Highlights of a Rockarchive evening with Daniel Rachel, author of 'Isle of Noises' in conversation with Chris Difford, lyricist and Co-founder of Squeeze.
Filmed at the Olympus Image Space gallery in London with unique acoustic performances of 'Up the Junction' and 'Cool for Cats'.
Difford and Tilbrook by Mitzi Bagpuss
“Black Coffee in Bed” opens with “There’s a stain on my notebook” and “Is That Love” begins “You’ve left my ring by the soap”. Do lyrical ideas infiltrate your everyday thoughts?
Yes, images that burn themselves into lyrics. It’s a bit like blotting paper: it blots up the images. If they’re interesting enough I can use them in some way. “Is That Love” was about the domestic situation I was in at the time. We’d just got married, the whole nesting thing had been taken care of and now we were just man and wife. The ring was by the soap, the beds were being made. It had become very mundane: is that love? The finger was being pointed at the individual.
Did “Up the Junction” originally have 10-plus verses?
It was quite long. Glenn’s got all the original lyrics. It was my attempt to write something like Dylan’s “Who Killed Davey Moore?”, although more so; it was inspired by a radio show, folk music hour or something, and there was this wonderful domestic song. It may have been Shirley Collins. I thought, that’s amazing, how she’s summed up domestic harmony, or disharmony.
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