Squeeze Are Cool For Cats As Pyramid Stage Openers At Glastonbury 2024

The forecast for the weekend is set to be fair and factor 50 is the must have accessory at Glastonbury Festival 2024. But for Squeeze, Glasto’s very first act on the Pyramid Stage this year, the sun is yet to break through overcast skies. No matter, if anything can bring a sunny disposition to a field in Somerset, it’s Deptford’s finest export after Dire Straits.

Squeeze @ Glastonbury Festival 2024

Squeeze @ Glastonbury Festival 2024 (Kalpesh Patel)

The band has had many incarnations over the years, though in the latest (2007) version of Squeeze, the only members from the original lineup are Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook. No disrespect to everyone else, but if you’ve got Difford and Tilbrook, does it really matter? No, not really to be perfectly honest. Would Yes still be Yes is it only had Jon Anderson? The answer is Yes.

The setlist is an unashamed greatest hits compendium perfectly designed for a festival crowd. There’s only one new song – the as yet unreleased One Beautiful Summer, “A song about two people falling in love in a care home”. No worries, it sounds just like the Squeeze of old.

Whilst Generation Z are still sleeping off last night’s late early hours activity at the Lonely Hearts Club, it’s probably fair enough that a band like Squeeze, playing the very first Pyramid Stage slot on Friday have attracted a crowd of a certain age. And being a crowd of a certain age, it takes a while for the hips to move. But with tunes like Take Me I’m Yours, Hourglass, Up The Junction and Slap And Tickle on offer, you can’t help feel that the band deserve more. At least people are moving as God intended by the time the Difford-led Cool For Cats comes along and at set closer Black Coffee In Bed, everybody is in full swing.

One slight disappointment is a stripped-back rendition of 1981 hit Tempted that teases to take off throughout, but with the full band only coming in at the very end to give it that lift. “You’ve made an old man cry” says Chris Difford shortly before leaving the stage. Having just seen a brilliant replication of the band’s heyday; as the audience disperses from the Pyramid Stage field, he might not have been the only person with a bit of grit in the eye.

Review of Squeeze at Glastonbury Festival 2024 by Simon Reed photos by Kalpesh Patel

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