Squeeze
Squeeze, Adam Ant, and Haircut 100 is more a summit of survivors than a tour banking on interest from aging new wavers. It’s an explosion of British pop, born in the late ’70s and early ‘80s, from bands who’ve managed to keep their identities intact and catalogs thriving. These are three wildly different acts connected by sharp songwriting, style-conscious reinvention, and an understanding that popular music can be both playful and sophisticated.
Led by the songwriting partnership of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, Squeeze have quietly built one of the deepest catalogs in British pop, balancing kitchen-sink storytelling with melodies so airtight they often get mistaken for standards.“Up the Junction,” “Tempted,” “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell),” and “Black Coffee in Bed,” among others, remain masterclasses in compact songwriting; witty, bruised, romantic, and endlessly hummable.
Yet the biggest talking point surrounding the band today is Trixies, Squeeze’s first album of new material in nearly a decade. The twist is that the songs themselves aren’t exactly new: The material dates to the mid-1970s, when Difford and Tilbrook were teenagers dreaming up elaborate characters and scenes inside a fictional London nightclub called Trixies. The recordings were shelved for decades before being rediscovered and finally completed with the benefit of experience, stronger musicianship, and a full-circle sense of perspective.
What could have been a novelty instead feels strangely perfect for Squeeze in 2026. Their music has always thrived on narrative detail and emotional ambiguity, and Trixies functions almost like a time capsule from an alternate timeline, one where the band’s earliest ambitions finally get their due. It also reinforces what longtime fans already know: Difford and Tilbrook belong in the upper tier of British songwriting duos and merit the Lennon/McCartney comparisons that trailed them through their heyday.
Live, Squeeze have evolved into something warmer and looser than the hyper-clever new wave outfit many people remember from MTV and college radio. Lead singer Tilbrook also remains one of pop’s most underrated guitarists, able to pivot from muscular riffs to jazzy flourishes without ever overwhelming the song, while lyricist, guitarist and occasional lead singer Difford continues to ground the band with dry humor and observational lyrics that find poetry in ordinary lives.
If Squeeze represent craftsmanship and emotional nuance, Adam Ant brings the swagger. Emerging from the post-punk underground with Adam and the Ants before launching a hugely successful solo career, Adam Ant fused glam rock, pirate iconography, tribal percussion and punk energy into something singular. At the dawn of the MTV era, he looked like a revolutionary cartoon hero and sounded like one, too.
Adam Ant
Songs like “Stand and Deliver” and “Antmusic” weren’t just hits; they were declarations of identity. Beneath the face paint and theatrics was a performer deeply influenced by old-school rock showmanship, spaghetti westerns, and a kind of knowingly exaggerated masculinity that helped redefine pop stardom in the early ’80s.
What’s remarkable about his current live performances is how committed he remains to rock theater. Rather than treating his songs as museum pieces, he attacks them with the energy of someone still fascinated by the characters he created decades ago. There’s humor in the presentation now, but also a genuine appreciation for how strange and daring those records were at the time. The drums still thunder, the hooks still land, and audiences still respond instinctively to that combination of camp, danger, and charisma.
Haircut 100
Then there’s Haircut 100, perhaps the most deceptively influential act on the bill. Fronted by Nick Heyward, the band exploded out of the UK sophisti-pop scene in the early 1980s with a sound that felt sun-drenched and impossibly stylish. While many of their contemporaries leaned heavily into synthesizers and icy futurism, Haircut built their identity around bright guitars, restless rhythms, jazzy flourishes, and breezy melodies that practically demanded rolled-up sleeves and rides in convertible.
The lineup is a rarity: a curated balance of complimentary acts instead of a package tour built around one marquee name. Squeeze deliver the songwriting depth, Adam Ant brings the theatrical voltage, and Haircut 100 supplies the champagne-pop shimmer. Different approaches, different aesthetics; but all connected by a period when British pop made personality, intelligence, and eccentricity coexist on mainstream radio.
Squeeze, Adam Ant and Haircut 100 perform 7pm Thursday, August 20 at Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood. squeezeoffical.com ~ Abel Folgar
