Squeeze
Argybargy

If you think you might enjoy the mashup of Pub Rock and New Wave that this group unleashed on the pop music scene of the 70s and 80s I could not recommend any album of theirs more highly than Argybargy.

Squeeze’s prime period with Jools Holland on keyboards encompasses four albums, any of which is worth owning. The band really gets going with their second album, Cool for Cats (1979), pulls it all together and takes it to another level for their breakthrough third, Argybargy (1980), and produces two more of high quality, East Side Story (1981, produced mostly by Elvis Costello) and the darker but equally brilliant Sweets from a Stranger (1982).

I’m a huge fan of all four, as well as two from their later days, the amazing-to-this-day Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti (1985) and the weaker but enjoyable Babylon and On (1987). I play all of them on a regular basis.

If you’re a fan of Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Nick Lowe, Joe Jackson and probably quite a few other lesser-knowns from this era, Squeeze is the band for you. I put them right up there with Elvis Costello and Peter Gabriel in the pantheon of British Pop Music of the era.

This vintage import pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What the Best Sides of Argybargy Have to Offer Is Not Hard to Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1980
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

What We're Listening For On Argybargy

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

A Rock Masterpiece

This is one of the band’s Masterpieces, as well as a Desert Island Disc for yours truly.

What qualifies a record to be a Masterpiece needs no explanation. We will make every effort to limit the list to one entry per artist or group, although some exceptions have already occurred to me, so that rule will no doubt be broken from time to time. As Ralph Waldo Emerson so memorably wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..."

For a record to come to my Desert Island Disc, said record: 1) must have at some time during my decades as a music lover and audio enthusiast been played enthusiastically, fanatically even, causing me to feel what Leonard Bernstein called "the joy of music"; 2) I must currently respect the album, and; 3) I must think I will want to listen to the music fairly often and well into the future (not knowing how long I may be stranded there).

How many records meet the Desert Island Disc criteria? Certainly many more than you can see when you click on the link, but new titles are coming online as time permits.

Side One

• Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)

Pulling Mussels received positive reviews from music critics. It has been variously described as “a timeless cult classic,” “a brilliant slice of pop genius,” “a pop classic of the new wave era,” and “a piece of pop mastery.”

In 2007, Anna Borg wrote, “The build up before the chorus always gets me, even 25 years later.” Allmusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine described the song as “a vivid portrait of a seaside vacation where Difford’s vignettes are made all the more vivid by Tilbrook’s bright, invigorating pop.” It is regarded as one of Squeeze’s catchiest songs.

The phrase “pulling mussels” is British slang for sexual intercourse, mainly used in England.

• Another Nail In My Heart
• Separate Beds
• Misadventure
• I Think I'm Go Go

Chris Difford said about the lyrics, “This was a song about touring, which could be a very strange experiences. It would get to the stage where I’d think ‘I don’t know where I am, I don’t know which county I am in, what time we’re onstage, or who I’m sleeping with.’ ‘I think I’m go go’ was the turn of phrase in the band at the time.” Difford continued, “Interestingly, this song was very popular in America. The first verse is about being in Amsterdam because a lot of our early gigs were in Holland. Glenn’s dad lived out there and he used to arrange gigs for us. It was always good fun playing there. The second verse is about New York and mentions liquor stores, rodeos and PIX, which was an American radio station. The last verse is about London.”

Glenn Tilbrook said of the song, “This was a step forward in our imaginations. It was influenced lyrically by the fact we have been whopped around the head and rendered bewildered by the amount of traveling we’d been doing. We all found it bewildering, but I had the sense that Chris probably felt this more so than the rest of us.” Tilbrook also said, “It’s very Beatles-like and also has a similar sound to our song, ‘The Knack.’ There’s a direct through line from ‘The Knack’ to ‘I Think I’m Go Go’, with that sense of other-worldness. The use of strings added to that feeling. I wanted to contrast real strings with synth strings and change the feel between the verses. This meant the listener got a sense of being jolted out of one mood or another.”

Side Two

• Farfisa Beat
• Here Comes That Feeling
• Vicky Verky
• If I Didn't Love You

Glenn Tilbrook said, “This is a really storming lyric from Chris [Difford] and was chosen as a different single in America. It was a massive radio hit there, particularly on the East Coast, whereas it was just an album track in Britain. The lyric caught a lot of people’s imaginations because of that thing Chris does so well, picking up on small, almost irrelevant details. What he wrote here rang absolutely true to me and was all the more powerful for it.” Tilbrook continued, “The line ‘The record jumps on a scratch’ was such a gift that I had to use it, so we sang ‘If I, If I, If I, If I, If I.'”

Chris Difford said, “I used to love playing this song live. Glenn and I sang it together as a duet, an octave apart. Lyrically it has to be my proudest moment from [Argybargy] and it takes me back to New York when I was living there and writing lyrics. It’s about the early cozy part of a relationship, which I call the nesting stage. It’s a lovely place to be, somewhere where I think people only go two or three times in their life. At the same time it has that juxtaposition of emotions saying ‘If I didn’t love you I’d hate you,’ because at the back of your mind you’ve got that insecurity about your inability to have a proper relationship with somebody.”

Difford also praised Tilbrook’s guitar solo, saying, “I also love Glenn’s slide guitar solo. When he first did it I thought ‘This guy’s out of his tree. What’s he doing?,’ but it’s brilliant.”

• Wrong Side Of The Moon
• There At The Top

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

If any one album were responsible for sowing the seeds of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook’s reputation as the new Lennon and McCartney, it’s Argybargy, Squeeze’s third album and undisputed breakthrough. Squeeze made a great leap forward between their awkward debut and its great sequel, Cool for Cats… with Argybargy it was clear that Squeeze were at the top of the pack among new wave popsters, and that their sardonic yet lively voice was unique among any pop group before or since.

Wikipedia

Squeeze are a British band that came to prominence in the United Kingdom during the new wave period of the late 1970s, and continued recording successfully in the 1980s and 1990s.

They are known in the UK for their hit songs “Cool for Cats”, “Up the Junction”, “Tempted”, “Labelled with Love”, “Black Coffee in Bed”, “Another Nail in My Heart”, “Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)” and “Hourglass”. Though not as commercially successful in the United States, Squeeze had American chart hits with “Tempted,” “Hourglass” and “853-5937,” and they have a dedicated following there and continue to attract new fans.