a reformed Squeeze in 2007 and the lack of synchronisation income that might arise from sound recording pointed towards the idea of re-recording the 1982 compilation. We shall discuss this idea first in general terms then as a model for Squeeze.

What, then, is a re-recording? Defining ‘re-recording’ as ‘the action or practice of recording something again’, the OED finds a quotation from The Times in 1951: ‘The recording and re-recording of standard works in the orchestral repertory continues unabated’. In classical music, re-recording standard repertory is a regular occurrence: the one work recorded by different orchestras with the same conductor, by the same orchestra with different conductors, by the same orchestra with the same conductor. Also in broad terms, the recording of a concert performance can qualify as re-recording; thus, Lucinda Williams included twelve out of thirteen tracks from World without Tears (Reference Williams2003) on Live at the Fillmore (Reference Williams2005) while, in the studio, she also re-recorded Sweet Old World (Reference Williams1992) as This Sweet Old World (Reference Williams2017). Resurrecting long distant albums via re-recording in the form of a concert was also undertaken by Brian Wilson, without Beach Boys, with Brian Wilson Presents Pet Sounds Live (Reference Wilson2002), then the lost album Smile, at first through concert performance then a 2004 studio reconstruction. Re-recording the Electric Light Orchestra in 2012, Jeff Lynne seems to have been prompted by curiosity to ‘have another go’ (Bosso Reference Bosso2012). Buzzcocks (2011), The Wedding Present (2017), and Gang of Four (2005) revisited albums and tracks following concert performances thirty years after their first appearance (Dooley Reference Dooley2017; Hogan Reference Hogan2011; Neff Reference Neff2017). In these examples, alongside issues of ownership, the motivation seems to be deliberately to present previous material in a more contemporary sonic setting: our ‘strict re-recording’ is considerably more constricted as a proposition. Here, the assertion or reclamation of rights motivates a significant number of examples, including, for example, Question Mark and the Mysterians (1997), Def Leppard (2013), and Taylor Swift (Reference Swift2021). For Frank Sinatra (Sinatra’s Sinatra, Reference Sinatra1963), Little Richard (The Most Dynamic Entertainer, Reference Richard1965), and the Everly Brothers (The Very Best of the Everly Brothers, 1964), shifting to a different record label motivated re-recordings.Footnote ¹²

Specifically addressing the motivation for StD, not long after its release, Tilbrook used images of incarceration and emancipation:Footnote ¹³

However, elsewhere Tilbrook described the benefit of re-recording in terms of financial benefit:

As was explained to us by two sources close to the band, first, in the 1970s, copyright in the master recordings was assigned to the record label following which ‘typically the artist would be getting a royalty based on retail price and typically it would be between, at the lowest end, 8% or 9% and at the higher end 15% or 16% of retail price’ (Anonymous interviewee 2, and see Osborne Reference Osborne2023a, passim). If we assume Squeeze were receiving around 10% of retail royalty, then re-recording would increase that figure dramatically: in the streaming world, while 30% is claimed by the Digital Service Provider, 70% belongs to Squeeze. Secondly, in the case of synchronisation rights, use in film or advertising and so on, 50% royalty would double to 100%, as was put to us by another source close to the band (and see Osborne Reference Osborne2023a, pp. 173–4 and Osborne Reference Osborne2023b, pp. 259–60). It is important to note that re-recording is a feasible possibility. As one of our sources explained: ‘Typically 1970s record contracts have a re-recording restriction under which the artist undertook as a contractual term not to re-record’ for ‘typically three years. The reason that restriction is there is simply that EMI doesn’t want its version of the song, which it owns in perpetuity, to be undermined by a separate re-recording of the track’ (Anonymous interviewee 1). Osborne (Reference Osborne2023a, p. 184) points out that, following the success of Taylor Swift’s re-recordings, Universal Music ‘has doubled the length of its re-recording terms’. Specifically for Squeeze, ‘there wasn’t a problem because although there was a re-recording restriction in the original contract with A&M records, it had long since expired’ (Anonymous interviewee 1).

Quite separate from recording income, the extent to which Difford and Tilbrook signed away their publishing rights remains unclear. Publishing deals that worked against the artist’s interest were not unusual at the time – one of our informants described this in general terms, the other as more specifically tied to the relationship between Squeeze and manager Miles Copeland – and, under advice from informants and experts, we found it methodologically advisable to keep publishing to one side and to focus on the specific issues around sound recordings and their re-recording. However, for Difford and Tilbrook, it appears that confusion set in early. Six StD songs (‘Take Me I’m Yours’, ‘Goodbye Girl’, ‘Slap and Tickle’, ‘Cool for Cats’, ‘Another Nail from My Heart’, and ‘Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)’) were published by Javeberry Music, bought by Rondor Music in 1997 (Pfenninger, Reference Pfenningern.d.), the publishing arm of Squeeze’s record label for many years, A&M. With the 1982 compilation published as sheet music in Reference Squeeze1994, ‘Tempted’ is one of four contemporaneous tracks assigned to Bugle Songs, as compared with Javeberry for earlier tracks and Difford and Tilbrook themselves for the subsequent ‘Annie Get Your Gun’. Thus, according to Chris Difford: ‘Even at the very beginning [of Squeeze’s career] there [were] two publishers: there was Javeberry, which was bought by Rondor, and then there was Rondor who covered just [the] B-sides [and “Annie Get Your Gun”], which was really confusing’ (Difford interview). Such complexity was neatly summed up by Difford in concluding: ‘it’s a really complicated kettle of fish, this, because there’s so many different publishing deals, so many different copyright deals. It’s a real mess’ (Difford interview).

Be that as it may, re-recording presented itself as a solution to what seemed to Tilbrook an unreasonable situation as regards ownership of sound recordings. How to go about it? When asked, Difford couldn’t name a model or precedent for StD, but knew that the idea was one that had been tried (Difford interview). Producer Andrew Jones had considerable experience in strict re-recording, but in a different direction:

Jones was inspired by the work of Replay Heaven (www.replayheaven.com, accessed 17.5.26), a production company that specialises in ‘sample replays – accurately re-recording sound-alikes of existing pieces of music, making them sound virtually identical to the original’, adding that

Jones’s reference to a service that arises from sampling is another indication that, while Squeeze’s songs and original recordings belong to a distant past, the process of re-recording avails itself of the technology and practice available in the recent past (Jones interview).

Tilbrook in press interviews more than once referenced the band formed in 2000 by Brian Wilson to present Beach Boys material first recorded in the 1960s (Cashmere Reference Cashmere2015; Ragogna Reference Ragogna2010; Spitz Reference Spitz2015). As far back as 1984, two years after the singles compilation, Tilbrook was observing the Beach Boys albeit as a path not to follow: ‘It was like being The Beach Boys singing “California Girls” for the rest of their lives. It feels silly to be forever singing songs that you wrote when you were younger’ (Griffiths Reference Griffiths2021, p. 249). However, by 2000, seeing Wilson’s approach to The Beach Boys’ back catalogue in live performance, Tilbrook was impressed by ‘perfect versions’ (Ragogna Reference Ragogna2010) and ‘how immaculately they do those things’ (Cashmere Reference Cashmere2015, passage at 6:21–35). As Tilbrook said of StD: ‘We can’t own the original recordings, but we can own flawless re-recordings that are the next best thing’ (Tilbrook Reference Tilbrook2010). Compared with Jones’s models, what was perhaps important for Tilbrook about Brian Wilson is that the project was both a touring band (Live at the Roxy Theatre, Reference Wilson2000, Brian Wilson Presents Pet Sounds Live, Reference Wilson2002) and a re-recording (Brian Wilson Presents Smile, Reference Wilson2004).

Eleven tracks on StD were thus decided simply by replication of Singles (Jones interview), supplemented as we have seen by three others: ‘Hourglass’, a 1987 hit single, and ‘Some Fantastic Place’ and ‘Loving You Tonight’, both from Some Fantastic Place (1993). While the process of re-recording was, as we shall show, complex, the arrangement of the album as album was disarmingly straightforward: the tracks on StD appear by title in alphabetical order. However, the alphabetical arrangement does underline the idea that StD was hardly planned as an album to be heard from start to end; indeed alphabetical arrangement might facilitate track selection for future use and possible revenue generation.

The ‘physicalist’ Squeeze in 2010: Spot the Difference, re-recording ‘Tempted’

In this final section, we analyse how re-recording was undertaken and focus on the track ‘Tempted’ as ‘formalist’ work, ‘formalist-physicalist’ sound recording, and ‘physicalist’ product. Strict re-recording is a curious phenomenon where both ‘formalist’ and ‘physicalist’ elements – ‘text-things’ – are treated with the most demanding ‘formalist’ rigour.

Reflecting the lapse of time from the original recordings, re-recording presented significant challenges for the replication of the sound of the original recordings, including choice of source recording, obsolescence of musical instruments, and recreating studio decisions made in the distant past. While Gracyk (Reference Gracyk1996, pp. 21–8) argues that all formats and remasters are equally valid versions of the autographic recorded work (as long as they derive from materials of the original master tape), when making an autographic forgery like StD, one particular instance of an autographic work has to be selected for replication, to become the ‘originating moment’ for the remake. (Middleton Reference Middleton and Talbot2000, p. 83)

The issue raised by subsequent iteration of recording, for example, in compilations, is considerable: for the fourteen tracks on StD taken together, our database of recordings reached 189 separate tracks. There was a wide range of variables from one version of a track to another: structural variations between the single release and album releases, and variations in length, panning, and compression levels, which shifted from format to format and from one compilation to the other. Andrew Jones described a pragmatic approach. Because the new recordings were going to be made digitally, CDs were used as source tracks, which meant that the production team were already dealing with slightly different mixes and mastering from the original releases, most of which were on vinyl and tape. Choosing from the many different CD releases of these often re-released recordings, the ultimate source-track was chosen according to clarity of sound, rather than the ‘best’ version, or the most representative version of the band’s sound. No attempt was made to recreate the likely recording process of the originals (where the band played at least some of the parts together in real time, adding overdubs later). Instead, an artificial click track was created at the start of whichever original CD track they were using as reference, then each instrumental part was recorded separately using the CD as a guide track (Jones interview).

Recreating the signature sound required major effort in three areas: the acquisition or replication of vintage instruments, particularly percussion and electronic keyboards, the recreation of the accumulated effect of various recording manipulations, and the final balancing and placement of all the individual recording elements in the mix. Obsolescence of sound arises from age, comparable to the ageing of voices mentioned above, and proved challenging, particularly in the case of the drums and the electronic or keyboard instruments. Although Tilbrook still owned his Roland CR-68 drum machine, used in several early tracks, the ‘live’ drums for the early tracks were originally performed on a Ludwig Octaplus kit. This was no longer available so it was recreated by the hire of eight concert toms. Various keyboards were required, some of which were also no longer available. The lack of a Polymoog and some uncertainty over what keyboard voices were used originally meant they had to attempt to recreate the distinctive sounds of these keyboards through experimentation and manipulation of several different sources. Producer Jones was responsible for matching the keyboard sounds, which proved one of the most time-consuming aspects of the project.

Depending on how the original instruments were recorded, Jones was trying simultaneously to recreate the sound of the individual instrument as played in the studio and any recording manipulation it may have had applied to it before the final mix. These recording manipulations were to some extent lost in the mists of time: Tilbrook recalled many precise details, remembering, for example, that Squeeze always used a 30-millisecond delay on automatic double tracking but, even when techniques were known, without the original recording equipment, modern digital methods of reaching the likely effects had to be used. It was not always clear whether the sounds of the instruments were right until the mixing stage, when small shifts in balance could have a huge impact on the overall sound of the track: getting the different instruments to sit right in the mix, as they had in the original, was the other hardest aspect of the project. At the end of the process, the whole track was mixed and then compared with the guide track by playing the two simultaneously and jumping back and forth between them, tweaking the balance and placement and panning of parts until they matched as closely as possible. The difficult process of recreating the tracks highlights the importance of timbre in the final recorded product – not only the distinct timbres of the individual instruments (and voices) in those particular sessions but also the role of technology in determining the overall sound of the track.Footnote ¹⁶ Jones and Difford both referred to the key role of timbral features, with Jones disappointed that he didn’t get the keyboard sounds quite right, and Difford commenting on the depth of sound being different: ‘it doesn’t matter how many plug-ins you use, you’re never going to get the sound of a two-inch tape’ (Difford interview).

Between recording and re-recording, the tracks contained on StD had followed two distinct journeys: in concert performance, and in iterations of recordings among which were singles, albums, compilations, downloadable tracks, and streamed tracks. As re-recording, StD attempts to place a retrospective lid on these highly mobile tendencies. The track ‘Tempted’ will provide a vantage point for observing these movements. As before, we account for ‘formalist’ aspects of ‘Tempted’ – chords and voice – and the process of conveying those aspects to the ‘physicalist’ recordings, finally considering ‘Tempted’ as a ‘physical’ product.

Understood as a ‘formalist’ composition consisting of words and music, ‘Tempted’ works as a verse, pre-chorus section, then chorus, the whole repeated, then a third verse with the pre-chorus importantly excised. An introduction based on the chorus opens the song, while the coda uses the same material.Footnote ¹⁷ In B major, the song’s harmonic plan can be described as a tonal excursion that continuously evades the closure of the authentic (or perfect) cadence. Indeed, the only full cadence is found mid-chorus: V/V–V–I, harmonically final but formally ongoing (1:04). Repeated, V/V is replaced by its diatonic counterpart, ii (1:14), leading to the mixture chord iv en route as a plagal to I (1:17). In the verse, mixture reigns, as major I gives way to minor i, IV to iv (0:20). The pre-chorus uses both mixture (IV–VI♭–I: 0:28–0:34) and much plagal: not only IV (E: at start 0:28 and at end 0:46), not only IV/IV (A: 0:36), but also IV/IV of IV (D: 0:38). The latter pair form the basis of important chromatic bass motions: E–E#–F# ascending (0:35–9), F#–F–E, descending (0:44–6). During this exploratory pre-chorus, the home chord, B, now appears in the plagal context (0:33: ‘billboards and the buildings’). B major is asserted in a diatonic bass descent at verse’s opening (0:10–14), altered for the chorus into a chromatic descent, A# replaced by A♮ as I leads to IV then back to I (0:48–52). The latter forms the basis for the coda, the recording fading at just under four minutes: an ascending vocal line (d–D#–F#–G#–B), perhaps imitative of Motown group The Temptations, is heard at 3:55–57.

As a ‘physicalist’ commercial recording, ‘Tempted’ first appeared on East Side Story, produced by Elvis Costello. This was one of the times when Jools Holland left the group, replaced by Paul Carrack, who sang the lead vocal in both the original recording and on StD. However, ‘Tempted’ developed across recorded performances, both before and after East Side Story. The track has been released in two demo versions: one by Tilbrook with piano and backing vocals (The Past Has Been Bottled (Tilbrook, Reference Tilbrook2008)), one as Squeeze (Excess Moderation (Squeeze, 1996)), the latter criticised by Tilbrook as ‘ELO on a bad day’ (Difford and Tilbrook Reference Difford and Tilbrook1996). Elvis Costello’s role in taking the track from band demo to the East Side Story version has been acknowledged (Difford, Tilbrook, Drury, p. 82). Tilbrook’s demo already includes the musical essentials: melody, chords and their inversions, voice-leading progressions. The chief difference is that the link between chorus and second verse, as well as the coda, has fully fledged diminished chords (E/G/B♭: 1:11–17), eventually replaced in both the Squeeze demo and the final recording by E minor as link between C# minor and the home key (1:05–10 in the Squeeze demo, 1:14–17 in East Side Story). Also, in both demos, the G chord that connects E to B (‘laundry on the hill’) is a G7 containing F♮ (0:23–25, 0:21–23 in the Squeeze demo), to be removed in the final recording.

Between East Side Story and StD, ‘Tempted’ was regularly performed in concert (175 times, according to setlist.fm statistics). Already on the 1990 live recording A Round and a Bout (Squeeze, 1989) – this is the band with two keyboards (Holland and Matt Irving) and Keith Wilkinson on bass – the two key moments of change from the recording are in place: the third verse and the coda. The second verse remains essentially verbatim et literatim, while having to accommodate the change of Elvis Costello’s striking vocal (‘the people keep on riding’ and ‘it’s no story I can tell’).Footnote ¹⁸ It’s at the third verse that Tilbrook begins the adaptation or improvisation, gaining a welcome 5 as the focal point of his melody (♭7–5–4–5–3, 1–5–6: A Round and a Bout 3:29–35) as a change from the original’s characteristic figure (1–2–1–3–5: A Round and a Bout 2:32–38). The coda had already developed a soulful melodic aspect in the Carrack East Side Story recording, a tendency that Tilbrook subsequently extended. The coda goes to church, gospel-soul vocals and guitar, and occupying 4:15–5:20, live music’s dead end, compared with East Side Story’s 3:22–56, recorded music’s familiar fade.Footnote ¹⁹ Difford comments: ‘I’ve heard Glenn sing some wonderful versions of “Tempted” because he wrote the music and brought quite a lot of passion to it. I’ve heard Glenn sing it some nights and it makes you weep’ (Difford et al. Reference Difford, Tilbrook and Drury2004, p. 83). Countering such a readiness to ‘run with’ the musical material’s inherent potential in concert performance, the StD version of this passage (third verse: exactly at 2:31–35) replicates precisely the rendition found on East Side Story.

In terms of the ‘formalist’ aspect of the ‘physicalist’ sound recording, ‘Tempted’ follows the signature production style of Squeeze, with important structural points clearly marked by extreme panning. The first sound heard in ‘Tempted’ is an anacrusis lone tom panned hard right, which then stays in that position throughout the song. The tom is used as a sectional marker for the beginning of the verse (0:10), the beginning (0:48), and midpoint (1:03) of the chorus. In verse 2, panning interest shifts to the movement of voices across the soundbox from left to right (1:20–1:39). At the opening of chorus 2 (1:58–1:59), the tom remains hard right but is masked by an organ ‘bubble’ which pans across left to right at opening of chorus and again part way through (2:12–2:13), effectively taking the tom’s place, including at the anacrusis into verse 3 (2:31). In the final chorus the tom comes back to prominence in the mix at the end of line one (2:54) and in the very final outro section, the organ bubble and tom are heard together (3:18–3:20), then the lone tom punctuates the end of almost every line (3:24; 3:30; 3:34) except where it is replaced by a drum fill panned across the space (3:38–3:40), with the highest toms on the right, and the lowest on the left.Footnote ²⁰ It is in the domain of recording that differences can well and truly be spotted, our conclusion consistent with that of Michael Thomas Connolly on Taylor Swift’s re-recordings (Connolly Reference Connolly2025, p. 90).

‘Tempted’ had a more varied recording life than other songs included on StD. More versions of ‘Tempted’ were analysed in our study than any other StD track: seventeen in all, twelve of which were CD re-releases or remasters of the original analogue versions. Each time a song is released on a new format, or included on a new compilation, it is usually remastered from an earlier version to suit the frequency response of the new format or to fit in the overall mastering style of the compilation. Sometimes a song is officially released as ‘remastered’ (usually as part of a remastered album release) when concerted efforts are made to make an improved mix of the track than was done when CDs were first developed in the mid-1980s. Remastering affects the recording in various ways, including panning, compression, and length, which are some of the easiest aspects to alter in the remastering process. We focussed on these aspects in our analysis of the recordings, complementing close listening with music software analysis: analysing panning width through the phase analysis function in Adobe Audition, and looking at compression and tempo through lining up all tracks for comparison in Pro Tools. The distinctive panning and multiple iterations of ‘Tempted’ thus provide a good example for consideration of how the nature of the track has altered from version to version. There are very few differences between the earliest released single version of ‘Tempted’ (Squeeze, 1981) and its album iteration, the most marked being that the single version has a smaller panning width, with the opening tom appearing right midfield to the ear and visually having only a slim, slightly right-biased panning profile. There is also a brighter sound to the tom in this version. By contrast, the album version has much wider panning, both visually and when listening, with the edges of the panning field appearing at the far right and left of the speakers, and the tom has a duller sound. The single is also a second or two shorter than the album version, with the album version having a slightly longer fadeout. The single and album are also opposite in polarity, so are out of phase when played simultaneously. Bearing these differences in mind, our analysis method makes it possible to trace the two versions of ‘Tempted’ through their history of re-releases. The album version appears to have been used on Classics Volume 25 (Squeeze, 1987), Master Series (Squeeze, 1998), and the Grand Theft Auto soundtrack; the single version appears (unsurprisingly) to have been used on Singles 45s and Under, Piccadilly Collection, and all other compilations we looked at from 2002 onwards.

StD’s ‘Tempted’ was based on the 1986 CD release of East Side Story (Jones interview). It is identical in tempo and slightly exaggerates the panning of the album track, creating the widest panning of all the versions (although there is a clear difference in that the bubbling effect organ is not panned from left to right on StD as it is on the album version (3:18–3:20) and the final panned drum fill is more focussed on the right (3:38–3:40)). StD also has one of the densest waveforms of all, suggesting that although strenuous attempts were made to replicate details of the original recordings, the norms of modern recording equipment and styles had an impact on the end result of the project.

As a ‘physicalist’ product, ‘Tempted’ appeared on studio album East Side Story on 15 May 1981, shortly followed by 7-inch and 12-inch single releases in the same year: no fewer than 22 of the 37 catalogued versions of the album and 15 catalogued versions of the single were released in 1981 (Discogs n.d.). ‘Tempted’ featured on almost all of the band’s compilation albums up to and including Essential Squeeze (2007).Footnote ²¹ A key rejuvenation point in the song’s history occurred when Ron Fair remixed and overdubbed the original recording of ‘Tempted’ to create a version of the song for the soundtrack to the film Reality Bites (Various, 1994); this version received some radio airplay and was titled ‘Tempted ‘94’ on which, in a re-recorded vocal track, Paul Carrack integrated changes into the third verse, at 2:31–36.

At least based on ‘Tempted’, the aim for StD – of generating income from neighbouring and synchronisation rights – made sense, since ‘Tempted’ already had a successful track record across various media platforms, appearing in TV commercials for Burger King, Fruit of the Loom (underwear), Heineken, Gap jeans, and Dentyne Tango, and in film soundtracks (the Reality Bites example above) and video games Rock Band and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Various, 2002), where it could be heard on the in-game radio station Emotion 98.3 and on the subsequent real-world CD of the game soundtrack.Footnote ²² As late as 2018, ‘Tempted’ continued to generate a modest income well above other tracks by the band (Anonymous Interviewee 2).

Conclusion: Evaluating Spot the Difference

Thus, with considerable effort, Squeeze has its own ‘Tempted’. Tilbrook recalls StD as a sharply divergent experience: a ‘labour of love’ that ‘ended up taking three years of blood, sweat and tears in the studio’, and again: ‘apart from the one time I stared at my studio floor for four hours, despairing at how things could have got so bad, I loved nearly every minute of recording the album’ (Tilbrook Reference Tilbrook2010). In the terms we’ve carried in our investigation, making up new ‘formalist’ inventions like songs and guitar solos, playing songs to an audience, making new ‘physicalist’ products in the studio, all these are familiar practices, but the strict ‘formalist’ replication of an already-extant ‘physicalist’ product, the ‘text-thing’, is literally demanding (as we’ve shown), but always haunted by a fundamental question: Why bother?

Various positions were adopted in evaluating StD. At one extreme, re-recording is dismissed as fundamentally a bad idea, essentially since the original recording has qualities challenging to replicate: these can be identified as belonging to sound quality (see above) or, in more amorphous terms, with recordings bearing the physical traces of their making, such as those captured by Chris Difford:

Albin Zak III describes similarly a ‘magical transferral of aura from artists to artefact’, where

In another negative view, the project was difficult to evaluate because the conditions of its release didn’t allow enough for marketing and distribution: ‘the post-recording administration was wrong… it never dented any charts, it never appeared anywhere’ (Anonymous Interviewee 2). ‘It’s a great concept, it’s just not terribly well thought through’ (Difford interview). Difford again:

A more positive view was that the project always had an ulterior motive in Squeeze’s case, which was to give the band fresh impetus. Jones thought that ‘learning, rediscovering that intent and that initial reason why you put that part down, putting yourself back in that headspace, was really important’ (Jones interview). Continuous touring may be the enduring legacy of StD, with Tilbrook’s response to Brian Wilson’s Smile the key motivation: re-recording is challenging and might not succeed as a commercial proposition, but re-recording assuredly rehearses and motivates a band for concert performance.

Perhaps the most surprising terms of evaluation came from both Difford and Tilbrook, which is that they value the tracks on StD that present the original tracks in a better light, rather than the ones that merely, so to speak, replicate the originals. There seems to have been a consensus that ‘Black Coffee in Bed’ captures a quality that evaded the original recording (‘much better than the original’: Difford interview); Tilbrook also mentions ‘Some Fantastic Place’ (Fanelli Reference Fanelli2012). Given the effort involved in re-recording, it seems counter-intuitive to evaluate the tracks for qualities that the originals didn’t have, rather than for qualities they strictly possessed, but this only underlines the strength and consistency of ‘ordinary’ terms of evaluation. It appears that Spot the Difference really is Spot the Difference, not Admire the Similarity.

Reinforcing these conclusions, in 2023, about ten followers of Squeeze contributed to a discussion and evaluation of StD (Anonymous 2023). There was much broad evaluation, largely negative (‘StD is an album that has mainly stayed on the shelf since I bought it’), and comparison of re-recording with original (‘It’s quite impressive that they were able to get so very close to the originals, even though I can hear minor differences here and there’; ‘I probably dig this [record] out once every five years and go “oh yeah, that one’s good”, and “that one’s terrible”’). One commentator replicates Difford’s point about recapturing a moment long gone: ‘the impossibility of recapturing that original “lightning in a bottle” performance’. One listener did spot a specific difference: ‘“Another Nail in My Heart” stood out for me as one that did not recapture the vibe of the original’.

Listeners also shared rumours about whether the project had generated income for the band. At the time of writing, there is no hard evidence of whether StD has fulfilled its aim of replacing original recordings in generating income. StD entered a market for the purchase of sound recordings where the CD had already given way to downloading and streaming so that, at the time of writing, both Singles and StD are available on the streaming service Spotify, where purchasers are offered both the 1992 A&M compilation, Squeeze Greatest Hits, as well as a separate playlist, Squeeze Latest and Greatest, which includes recordings from StD. Similarly, the intended purchase of synchronisation rights appears not to have followed StD, Tilbrook commenting in 2019, rather bleakly, that ‘ten years later, we’ve not had a single uptake’ (Ingham Reference Ingham2019). The simple lesson may be that synchronisation rights are unpredictable: even in 2010, the year of StD, and after all the work that had gone into its production, ‘If It’s Love’, lead single from Frank (1989), absent from StD, was used in a television commercial for EHarmony online dating.Footnote ²³ Equally, however, what could also be concluded from that example is that sync rights might follow StD at some point in the future. Difford’s comment on the recordings on StD is wishful thinking – ‘Hopefully in the future they will turn a coin’ (Difford Reference Difford2017, p. 254) – but the ‘hope’ – that purchasers of rights will turn to Squeeze rather than to holders of the original masters – still holds.

The general topic of re-recording took a decisive turn when in 2021 Taylor Swift released ‘Taylor’s versions’ of two studio albums, Fearless and Red. For all re-recording’s possibility and precedent (see above), surely never before had the topic been so prominent. Asked by John Ingham in 2019 about his advice to Swift based on StD, Tilbrook replied that ‘it takes an awful lot of time, trouble, and money, and I would question what the intended outcome would be’ (Ingham Reference Ingham2019). One unintended outcome was that, within four years of the first ‘Taylor’s version’ release, a collection of academic essays was published (Polite Reference Polite2025). Editor Polite’s own essay offers a useful framework, pointing to three broad interpretative paradigms for re-recording: formalism, intention, and metaphor.Footnote ²⁴ Polite’s formalism – not to be confused with Barron’s – clearly accounts for Squeeze’s project. By ‘meticulously recording new versions that perfectly replicate their finest sonic details’ (p. 97), ‘ontologically identical’ (p. 97) to the original, then the

However, believing with ‘philosophers of art’ that ‘an artwork’s identity depends instead on its “history of production”: when, where, how, by whom, and perhaps even why an aesthetic object was made determines its identity’ (p. 101), Polite thinks that, like intentionalism, ‘formalism fails’ (p. 99): while two copies of Singles are identical, Singles and StD are ‘distinct works of art’ (p. 102). If, on both formalist and intentionalist grounds, re-recording is sure to fail, Taylor Swift nevertheless scores a notable ‘metaphorical’ victory: consumers purchased the re-recordings in significant numbers, they were followed by successful tours, other artists considered re-recording works, and so on. Such gains, and the sheer scale of such gains, hardly apply in Squeeze’s case, but their own ‘metaphorical’ gain lay in the band’s enduring and ongoing presence as a legacy act. As a ‘distinct work of art’, StD therefore remains a curious collection of recordings by Squeeze, kings of ownership at last.