Chris Difford

Squeeze's guitarist/singer on the band's great 'lost' album, the dicey nightclub that inspired it, his lyrics...

- Interview: Henry Yates

As a veteran rock star, part of the deal is to be constantly confronted by your younger self.

Even so, at 71 Squeeze's Chris Difford was stopped in his tracks by the cassette he exhumed from his loft last year. Labelled 'Trixies', it captures the first bloom of Difford's partnership with Glenn Tilbrook, recorded back in 1974 (when the pair were respectively 19 and 16), but packed with jazzy art-pop with a sophistication light years beyond their peers. “It’s very emotional,” Difford says of rerecording these youthful songs as an elder statesman. “It’s been an incredible journey to get to this place.”

Lyrically, Trixies is a concept album set at a fictional nightclub, isn't it?

Yeah. There was a club on Deptford Broadway. You had to go downstairs to get in. And it was kind of sweet-looking inside, with gilded sofas, but it was a pretty nasty place, full of strange people. I think Trixies is based there, in my imagination.

Mark Knopfler once described mid-70s Deptford as an "armpit". Deptford has always been rough around the edges. It's become gentrified now. If you wanted to buy an apartment there you'd have to find a couple of million, whereas in those days you'd get somewhere for a hundred quid a week. But there was always a kind of warmth about danger for me. That was just part of growing up in Deptford, getting to know the ropes, on the streets, and it feeling vulnerable and romantic at the same time. At nineteen I was in and out of pubs, in and out of trouble...

Tell us about some of the songs?