Toronto had a special weather alert out for heavy rain most of the day. It tried to rain a few times through the evening, but it never got past a drizzle. Getting in was easy, and where I parked put me right next to the CNE grounds, with the fair in full swing for its 147th year, running through early September. Fans packed the venue for the night, lawn seating was closed, and staff were offering upgrades to floor access as people walked through the gates. I brought a rain coat and umbrella just in case. Turned out I didn’t need either.
This stop was part of Squeeze’s Tried, Tested, and Trixies tour, a run built around two things at once: 50 years of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook writing together, and Trixies, the band’s new album pulled from a batch of songs the pair wrote as teenagers in 1974 and shelved for half a century. Toronto was the tour’s only Ontario stop and one of just two Canadian dates on the whole run, alongside Vancouver in September. For a bill built entirely around British acts who broke through in the late ’70s and early ’80s, that made it a fairly rare booking for this market.
Haircut 100, 7:00 PM
Haircut 100 opened the night. Nick Heyward’s band never had the long career their early singles suggested, splitting after one album before mostly staying apart for decades, but the songs still carry the bounce that made them a UK chart fixture in 1982. The set leaned on that run: “Someone,” “Nobody’s Fool,” “Kingsize (You’re My Little Steam Whistle),” “Fantastic Day,” “Love Plus One,” and closer “Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl).” Short, upbeat, and a good way to get a crowd still filing in through a drizzle into a decent mood before the headliners.
Adam Ant, 7:45 PM
No photography allowed for Adam Ant’s set, which is a shame, because the staging alone would have made for a fun shoot. He stood centered with bass on his right and guitar on his left, and behind him sat two elevated drum risers with two drummers, one with “Adam” written across his bass drum skin and the other with “Ant.” The dual drummer setup has followed him through different points of his career rather than being a constant, so seeing it out for this tour felt like a deliberate callback to the arrangements that defined his early ’80s run.
The set drew from both his solo catalog and his Adam and the Ants material: “Dog Eat Dog,” “Vive le Rock,” “Friend or Foe,” “Cartrouble,” “Zerox,” “Prince Charming,” “Desperate But Not Serious,” “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” “Antmusic,” “Goody Two Shoes,” and “Stand and Deliver.” It’s a legacy set through and through, no new album behind it, just a career’s worth of hits played by a full band built to recreate the tribal rhythm section that made them stand out in the first place.
Squeeze, 9:00 PM
Squeeze closed the night, and the set stretched across the full arc of the catalog: “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell),” “Up the Junction,” “Another Nail in My Heart,” “Is That Love,” “What More Can I Say,” “You Get the Feeling,” “The Place We Call Mars,” “Hell on Earth,” “The Dancer,” “Good Riddance,” and “Why Don’t You” all came before the show shifted into a dedicated run of Trixies material, “It’s Over,” “The Jaguars,” and both parts of “Trixies” itself, closing that stretch out.
From there it was back into the catalog for “Hourglass,” “Black Coffee in Bed,” “If I Didn’t Love You,” “Third Rail,” “Goodbye Girl,” “Slap & Tickle,” “Cool for Cats,” “Tempted,” and “Take Me I’m Yours.” Before the band wrapped, Danica Dora came out during the intros to cover Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colours,” a nice detour on a night that was otherwise all UK pop pedigree.
Visually, the band matched the moment. The whole lineup came out in coordinated maroon and purple suits under a wash of green stage lighting, with the drum riser branded front and center with the Trixies wordmark. The touring lineup had grown to fill the stage, extra keys, a second guitarist, additional backing vocals, and it gave the older hits a fuller sound live than the records ever had. A few songs brought out an accordion and a smaller guitar tucked into the arrangement, small touches that leaned into the concept-album, nightclub-set feel of the new material without turning the whole show into a novelty.
“Listening back through my notes now, I’ve got ‘Another Nail in My Heart’ stuck in my head on a loop, which says something about how these songs hold up. I hadn’t heard Squeeze in years, maybe not since radio still played them regularly, but the second those hooks kicked in live, it was instant recall.”
Trixies is a strange kind of record to build a tour around. These are songs written by two teenagers in 1974, shelved, and only now finished by the same two men fifty years later. Hearing that material sit in the middle of a set alongside “Cool for Cats” and “Tempted” gave the whole night a sense of a band closing a loop rather than just running through the hits one more time. Pairing that with Adam Ant’s legacy set and Haircut 100’s brief run of early ’80s singles made for a bill that covered a lot of UK pop history in one night, and Toronto got to see all of it on a rare Canadian stop.
SQUEEZE
HAIRCUT 100
I’m Drew, the founder and editor of Front of the Stage. I have a strong love for music and photography, which started at a very young age. There’s just something I love about experiencing live music and capturing memories that will last a lifetime, and that’s how Front of the Stage came to be.
