Squeeze and Hot Chip are both great British pop groups. But they never defined a scene. Their ambitions extended further than being hailed by a few hundred people in bleeding-edge clubs.
Squeeze piggybacked on punk, but they were quite evidently never a punk group, even if they dressed up as one. They were of the street rather than the art school, but they had no interest in gobbing, and Chris Difford was able to turn vignettes of everyday London life into three-minute comic dramas. (Perhaps he had more in common with John Sullivan — another south Londoner whose characters combined humour and pathos in his scripts for Only Fools and Horses — than he did with Joe Strummer.) They took musically not from the Stooges and the MC5 and Roxy Music, but from country and R&B and soul and rock’n’roll, which meant they were one of the groups — like the Pretenders — which older audiences were able to like as well.
Hot Chip emerged out of new rave, a mid-Noughties confection that was briefly so fashionable you risked severing limbs on its bleeding edge.
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