Welcome to the mid summer Squire newsletter! First of all, to get into the summer mood, we are running a special tee-shirt & CD promotion to email subscribers! If you buy the Squire ‘Its A Mod Mod World’ T shirt, you can have any CD you fancy for £5 - that half price! So there’s a chance to pick up something you may have missed, such as the ‘Live In Tokyo’ recording, or 'Get Ready To Go' album! Something new for summer! Check out the link on the picture below.
We’re already half way through the year and it’s a good time to recap on the last six months and what Squire have been up to, and reading back on the newsletters provides a fascinating catalogue of topics. Although the overarching thread appears as a chronological reflection of events, there are various parallel narratives that capture Squire through different vantage points, the single releases, the live recordings, the international perspective, the release of Get Smart, the songwriting and demos.
First of all, we are four releases into the singles re-issues!
From last years My Mind Goes Round In Circles and No Time Tomorrow, we surprised many off you by releasing Girl On A Train in the original sleeve and also in the yellow & red version that went all the way to the printers before we switched at the last moment! We recently followed that with the first ever release of Every Trick (In The Book Of Love) on 7 inch!
We have had a lot of fun creating these records, from carefully choosing the label colours to match the colours on the sleeve. My Mind Goes Round In Circles picked the light blue front and milky flip side.
No Time Tomorrow captured the red front and pink reverse.
Girl On A train matched the magenta and blue, and the red and yellow.
Every Trick (In The Book Of Love) has the pale blue and orange.
We then tried to match the two colours of vinyl to these labels, so blue & milky clear, red & pink, translucent magenta and yellow, blue and orange! We can’t decide our favourite combination yet, and there are more to come!
One of the interesting aspects of reviewing Squires archive of recordings is finding unheard live tapes! We got to hear and compare sessions from the Electric Ballroom in 1979 at the high point of the mod revival, featuring the Get Ready To Go 4-piece line up,
then the 1980 Venue recording, the concert that coincided with the ‘My Mind Goes Round In Circles’ single release, so another era. The 1982 100 Club featuring the ‘Get Smart’ line up and then the amazing 1985 Toronto concert! So many performances capturing the audience excitement and interaction at different stages of Squire's development. Indeed, the surprise release of Anthony Meynell ‘ Live In Tokyo’
provided yet another understanding of the songs, this time acoustic and unaccompanied, and last weeks reflection on the Get Smart record shop promotion tour provided yet another version of Squire live! All these recordings are available on the YouTube channel that you can link to here, and on the picture below,
as well as revisit the original articles that featured the embedded videos in the weekly newsletters.
The Tokyo and Toronto concerts are part of the wider focus on Squire's appeal overseas, and the newsletters took us to Germany, California, Canada, Japan, and the next few weeks will expand on this theme as we dig deeper into the archive to find some more unheard and unseen surprises!
While the single releases have been arriving in chronological order, it has provided a vehicle to delve into the songwriting and demoing of the songs, so we heard an unheard song from 1980, Hey! Hey! Hey ! Hey! and how it morphed into the original demo of Girl On A Train. Don’t Cry To Me featuring the Casio VL-tone!
We considered the various and many versions of 'Every Trick (In The Book Of Love)' including the very original. We went back to the very first 'Get Ready To Go' single recording and heard the count in to very first chord, and then got to hear the unreleased version of 'Getting Better' from the same session! The alternative ‘The Life’ and Californian mix of ‘Stop That Girl! from the Get Smart! sessions. The demo of ‘The Reasons Why’ provided the arrangement destined for the original September Gurls sessions. Again, all these tracks are available on the YouTube channel as well as on the newsletters, so you can pick how to listen to them!
Last but not least is the fun we’ve had running the white label competitions and the ‘live’ videos of choosing the winners!
All in all, we're six months in and managed to keep our weekly newsletter vibrant and informative, and hope you’ve enjoyed reading them.
The second half of the year looks to be as interesting. We have more single releases in the series due, hopefully some live concerts to play, you can see the list of expected dates on our live page, and as always, more surprises, stories and archive digs to share! If there is anything in particular you’d like us to focus on, or if you have any questions, please get in touch!
All the best from Squire - and don’t forget to look at the Tee Shirt/CD offer!