Cool For Cats was the first coloured vinyl
in my collection – the 12 inch version. I swapped it with a guy at school when
I was 13. The deal was Cool For Cats for a Bill Haley compilation album and a
couple of Elvis records – G.I Blues and Moody Blue (there was a mini Rockabilly
revival happening around our way at the time).
The three records that formed my
end of the deal had been purloined from the family record collection. Theft,
essentially. But I just had to have it. Pink vinyl.
Cool For Cats was the first Squeeze record
I’d been aware of. I’d seen them doing it on Top of the Pops. I was 10. Chris
Difford – the one with the dark hair and the voice like a Deptford scrap yard
in full spate – took the lead vocal.
When I next saw Squeeze, Glenn Tilbrook –
the blond one with the sweet voice – was singing lead on the kitchen sink drama
of Up the Junction. “Oh look,” I thought to myself, “they’re giving the other
guy a go at the singing.”
First impressions last – to such an extent
that I’m somewhere still slightly confused when I see Tilbrook, “the other
guy”, and not Difford singing lead with Squeeze. I just can’t shake it.
The topic of Squeeze also came up at
school. For homework we were always given five words and asked to write each in
a sentence. When presented with the word “junction”, a girl in my class called
Lesley came up with the sentence “Squeeze had a hit with Up The Junction”. I
thought this deeply cool. Not so the teacher, who chided her for the use of
junction as a proper noun in a song title.
Harsh.
But it was an early lesson, if not in
grammar then at least in what girls like. And girls like pop music. And so it
follows… Pop music good.
The voice and the argot of Cool For Cats
caught my ear vividly when I was 10. This was pop music without an American
accent. The first verse seemed, to my child’s mind, to be about a western
movie, which was indeed cool for cats for me, as we – my dad, granddad and me – loved
westerns. Ditto the next verse about The Sweeney. The pictures were painted
clearly enough for me to enjoy the narrative, even through the meaning was
outwith my frame of reference: life never quite meets expectation and sometimes we have to clamber out of great torpor simply to carry on (this represented by the pseudo-prog instrumental of the middle eight).
The references to getting one's end away in
the last verses were lost on me back then. But the music hall tone was clear:
this was a funny record. Bleak, but funny.
Great fade-out, too, over Jools Holland’s spivvy, rinky-dink keyboard part. I’ve always loved a fade-out.
It was a record I loved all through my
teens, despite the vagaries of fashion and fad, and is a record I love to this
day.
Watch Cool for Cats on You Tube