Squabs on Forty Fab
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Labelled With Love b/w Squabs On Forty Fab (non-LP track)
released September 25, 1981, A&M Records
#4 UK Charts
I've been reading my most recent cheap score from Daedalus Books & Music, Squeeze Song By Song (Chris Difford & Glenn Tilbrook with Jim Drury, $3.98), and came across this entry about their 14th single, "Labelled With Love" (from 1981's East Side Story LP) on page 98:
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A joke by the band that backfired unwittingly helped the country ballad's success . 1981 had heralded the tacky series Stars On 45 - unspeakably awful medleys of songs by bands like The Beatles, Abba and Stevie Wonder - and Squeeze thought it would be funny to cobble together an assortment of their own hits on the B-side, which they crudely named 'Squabs On Forty Fab'. 'It was a brutal shoehorning of all our hits to that point into one tempo which absolutely murdered the songs,' says Glen. 'We did it for a laugh but it got almost equal airplay to "Labelled With Love". It was such an own goal because people didn't know we were joking'.
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For the record, the songs on this toe-tapping B-side novelty hit were as follows: "Take Me I'm Yours," "Cool For Cats," "Up The Junction," "Is That Love?,""Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)," "Separate Beds," "Another Nail In My Heart," "Slap & Tickle," "Goodbye Girl," and "Someone Else's Heart."
It's a shame that the greatest wham-bam, one-after-the-other representation of Squeeze's hits remains virtually unknown in the Digital Era, out-of-print except as an overpriced import CD, Excess Moderation - Chronicles. (You can also try tracking it down on used copies of the out-of-print import CD Big Squeeze: The Very Best of Squeeze.)
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