Photograph: Julia Claxton
A: How did you go from that job to
wanting to be a musician?
CD: Well, I fell in with the right crowd.
I went to a very tough all boys school
in South London. I wasn’t really that
interested in the general education of it
all and my mates sort of were into music
as were my Art and English teachers,
who were younger than the other
teachers. So gradually they unveiled this
music of the time which was prog-rock,
but then on the other hand you had The
Who and the Small Faces, there was a
good balance. By the time I was 14/15,
I had already been writing poetry on
my schoolbooks to pass time, and my
English teacher came up to me and said
“have you listened to any Bob Dylan
or Donovan?”, and I didn’t know who
they were, and he said “your poetry
could become songs”, and that was the
introduction.
A: How did you meet your writing
partner Glenn Tilbrook?
CD: I had various bands at school that
were pretty unsuccessful but great
fun, and then, when I’d left home, I
was knocking about sort of trying to
12
find my way, and I’d put an advert in a
sweetshop window in 1973 and I just
thought, well, I’ll see what happens.
That’s how I met Glenn and we became
Squeeze, so – he knew Jools from being
at school together and very quickly over
the next two or three years we became
a unit.
A: Tell us about your first gig as
Squeeze?
CD: It was at Catford Girls’ School, so
we had a captive audience of girls, and
my girlfriend at the time, Nicky, was
insistent that I looked like Marc Bolan,
so she got me dressed up in God
knows what, but I wore makeup like
Marc did and I went on stage. I was a
bit uncomfortable with it, but the girls
loved it, so that was our first gig and it
was all right.
J: How old were you then?
CD: 18, which was the first gig that I
remember.
A: How did you develop your style of
writing lyrics from poetry?
CD: I don’t think the style really took
shape until 1979, so quite a few years
later really. It wasn’t until I found my feet
amongst my contemporaries like Ian
Dury, Elvis Costello, Nick Lower, people
like that. So it took a long while to find
what I liked– I couldn’t emulate the
people that I liked when I was a kid really,
because they were too distinctive in
their own fields. I couldn’t write like Pete
Townsend or Pete Sinfield, who wrote
the lyrics for King Crimson, so it was kind
of between those goalposts.
J: What was the first song that you
wrote that really worked well for you?
CD: On the first album, ‘Take Me I’m
Yours’ was our first hit, it got us in the
charts and on Top of the Pops, so I’ve
got a lot of affection for that song even
though lyrically it’s not a particularly
deep song or musically, but it got us to
where we wanted to be. It wasn’t until
the second album when things started to
take shape really.
J: Did you have a difficult album? I
know they always say the second is the
hardest