Do you think that, in a sense, today we have a greater understanding of how important language is?

I think we've kind of discovered language much more in the last 25 years, I suppose, because in 2007, the mobile phone came along and people began to understand language in a different way.

And in fact, I've just been writing about the fact that the mobile phone kind of became or has become like a parent to a lot of children now.

Whereas when I was a kid, If I asked a question, you know, I would be involved in a conversation of understanding.

And now mainly children don't ask questions because they can look at a phone and they can get the reward and the answer instantly.

But is that a good thing? Of course it isn't, in my opinion, but then I'm 72.

So somebody who's 16 or 15 who has a mobile phone and has a relationship with their phone, it's all that they need in life.

Did being dyslexic and therefore an outsider at the school make you a better observer of people?

I want you to set up how this came to be this many years later and why you decided to share this work now.

This is a bunch of songs that Glenn and I wrote in 1973, 74.

And the band that we had at the time rehearsed it and it didn't really work.

It was a bit ahead of its time.

We wanted to play rock and roll songs and it wasn't really working.

It just wasn't gelling.

So we shelved the whole thing.

How did you keep that sort of vintage charm, but also make it sound like you wanted to in 2025, 26?

Here we are in rainy Manchester talking Trixie's with Squeeze's own Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford.

What more can I say? Now there's just me and you.

What more can I say? There's nothing to do.

The cocktails have been shaken.

The girls have all been taken.

The dawn is slowly breaking.

It's oh so continental.

over"So did you, at that age, have any experience of kind of like London nightlife and the sort of people who would inhabit that world, or was it purely kind of a, an exercise in imagination?