What i am Listening to: Squeeze

“Greatest Hits are for housewives and little girls”. This line from the Kids in the Hall sketch about the Doors may be the best one line of music criticism ever written. It’s a good line for many reasons, primarily being you have to be a certain age to say it. Greatest Hits are generally the way we discover our favorite artists. I suppose these days it could be a “Greatest Hits Playlist” but the concept is the same I could name my lifelong favorite artists and in nearly every case, I had their greatest hits album in my formative years. So here goes: Ramones, the Clash, the Jam, Soft Cell, the Stranglers, REM, the English Beat, Buzzcocks, the Damned, Roxy Music, Siouxsie and the Banshees, OMD, the Cure, New Order, the Police, Joy Division, David Bowie, Psychedelic Furs, Queen, Bob Marley, Tom Petty, XTC, the Who, the Rolling Stones, and come to think of it, the Doors. In this process, surely some great bands are lost. For example, I probably should not have skipped “Natural History” covering Talk Talk or “History Never Repeats” from Split Enz. Maybe if I had “The Whole Story” I would have gotten into Kate Bush much sooner. There’s no reason that I never purchased “Musiquarium” and as far as classic artists go who I only recently gotten into, well I can’t believe I never picked up Gold and Platinum (Skynyrd) or The Very Best of Jethro Tull, nor retroactively fill a gap I lived through like Tupac’s Greatest Hits. To get to my belabored point, I never did pick up the ubiquitous Singles - 45 And Under by Squeeze. I have written about Squeeze before- a band that did get a bit of airplay in the US and I enjoyed. Yet I never went very much farther. In the modern world of nostalgia radio, certain artists and songs have went up in value and some down. Squeeze only put three songs on the US Billboard Hot 100, yet just about all of the 12 songs off “Singles” are staples of this nostalgia wave. There is just something timeless about the greatest moments of Difford and Tillbrook. It’s smart pop. For me, it means I am finally getting around to the bands classic run of albums -79s Cool for Cats, 80s Argybargy and 81s East Side Story. Better late than never. And that’s what I am listening to this week. 1979 - A&M