BY JUD COST

It was just like old times. The Fillmore was packed tonight with a certain demographic that was actually there to enjoy the music of Squeeze, not inject themselves into it. Very few iPhoners were texting their friends. Nobody hollered out, "We love you, Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook," "Tell us a story, uncle Glenn" or "Squeeze is in the house!"

It got so bad at a recent Neil Young concert at Oakland's Fox Theater, Young had to admonish the crowd to "be polite. It's not about you." But as veteran columnist  for the San Jose Mercury News and longtime concert-goer Mark Purdy pointed out recently about this new generation of music fans, "They think it IS about them because of all the social-networking stuff that's made them the center of their own universes."

Still helmed by Difford and Tilbrook accompanied by keyboard and rhythm section, Squeeze kicked things off with the familiar strains of a safari lumbering towards an oasis on 1978 U.K. smash "Take Me I'm Yours" while the screen at the back flickered with blown-up images of just about every British music press clipping the band ever rated in its late-'70s/early '80s prime. Some of the early reviews even made serious comparisons of Tilbrook and Difford to McCartney and Lennon. 

The group that first cut a 3-song EP for punk label Deptford Fun City in 1977, soon signed with A&M and would place 10 singles in the British top forty. Interspersed with lesser-known but equally sharp material, they played everything their devotees wanted to hear. It's surprising to learn that almost all their early singles stiffed in the U.S., considering how often you can still hear "Black Coffee In Bed" on classic-rock FM stations. Their American rep has obviously grown since then. (Watch for an exclusive interview with the band in the upcoming print issue of BLURT. - Ed.)

The first time Squeeze played San Francisco, flogging their self-titled New Wave debut album in the summer of '78 at Battery St. night spot the Old Waldorf, they drew a crowd of maybe 150. They were known as U.K. Squeeze stateside back then for contractual reasons, and brought along a beefy, oil-smeared, Schwarzenegger-esque body-builder to flex his muscles during their set, in keeping with the album's sinewy artwork. Or maybe they correctly reckoned the songs from the first LP weren't quite strong enough to carry the load, even though famed keyboards session-man Jools Holland was also a card-carrying member of the band at the time.

No unnecessary beefcake needed tonight as "Goodbye Girl," crooned in Tilbrook's brisk tenor with Difford's subtle baritone chiming in, had the crowd bouncing around joyously. "Cool For Cats," the rare track with Difford on lead vocal, has that sprightly Ska/Blue Beat feel, a genre mined well tonight by evening's openers, the English Beat.  Frontman, Dave Wakeling closed their Two-Tone-inspired set with "Mirror In The Bathroom," a rattling good tune that recalled vintage sets by the Chambers Brothers where you got solid R&B for 45 minutes, finished off by a killer 20-minute version of their psychedelic masterpiece, "Time Has Come Today."

Squeeze's "Black Coffee In Bed," itself, lasted almost that long, time enough for the java to spill over the pillows and onto the Sunday New York Times. The shimmering "Slap And Tickle" is further evidence how Broadway/West End-ready Difford and Tilbrook's lyrics were in this cinematic boy-girl romance: "She cried all night at missing/The boy she could be kissing/He drove off to his local/And drank himself back sober."

Their encore, as everyone knew it would be, brought out a pair of Squeeze heavyweights, "Another Nail In My Heart" and "Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)," the latter framed by stage-rear photos of adverts for English seaside chip shops listing holiday delicacies like jellied eels, whelks, crab and periwinkles.

Special mention should be made of Squeeze's brilliant song "Up The Junction," played just before the encore. It's a mesmerizing short story set to music that could be used to convince any jury of the intrinsic value of certain song lyrics.

Here's the Reader's Digest version: "I never thought it would happen/With me and the girl from Clapham/I worked eleven hours/And bought the girl some flowers/She said she'd seen a doctor/And nothing now could stop her/And when the time was ready/We had to sell the telly/Late evenings by the fire/And little kicks inside her/This morning at four fifty/I took her rather nifty/Down to an incubator/Where thirty minutes later/She gave birth to a daughter/Within a year a walker/And now she's two years older/Her mother's with a soldier/No more nights by the telly/No more nighttime nappies smelly/And so it's my assumption/I'm really up the junction." Not even Lennon and McCartney ever did much better than that.