Day: May 25, 2007

Inspired by the ever-interesting Jefitoblog, which has been offering up a lot of love to Squeeze lately (including the first half of his Idiot’s Guide to the band as well as some hard-to-find live MP3s), I thought I’d similarly pay tribute to one of my favorite songs by the band, taken from one of their criminally overlooked albums.

Frank was released in 1989 to a fair amount of critical acclaim, but precious little of that translated into sales for the band. After staging an unexpected commercial comeback with 1987’s Babylon and On, an album which produced two top-40 hits for the band (“Hourglass” and “853-5937”), it was actually rather shocking that Frank didn’t sell very well, but my theory has always been that the band’s label – A&M – had decided to ignore top-40 radio for the album and instead focus on Billboard’s latest and greatest chart: Modern Rock. It made a certain amount of sense, given that Squeeze had always been more college-radio darlings than a full-fledged mainstream success, but, still, to go from having 2 top-40 hits to being dropped by your label altogether within the span of two years…? Somebody screwed up somewhere, and it certainly wasn’t Squeeze.

There are, unfortunately, a lot of great tracks to pick from when it comes to spotlighting the unheralded numbers from Frank, including the Jools Holland piano stomper, “Dr. Jazz,” and Glenn Tilbrook’s ode to a woman’s time of the month (“She Doesn’t Have To Shave”), but my favorite has always been “Love Circles,” which offers Chris Difford the vocal spotlight yet still provides some downright fantabulous harmonies for the chorus. It was released as a single, but it did precisely diddley…but, thanks to the aforementioned Jefitoblog, you can check out the song here.