4-Album Squeeze Tribute Project!

I just found out that there is a huge Squeeze tribute album project in the making, which will cover the band’s entire first four albums. The guys responsible are Alan Heaton and Steve Turnidge, who have made and marketed three successful tribute albums already for bands they love: Jellyfish, The Posies, and Roxy Music.

Their approach is extremely grassroots. They searched on YouTube for bands doing tribute songs for Jellyfish, and were thrilled and surprised to discover that even that fairly obscure band did have good tribute songs already. So they went on to contact the best of the bands on YouTube, set up a MySpace page to attract more artists, and managed to put together an album they’re extremely proud of. They ended up using bands from four continents, all of it done via the internet!

The project was low cost, fostered direct communication with the artists (each of whom recorded the tracks themselves and then sent them to Alan and Steve), and 100% committed to great music.

Alan says, “One thing you’ll notice about the contributors to our records – for the most part, they are not “big-name” artists by any means – at least not yet. One thing that I want to make completely clear is that I couldn’t care less if you’re the Red Hot Chili Peppers or a band of high school kids – in fact, we had two bands of high school kids on Take Refuge In Pleasure. All I care about is how your Squeeze cover sounds.”

He also talks a bit about why he chose Squeeze:

“Squeeze is such a great band. They have the great synergy between Chris Difford’s poignant-yet-accessible lyrics and Glenn Tilbrook’s musical arrangements, and the whole band’s amazing musicianship, despite a rotating set of band members.”

So true!

This project sounds fascinating to me, and I can’t wait to see how it comes out. One of the parts I find most interesting is that the albums they put out have been so comprehensive. Jellyfish only had two official album releases, but there are a bunch of “previously unreleased” songs in a box set, and the Jellyfish tribute album ended up covering all the songs on the two studio albums, plus every single one of the unreleased tracks! Clearly they are really passionate about the bands they cover.

Their label is called Burning Sky Records, and the MySpace page for the Squeeze project is Songs of Squeeze Revisited. There are no songs up yet, but a quick look at their Jellyfish Tribute Album’s page gives me hope that before long we will be able to preview some of those Squeeze covers!

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