🎵 AotW Squeeze - SWEETS FROM A STRANGER (SP-4899)

[LPJim]

Squeeze
SWEETS FROM A STRANGER
A&M SP-4899

Out Of Touch 3:50
I Can't Hold On 3:34
Points Of View 4:13
Stranger Than The Stranger On The Shore 3:18
Onto The Dance Floor 3:38
When The Hangover Strikes 4:31

Black Coffee In Bed 6:12 (Elvis Costello & Paul Young, backing vocals)
I've Returned 2:36
Tongue Like A Knife 4:10
His House Her Home 3:25
The Very First Dance 3:18
The Elephant Ride 3:23

• Arranged By [Orchestral] – Del Newman
• Artwork [Cover Design] – Simon Ryan, Squeeze (2)
• Bass, Backing Vocals – John Bentley
• Drums – Gilson Lavis
• Engineer [Assistant] – Butch Yates
• Keyboards, Backing Vocals – Don Snow
• Mastered By – Frank DeLuna
• Photography By [Cover] – Mike Putland*
• Producer – Phil McDonald, Squeeze (2)
• Guitar, Vocals & Wrote Songs – Chris Difford, Glenn Tilbrook

Recorded at Ramport Studios, London
Mastered at A&M Recording Studios, Hollywood
Released 1982 - Peaked at #32 on the Billboard 200, charted for 30 weeks
Reissued on CD by A&M in Japan in 1987



JB

 

[jfiedler17]

This one tends to get more lackluster reviews than most of their other '80s efforts on A&M, but, while it's not quite as consistent as, say, Argybargy or East Side Story, there's still plenty material here to make it a worthwhile pickup. My favorites are "When the Hangover Strikes," "I've Returned," "I Can't Hold On," and, of course, "Black Coffee in Bed." I think what hurt the album, though, was that "Black Coffee in Bed," the most famous song here, wasn't the most terribly contemporary-sounding single in the world - it sounds (even more so than "Tempted" does) more like early-era Motown than it does your typical '80s pop record, right down to the "ooh ooh!" background vocals - and lasts nearly six-and-a-half minutes on top of it all, so it might have worked more to the album's advantage had they held off on releasing this one until a few months later when they came up with "Annie Get Your Gun," which is admittedly a much stronger single and sadly never got released on a proper studio album.
Incidentally, this is a really little-known tidbit about Squeeze, but right around the time this album came out, Chris and Glenn were actually moonlighting as musical-material writers for a short-lived and now-largely-forgotten British sketch-comedy series called Alfresco (whose cast members included Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, interestingly enough). [It does exist on DVD if you're curious in checking it out, but just to give you a fair warning, although the Difford and Tilbrook input adds to the intrigue factor of the show, it's not nearly as funny as you would expect a sketch-comedy series to be; it did get considerably funnier in its second season, but Laurie's own sketch-comedy series, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, is the much funnier sketch-comedy series and remains one of my all-time fave TV series.] I bring Alfresco up because one of the several songs they penned for the show was a nuclear-power-themed song called "The Apple Tree" that was originally supposed to appear on this very album but was ultimately scrapped. (Although Chris and Glenn would later revive the song and record it on their own self-titled one-off album as "Difford & Tilbrook" in '85.)