In the current calendar year, Glenn Tilbrook has been quite the road dog. Since the beginning of 2025, Tilbrook and his Squeeze bandmates spent some time opening on a leg of the Heart tour. From there, he decamped to Houston, where the Squeeze founding member joined Daryl Hall and his band to open an early 2025 tour, while also stealing time away to do solo dates.
Between Hall and Heart, Tilbrook, with and without Squeeze, has recently opened/co-headlined with a number of disparate acts including Boy George, The Psychedelic Furs and an arena tour in the UK alongside ska/pop legends Madness last December.
Tilbrook says he’s happy to play this self-described “tumble dryer of different shows” either as part of Squeeze or as a solo act.
Tilbrook’s currently back on the road, playing solo dates as well as opening for Hall, who the power pop veteran first met when Squeeze opened for the latter and his former creative partner John Oates when they were on what became their final tour a few years back. Tilbrook’s admiration for Hall, though, goes back much further, to when “She’s Gone” landed on the UK charts in 1976.
“When ‘She’s Gone’ suddenly got radio play, I was absolutely nuts about that song,” Tilbrook recalled in a recent interview. “What I’ve found in being with Daryl and opening up for him is that while we’re very different, there are still quite a lot of similarities musically in terms of what we’ve listened to and what’s inspired us. I can hear that in his music and my music.”
The Hall tour has an unusual wrinkle for Tilbrook as he’s borrowing the headliner’s band to back him when he opens the shows.
“I’ve put all my time into Squeeze over the past 10 years—it’s been pretty unfailing,” Tilbrook said. “With Daryl’s band, I’m playing quite a bit of my solo stuff and it’s great to hear that fleshed out by their musicality. Their band is very different from Squeeze and I’m loving the difference. If you go into any situation, you wonder what the best is that can come out of it given the tools you have. That band is an immaculate bunch of musicians and it’s a pleasure and privilege to play with them.”
Since Squeeze came over to the United States for the first time in 1978, Tilbrook has been humbled and grateful for the reception he’s received every time. Being part of a heritage act, he’s noticed how the band’s audience has evolved. While he admits advances like streaming have “become another criminal enterprise where artists miraculously don’t get paid,” he admits that it’s a gateway for people who might not otherwise be familiar with his band.
“Streaming has opened up our audience in a way that would never have happened were we signed to a label,” Tilbrook said. “The label decides who they’re going to push and when they’re going to push us. Or conversely, you’re not worth pushing or your time is done, like it occurred to us. We’ve seen our audience grow and I attribute that directly, not only to us being good, but for the availability of our catalog to younger people, who don’t have any sort of barriers about when music was made. They’re just interested in the music and whether they like it or not. I don’t think any other service would done that for us. I don’t think radio could have done that for us. TV could not do that for us, but streaming did.”
As for Squeeze’s activities, Tilbrook and his songwriting partner, guitarist Chris Difford, have been busy working on a new album and a special archival project, Trixie’s, which will compile previously unreleased songs the duo originally wrote roughly 50 years ago—around the same time as the songs that made up the basis for the band’s self-titled 1978 debut album. The band has not set a date yet for its arrival.
“We’ve got all our songbooks going back to when we first met,” Tilbrook explained. “We always thought Trixie’s was a good set of songs that we wrote in the first year that Chris and I were together, in 1974. The thing about that time is that we had very little else to do except write songs and go out to work. We spent a lot of time writing a lot of songs and then they get pushed aside by the newer songs. Trixie’s was the first proper flowering of our songwriting. We really set each other off in a way that I can feel proud of now because although it was 50 years ago and those people are very distant to me, what they did was incredible I’d say.”
Glenn Tilbrook plays at 8pm on Oct. 20 at Felton Music Hall, 6275 Hwy. 9, Felton. $32. feltonmusichall.com
