A difficult choice

Over at myspace.com/squeezeofficial they're running a little poll.

What are the five best Squeeze songs?

That's tough. It's like asking what are the five best glasses of wine you've had in your life? I've had so many good ones....

But I like this sort of game, so let's play.

Two are easy for me:

Up The Junction - Hands down, one of the best songs ever written. It's got a story, it's got some wicked images in the lyric, and the music complements it so completely.

Maidstone - The hidden gem of pop music. A throw-away B-side (note to kids: We used to buy small vinyl records that played on a turntable. They had one song on each side, the "single" and the "B-side.") that should never have been thrown away. It combines the best of Difford and Tilbrook: a fistful of chords that drags you into a story, a wistful lyric about young love, and a sense of place. We're so lucky this has been on best-of compilations. It could have been lost forever.

The next three are harder to pick. They're probably more dependent on my background with Squeeze's music.

Another Nail In My Heart - It's New Wave, it's got the octave-apart vocals thing, it's got the country music drunk and lost love thing, it's got Jools playing every key on the piano, how can one group cram so much into one song? They do. Amazing. I remember spinning the Argybargy album, wondering whether the Gs were hard or soft, and listening to this song and knowing that my life was going to be different because of it.

Labelled With Love - It's hard to believe some guys from London could write one of the best country songs ever, but they did. And they didn't even mean to. Chris wrote the lyric, passed it to Glenn, and for some reason he put it to some old honky-tonk--type tune. Love, loss, and drunkenness: you can't go wrong those as your themes.

Electric Trains - For every Squeeze fan, I think what we really want is to be Chris Difford's friend. Really. He writes such interesting words, he must be the most interesting person to sit down and chat with. What he's been through and where he's going just fascinate me.

So Chris lets us in a little to his life and see some of his childhood. It's got the octave-apart thing. A piercingly personal lyric. Soaring music. I could listen to it every day for a million years and not get tired of it.

Anyway, so there you go. Those are my five, what are yours?