You have to love a bit of Squeeze.

And now there is an extra reason to feel affection for Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, besides the punch-drunk, teary joy of all those evergreen short-story songs about ordinary lives.

On tour at the moment, the onetime south-east London lads, now comfortably into their sixties, can still belt out the old hits and more in lively style, as they showed last week at the Harrogate Conference Centre.

It’s still cool for old cats, as this old cat would concur in hope.

Tilbrook leads the show, singing and playing guitar. He is an overlooked guitarist, who plays quite brilliantly at times, running off into blistering solos that never last too long.

There are seven in the band now, and it’s a confident, ringing sound, and by the end everyone is on their feet, quite something for a Harrogate audience, some of whom need help getting up.

You have to love a bit of Squeeze.

You see, this tour and an accompanying EP and single, Food For Thought, are raising funds for food banks and awareness about food poverty. Donations are being collected at gigs for the anti-poverty charity the Trussell Trust, which operates food banks across the country.

In a news report for the Guardian (print edition, November 5), Tilbrook says that for years he was unaware of many things, being in his own “bubble of success”. Now he rails against the poverty crisis.

“It’s terrible and wrong that so many people have no choice other than the help that food banks provide to feed their family,” he says. “That there are so many people who have to choose between heating and eating is a disgrace.”

Tilbrook adds that the social security system was “set up to save people who didn’t have work, and now people are earning wages and it’s still not enough”.

As nurses vote to strike, worn out by seeing their pay diminish year after year, and as some nurses are forced to use food banks set up in the hospitals where they work, this Squeeze tour could not be timelier.

The Trussell trusts sent out 1.3 million emergency food parcels in the past six months –  just one provider of a service that shouldn’t be needed in a properly functioning country.

Various Tory MPs like to bluster about food banks, saying it’s just that poor people don’t know how to cook or budget properly. Invariably porridge is mentioned. Google for more details, but my fingers will not type their names.

You have to love a bit of Squeeze.

Back in the 1980s, as surely mentioned here before, I interviewed Glenn and Chris for the South East London Mercury a few times.

That Guardian report mentions “Jools Holland appearing on keyboards at one point”, which seems dismissive. He was there for quite a while, before wanting to go his own way. “Jools has got his own things he wants to do,” as Tilbrook told me.

Jools, who is quite grand nowadays, lived then in a basement flat and kept his gold records on the loo wall. Or he does in my memory, as it was a long time ago, and time plays tricks, the lens can smudge.

I still have an affection for Jools though, not so much the albums, of which I own a few, as the roof-lifting live concerts. And I must have watched most editions of Later, which has been going for 30 years now.

You have to love a bit of Squeeze.

When Jools left he did a final gig at the old Albany Empire in Deptford. Elvis Costello, who produced their album East Side Story, turned up as a surprise guest.

It was quite the night.

 

A lottery player in California has just won $2 billion on one ticket. As a long-time Lottery loser, that news stirs mixed emotions.

Yes, money would be good, but not that much. Such an unfathomable fortune in one go would be a golden curse.

Sometimes I do say a little prayer to the lottery god, while having another go at Lotto or Set For What’s Left Of My Life, but he just replies: “Here’s £30 to keep you going, now shut up.”

More than thirty quid would nice, but I am happy to have so far avoided two billion.