Towns & Cities # 16 London - Squeeze

'I never thought it would happen. With me and the girl from Clapham.'

 

So we got here eventually. I've always mixed feelings about London having spent a fair bit of my life here at a point when it and I were not at our best. This song sums the city up, then and probably still now, better than anything I know, and the struggle it was and is to live there for so many people. Squeeze are proper Londoners. This is their most explicitly 'London song'. I'd plump for them over Madness (who play up the point that they're Cockneys to a ridiculous level), for example, every time. The Kinks would be the obvious other choice as the London band. The Pistols too perhaps, although London is not always so angry. It's often just beaten down the way Squeeze are here and The Kinks were in Dead End Street .

 

This is a beautifully concise piece of writing. A whole three act drama in three minutes. Every line is quotable. It's about endings and beginnings. Anyone who has had a relationship turn horribly sour and die, (and isn't that nearly all of us), but carried on as we have to, can relate to this. The rhymes make it funny and poignant and very London.  It must have been a complete joy for Difford and Tilbrook to finish it and realise what they had. You can walk down hundreds of rundown, litter strewn streets and across greens and commons and shopping precincts and into shops and pubs and bookies all over the city and hear it playing inside your head.

 

Squeeze had plenty of wonderful songs but this for me is their shot at immortality. The song reached Number 2 in the charts which is apt considering its glum, resigned tone because there is no way it should have been anything other than Number One. There is no chorus. It doesn't mention the title until the last line. Both facts make it even better. It's a much overused word. By me on here as much as by others. But this is genius from start to finish! Perfection.

 

 

* it also has Cindy Beale from Eastenders (she's the blond girl tidying up at the back of the shot) in the video. Thanks to a friend, Mr. Drayton for pointing this out.