Branching out into new musical territory can be a scary thing. In some cases, artists need a push from someone and some encouragement to bolster their confidence that they’ll be able to pull it off.
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Squeeze needed those boosts when they concocted a song in the vein of country music. That song, “Labelled With Love”, turned into one of their biggest British hits and most beloved songs.
A Country Kick
Squeeze entered into their 1981 album East Side Story, clicking on all cylinders. The band, which recorded their debut LP in 1978, had been a constant on the pop charts right from the start. Most of their songs combined fast tempos with Glenn Tilbrook’s sticky melodies and Chris Difford’s winning lyrics.
The formula didn’t necessarily need to change. But like most great songwriters, Difford and Tilbrook didn’t want to get stuck in a rut. As a result, East Side Story found them dabbling in many new genres, such as blue-eyed soul, avant-garde, baroque pop, and, with “Labelled With Love”, country music.
Chris Difford took inspiration for the lyrics from a photo that he saw of an older woman in a bar in Paris in the 1930s. That spurred him to write a song based on an older generation than his. He based the lyrics on the fact that many American servicemen married British women while overseas in World War II and then returned with them to the US.
Once Tilbrook got a hold of the lyrics, he dropped them into a country-ish lope. At first, he thought it wasn’t suitable for Squeeze. But Elvis Costello, who was co-producing the album for Squeeze and had already developed a love of country, encouraged him in the endeavor.
Examining the Lyrics of “Labelled With Love”
“Labelled With Love” imagines the fate of a British war bride and the loneliness she encounters when her American husband dies first. In the case of this protagonist, she turns to drinking. “She unscrews the top of her new whiskey bottle,” Tilbrook sings to begin the song.
Unfortunately, with her husband no longer around, she lets her house and herself fall into a state of disrepair. “She shuffled about in her candle-lit hovel,” the narrator explains. “Like some kind of witch with blue fingers and mittens/She smells like the cat and the neighbors she sickens.”
It wasn’t always like that. Tilbrook recounts how she was swept off her feet by a soldier who “Made every air raid a time of excitement.” But the happy ending eludes her, replaced by cliché: “He became drinker and she became mother/She knew that one day she’d be one or the other.”
His demise is inglorious: “He, like a cowboy, died drunk in his slumber.” When she heads back to England, she discovers that there’s nothing for her there anymore. She has nothing left but to turn bitter. “On moth beaten arm-chairs, she’d say that she’d sod all,” Tilbrook mewls. “The friends who had left her to drink from the bottle.”
“Home is a love that I miss very much,” Tilbrook sings in the chorus. “So the past has been bottled and labelled with love.” It’s a killer couplet that any Nashville tunesmith would love to have penned. Not bad for a bunch of Brits just finding their country music footing.
Photo by Mike Prior/Redferns
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