WE'VE JUST ARRIVED AT A HUGE VIDEO STUDIO IN A PARTICULARLY SEEDY PART OF SOUTH-EAST LONDON. SQUEEZE ARE MAKING THE VIDEO FOR 'TRUST ME TO OPEN MY MOUTH,' THE NEW SINGLE FROM THEIR LATEST LP, "BABYLON AND ON". LET'S GO INSIDE.

Blimey. The first impression is... chaos. Of course it isn't. It's just that a whole tribe of engineers, camera pushers, teapersons and lighting artistes are crawling over a massive model of a face, the mouth of which opens to reveal Squeeze miming to the single.

And so between takes a tired, hot, and yet still alert Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook find time to chat about the mechanics of that celebrated, talented songwriting duo, Difford & Tilbrook.

When did you start writing together?

Chris Difford: "Fifteen years ago. I think we were going to Devon in a van. I was writing lyrics on my knee and he was playing guitar, and he said oi, why don't you give me those lyrics and I'll see if I can write a tune to them. Half an hour and he'd written a song, and it sounded great."

Glenn Tilbrook: "I remember we were moving a piano for a friend once, we had this piano in the back of the van and we wrote a song on the journey. That was one of the first we wrote, I'm sure, 1973."

CD: "Maybe that was it. Anyway, I thought well, this seems to make sense, I'll keep giving Glenn lyrics, and hopefully we'll keep delivering the goods. And 15 years later it's still happening. I'd been writing on my own a bit before that I s'pose, but it was pretty irrelevant stuff. Some of the stuff Glenn and I wrote at first was pretty irrelevant, too, but it takes a while to break into a mould when there's two of you writing.

"It felt very natural to write with Glenn and it still does, it still seems a very easy thing to do. Nothing really changed. Two tracks on the new album we actually wrote in the same room, that's the first time we've ever done that, and 'Cool For Cats' was written music first, lyrics second, but those are the only diversions from normal, which is that I come up with the lyrics on my own, take them to Glenn, and he goes away and does the music to them."

How did writing together on those two tracks affect you, Glenn?

GT: "I just liked the idea that, rather than bounce ideas back and forth on paper or on tape and then talk about them, which is what we usually do, we'd have instant communication, bouncing ideas around there and then. It was the first time we'd written together since we started writing songs, and it worked well. In 'Trust Me To Open My Mouth', I put the lyrics in for the bit just before the guitar solo, and Chris changed a line. I also came up with the idea of having the answering vocals at the end, I thought it needed something else which lyrically wasn't there at first. Equally, Chris did the same thing musically with 'Striking Matches', to reinterpret the tune that I'd done — what he came up with was much better than the straightforward tune that I had.

"But generally I think it is easier for us to work apart, because we're both quite private people when we're working, we like to develop our ideas on our own and then talk about it. It might change: I'd like to work together more in the future. I suppose the main advantage of being in a songwriting duo is probably that we're able to write more, although having said that, someone like Elvis Costello writes a lot more songs than we do, so it's not always the case. But there is the advantage of Chris being lyrically free to do whatever he likes, uninhibited by the demands of a tune that he might have. I like the challenge of working with whatever Chris comes up with, it's inspiring."

Did you go away to write the lyrics for this album, Chris?

CD: "Yes, I decided to rent a cottage down in Kent and work on my own from nine to five every day. The majority of the lyrics were written there. I'd done that before in one place and it wasn't very successful, but I found it much better going to a cottage that didn't have anything in it, it wasn't a hotel or anything like that, it just had a kettle and a teapot, that was enough. The good thing about it was that I could sit down and say my aim by the time the pub opens tonight is to have at least one or two lyrics that I'm happy with, and then the reward would be a pint of beer. I think discipline is really the hardest thing to muster up, but once you've got it...

"I took my whole study with me, all my books, paper, pens, teabags, the necessities — and a bit of cheese on toast here and there. I like to be surrounded by books. None of which I've read, I just like to be surrounded by books. I think they're very sort of homely things to have, they make me feel relaxed. I take my books of lyrics past, look back at things you've done. A rhyming dictionary? No — I have a few actually, but I haven't been into them that deeply. I find them really difficult to cope with, some of them, I think you end up sounding like Richard Stilgoe if you use one of those — over-rhymey.

"I wrote three different batches of lyrics at the cottage, so roughly speaking I'd go back and do the next lot while Glenn was demoing up the batch I'd just brought."

GT: "Sometimes when I get the lyrics from Chris I like not to read them until I'm sitting down and everything's ready and I can just start straight away. Other times I'll read through them when I'm not going to be writing, to let them distil through me, if you like... I hope that doesn't, sound too pretentious? But that's what happens. Sometimes I just sit and sing whatever comes up — some lyrics suggest where it's going to go anyway, others you have to break the lines up a bit and work your own rhythm into them.

"With this set of songs I found it easier really to stop thinking about what I was doing, to stop consciously thinking I won't do this and I won't do that, and to try and write more instinctively, which meant that my writing got a lot simpler than it had for quite a while; I think they're all songs that you can sit down and play quite easily. I remember on the last album, one song had a two-page chord sheet for it, which in retrospect seemed to be getting a bit silly. What you should aim for is ending up with something which has your own stamp on it. Mind you, some of the things we write, from my point of view, can be anything from mediocre to unlistenable, but I'll always see a song through to the end anyway. I've done some hilariously bad songs. But then through doing bad songs as well, you learn things for the next time you do a song, so something else springs out of it.

"I always think the writing is, as Chris says, a process of being disciplined — my working hours are between 11 and seven, that's when I can function. There are always days when you make more cups of tea than you'd normally drink, because you feel totally uninspired. Inspiration when it comes is great, but I can't wait for it. More often than not I'm inspired by an idea I get through sitting down and just playing around, literally fiddling around. On the other hand, I do believe you can get great work out of 'writing to form', almost — you won't always do it, it won't always happen, but it'll happen more often if you try more often and set yourself a target.

"The other thing is that the process of zeroing in on what sort of songs are needed gets better and better the more you write. For example, from the first batch of songs for this album — there were 14 — we ended up using two. But from the next batch we used five of the songs, and the last batch we used the lot. You get closer all the time."

Where do your ideas for lyrics come from, Chris?

CD: "From my imagination, from scooping ideas out of listening to conversations that other people have, and some of them are from my own personal life. I'm not sure which is which, though, I get too confused. Travel on a bus, or on a train, sit in a pub, just listen to people's conversations and pick up the interesting flow of words, if there is any. You can learn a lot from watching plays as well. But your imagination has to be sparked from the word go, really. I don't think it's something where you can say, 'I'm gonna be a writer,' and off you go.

"I just use a pen and a piece of paper, pretty simple really. I update lyrics constantly until I'm happy with them or until Glenn is happy with them; it's very important what Glenn feels, he sings most of them and I respect his opinion.

"I consider my lyrics as prose. And then when I hear them come out as a song, it gives me a different emotional feeling, a different angle. But it has to work as a piece of writing first of all, always. It's important that it reads properly. Nine times out of ten it doesn't, but that doesn't bother me, ha ha. That has been a strong consideration in the past, the 'wave' of the lyric, but I'm getting more away from that."

Do you get ideas for tunes from any odd sources, Glenn?

GT: "There's a guy called Brian Inglis, writes about the paranormal and the power of dreams, and he says that sometimes people dream tunes. And I do sometimes — the first song I wrote was a tune that I dreamt, and I can still remember it, crystal clear. It was definitely a song I'd written, too, not one that I thought I'd written. A couple of times I've actually got up and done something about these snatches of music I get as I'm going to sleep, and it's resulted in really good songs.

"For example, an album I'm not generally proud of, but a song that I'm really proud of from it, 'On My Mind Tonight' on the Difford & Tilbrook album, I actually dreamt part of that as I was going to sleep. It's a very funny area, what your brain does when you're relaxing. It's not as if on any of those occasions I've actually been thinking about writing a song — when I go to bed and go to sleep, that's what I'm there to do!"

People have labelled you as 'great songwriters'. Does that kind of treatment put new pressures on your work?

GT: "Yes, I think at one stage we were conscious of the fact that we had to come up with 'great songs'. I found myself thinking that way, sitting down to write, for two or three years. In the end I think I just disappeared up my own bum for a while, I was getting too complicated. It wasn't natural enough for what I was writing. It was only really writing for this album that I felt strong and certain: I wanted to keep things simple, and not get too clever about songwriting. All my favourite songs of ours are mostly pretty simple — with the exception of things like 'Tempted' and 'Black Coffee', which are reasonably complicated, but they had a reason to be that way. So I'm not disregarding doing that sort of thing, I just don't want to do it all the time.

"When Squeeze split at the end of 1982, I think we'd become frustrated in a way by our lack of success: we were doing what we thought at the time and what I still think are really good records. Up to this new album, for instance, 'East Side Story' (1981) and the 'Singles' album (1982) are the only ones that have charted at all. And that's disappointing — 'East Side Story' was our fourth album, and I thought 'Cool For Cats' (1979) was a pretty good album and I thought 'Argy Bargy' (1980) was a great album, I still really like those. So in a way, when the split came, it was at an unfortunate time. But the band had just worked too much, it didn't feel right any more. I think we were right to break up at that time, because it wouldn't have got any better."

Can you write on tour?

CD: No. I mean this is like being on tour, today — I can't imagine there being much time, really. We did a gig last night, got home at one this morning, do a video today, here at 8.30am, finish at eleven tonight. There's not a lot of time on tour, apart from when we travel. And really it's the only chance you have to get some time off, while you're travelling."

The last thing you want to do is more work?

CD: "Uh-huh. It's not work, though, for me, it's a hobby."

Pretty successful hobby, really.

CD: "Thank God, yeah."