There’s nothing like the opening first track of a new LP! Choosing which track deserves that important position, the one that sums up the theme of the album, sets up the mood, is the welcome mat, the handshake, the eye contact, the hug - the first impression! It’s one of the most loaded decisions a record maker faces.

Sometimes it’s an arbitrary decision, a consensus: choose the catchiest song, the easy rocker. Yet your choice will nevertheless come to signify the entire experience. Think of an LP, and you’ll probably recall the first song, and may struggle to remember the subsequent track order, without running through the whole thing in your head!

For Squire LPs, the choice is always instinctive. The Life on Get Smart says everything - like a fanfare, a manifesto! September Gurls, obviously, that intro with that guitar sound! And even the first ever single, Get Ready To Go, the keen frenetic three quarter sized Rickenbacker making a bold statement, pushing every conceivable chord into the first four bars! I could go on…!

For Smash? It was always going to be Slip Away!

The first note you hear is the 12-string Rickenbacker. It’s the fastest song on the record. It’s explosive. It connects everything together - the tension, the intention, the determination, the two sides of the coin, the two sides of consciousness, inside and outside, the two continents, London and Los Angeles, and the invisible silver thread that connects them. Am I on the inside looking out, or outside looking in? Am I homesick in LA, or longing to escape London?

Slip Away lands like jumping onto an already fast-moving merry-go-round. It’s already out of control. The verses sit stubbornly on one chord, like speeding down a one-way street, relentless - a simple pentatonic melody underscored with a motorific beat, the engine. Then the realisation: I don’t need a train or a plane, or a wave goodbye. All I have to do is close my eyes. And I’m back wherever I want to be again. London, LA, in, out, up, down. I’ve slipped away.

Like all the tracks recorded for the album, it was recorded direct to the four-track tape machine. The sessions moved fast. With that came a relentless forward motion - no second chance, second guess or second version. The songs sit tightly next to each other on the analogue tape. There isn’t even a minute of silence between them for fades or safety. Instead they crash into each other and begin to segue, as though they’re destined for side two of Abbey Road. The session ended when the tape ran out, not when the songs ran out.

Within that speed of recording, ideas and ways of playing seemed to affect the songs as a group. There is a perhaps unintentional guitar figure that appears on at least three songs - and it’s here in Slip Away, going into the first I don’t need a train section. Unconsciously played and only recognised afterwards. As though a co-writer had quietly joined the song’s creation.

The instrument as signifier

Instruments act not only as riffs, rhythm and character - they act as signifiers as well. They connect the music to a particular era, a genre, a place. And the 12-string guitar is one of the most loaded signifiers in the whole of popular music.

The instrument first came to wide attention on the hit single Walk Right In by The Rooftop Singers - an acoustic folk song released in January 1963 that spent two weeks at number one on the US Billboard pop chart, reached number ten in the UK chart, and stayed high in the chart for twelve weeks. But it was what happened next that changed everything.

The song that truly established the 12-string sound in pop music was, of course, the opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night - George Harrison’s electric 12-string Rickenbacker, so upfront as to obliterate everything else on the record. And then the follow up single Ticket to Ride. The 12-string became the new secret weapon of The Beatles’ signature sound, instantly replacing the Merseybeat/soul/girl group mix with a futuristic sonic salvo of turned-up treble. It was ubiquitous to the sound of the era, and soon enough you could hear it on Mr. Tambourine Man, and then, when The Beach Boys joined in on Wouldn’t It Be Nice, it came to signify the sound of California.

Looking at the evolution of music in the 1960s, music historian Richie Unterberger has also observed a seismic shift in how records were heard. Up until then, records were either live recordings or novelty records. Afterwards, the creation of signifiers added a third layer of meaning…

That third layer of meaning is precisely what the 12-string carries. You have the melody and lyrics, and then the soundscape carries something else entirely, not just accompaniment, but sounds that evoke memory, borrow styles from adjacent music to suggest you belong to a genre, or catch a sonic silhouette that becomes the main feature of the song. A 12-string is not just an electric guitar, its not just the sound of a guitar on steroids, its particular shimmer is unique, and when you hear it you hear beyond what the player is performing and listen unconsciously to what the sound is evoking. It reminds you of other music, you’ve heard it before, it must mean something!

Indeed, the instrument came to signify the West Coast more than The Beatles’ hard-hitting introduction. By the time of If I Needed Someone on Rubber Soul, it sounded as though George Harrison was referencing The Byrds rather than the other way round. And after that song, he never recorded with it again. The Beatles reinvented their sound once more with Revolver, stepping away from the jangle and into something stranger and more expansive.

But the essence of the 12-string shimmer remained in the culture. Hotel California by The Eagles, the rolling arpeggios that open the track and underscore the verses, owns the Laurel Canyon folk revival era. The instrument had become a sonic shorthand for wide open spaces, for the California dream, for a certain kind of yearning.

A strange period for guitars

The 1980s were a peculiar moment for the 12-string, and for guitars generally. In a sea of synth pop, the guitar sounded retro; the band sound was nostalgic rather than searching for new expression. Records featuring the instrument were either ironic or reaching back towards a prior authenticity. And there was a further complication: the 12-string is genuinely difficult to record cleanly and keep in tune, which is partly why its presence on pop records of the era, that are defined by precision, modernity and perfect tuning, was often more implied than actual.

The Smiths are forever associated with the sound, Johnny Marr and his black Rickenbacker epitomised the image of the new guitar god, but their studio approach typically involved a Fender Telecaster with an effect rather than a genuine 12-string. What Morrissey and Marr achieved was something more subtle, an arpeggio style that paid homage to 1960s guitar fluidity, while overlaying the sound and spirit of early 1960s female-fronted pop, creating a peculiar tension between a back to basics accompaniment and traditional British pop. The 12-string signified a lineage connecting back to a time when guitar hero meant Harrison and McGuinn, not Clapton and Page. What made it modern was a rhythm section that never quite loosened up.

REM used the Rickenbacker sound differently, to create a garage-band energy within an Americana framework. For them it signified wide open spaces, and the claustrophobia of playing in clubs at the end of a dusty journey.

And when you’re not paying attention, you’re still hearing it. The opening notes to the theme to Friends? The Rembrandts with a 12-string! The opening credits to UK daytime soap opera Crossroads, running from the 1960s through to the 1980s? A 12-string! (played by Vic Flick, who also played the Bond theme). It never really went away.

The 12-string Rickenbacker had already become a signature sound of Squire in the very early days, featured on the My Mind Goes Round in Circles / Does Stephanie Know single and forever played live as the main guitar sound. You come to expect it to show up eventually, and might feel quietly cheated if it doesn’t.

But there is also a risk with any signifier: overuse eventually transforms the original meaning. Phasing, for instance, once connected powerfully as a key signifier of the psychedelic experience, has gradually come to signify 1960s novelty sound effects rather than its original counter-cultural charge. By the 1980s, the 12-string risked something similar, sliding from genuine signifier into mere period costume, a sonic cliche from the past.

Using it on Smash was therefore a knowing, loaded choice, not simply a sonic preference. Is there ever a right time to disconnect from the past and make a ‘new’ record?

Back to Slip Away

The 12-string is on Slip Away because I picked it up to play, to contrast to the six-string rhythm guitar that drives the song. But as soon as I started, the sound suggested itself, and the style was an improvised blast from beginning to end. One take. It had to be. You can’t drop in to repair anything when you’re recording to a primitive four-track tape machine. And that one-take-or-bust methodology creates the excitement. The few wrong notes are suddenly the right notes as you wayfair your way to the end of the song.

It’s a trip. In every sense. Sensory overload. And in its way, it not only signifies California overlaid on top of a very British backing track, it connects across to a myriad of unconscious influences and counter-cultural references - and you know who it is as well!

On Smash, it arrives with the very first note. The album opens, as it always was going to, with a Smash!

In 1985, you couldn’t see the other side of the world. You could read about it in monthly magazines that appeared weeks later in import record shops. Imported records were expensive, and had no context, they were just more unknown bands.

If you happened to be watching the right channel on the right night, you may have caught a single Old Grey Whistle Test special documenting something called the Paisley Underground in Los Angeles. Miss it and it was gone. It existed, briefly, as a rumour.

I didn’t miss it. I saw it first hand!

I’d been travelling between London and California since the early eighties, 1983, 84, 85, 86, running Hilo Records, performing on both sides of the Atlantic, mixing Squire records in Hollywood and London. What that gave me was something genuinely rare: I could see both rooms at once. And what I could see was that the two scenes looked similar but were operating on entirely different assumptions.

In California, the Paisley Underground, The Three O’Clock, Rain Parade, Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, The Bangles, weren’t reviving anything. They were continuing. Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys, Love, The Doors: the lineage ran straight into what they were doing, without apology. It was California. It always had been.

As recently as February 2026, Cherry Red Records released a three-disc Paisley Underground box set. The scene I witnessed forming in 1983 is still being excavated.

Crucially, it was framed as underground, not revival. That single word made all the difference. Underground can’t fail on its own terms. Revival is already looking backwards before it’s played a note. Underground doesn’t need mass sales to be generative.

Brian Eno, in a 1982 conversation later reported in the Los Angeles Times, noted that the first Velvet Underground record had sold around 30,000 copies in its early years, but, as he put it, “everyone who bought one … started a band.” That was the surrounding music in the early 1980s. The interesting music started underground.

Back in London, the Mod Revival had been filed as retro almost from the beginning, as soon as the major labels had taken a passing interest. It was framed as a 60s pastiche, a novelty echo, despite the fact that mod in the 1960s had been the absolute opposite of backwards. Modernism, risk-taking, mixing cultures, embracing what was new. The irony that it had become synonymous with nostalgia would have baffled anyone who’d been there first time round. But in the UK, its familiar silhouette positioned it as a revival, not an underground. In California, mod was underground style.

Meanwhile on KROQ covering Los Angeles and Orange County, the fifth-largest record market in the world at the time, just those two counties alone, British records dominated the airwaves: Echo and the Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs, The Cure, Culture Club, Depeche Mode (remarkably their first gigs were also at the Bridge House, Canning Town!). The Second British Invasion was real, and these records were heard as modern and forward-facing. They openly embraced the technology of the moment, while referencing the underground!

Jon Savage, in his book 1966, locates the beginning of what he calls the ‘Great Race’ at Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone in 1965, six minutes long, a starting gun on “a new age of pop ambition”. Eight Miles High, Pet Sounds, Rain, Revolver, Good Vibrations, Sgt. Pepper’s, all within two years. Every significant band felt obliged to join the race. Standing still wasn’t neutral. It was retreat.

The great race had re-emerged in the eighties with the same urgency but different terrain.

While Trevor Horn, producing Frankie Goes To Hollywood, had replaced musicians with a Fairlight computer, costing the price of a house, power pop bands such as The Cars, originally produced by Queen’s 1970s sonic architect, Roy Thomas Baker, black and white sleeves, angular new wave with impeccable pop underneath, were by 1985, in Battery Studios in Willesden, London, recording Heartbeat City with Mutt Lange, similarly embracing Fairlight sampling and a more controlled, contemporary production sound. Same band. Same songwriting instincts. They’d stayed in the race by working honestly with what the moment made available.

So while the see-saw of underground- LA rising mod adjacent Paisley pop vs UKs descending Mod Revival played out in the background, pop bands with clear mod connections, such as The Cars and Blondie, whose members Elliot Easton and Clem Burke wore their unashamed mod influences literally, demonstrated that engaging with contemporary technology and holding deep mod values were not incompatible.

Standing somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, I was aware of the irony that mainstream pop had taken 1960s mod influences and combined them with modern production instincts. And I could see that my records were more naturally welcomed in California than in London, where Squire had been filed under Mod Revival from the start, and once you're given a label, no matter what music you make, that's who you are. By 1984-85, that label meant retro, niche, already over.

What I was reaching for with Smash wasn’t reinvention so much as release: letting familiar songwriting instincts meet a genuine curiosity about what the moment made possible.

The known and the contemporary held together, pointing toward something that felt like a future rather than a footnote.

From where I was standing in 1985, moving familiar songwriting instincts forward in new ways didn’t feel like betrayal. It felt entirely consistent with the spirit that had inspired everything in the first place.

New way, New day! Or, Old way, Same Old Day?

You decide!

It’s winter again! It’s not, it’s the middle of May. But this week in London - it’s been like freezing weather. There’s a north wind. The heating’s back on, the coat is back on! This is ridiculous.

This is week two of Smash!

Last week, I played two songs, from the forthcoming Smash LP. ‘Living Day To Day’ and ‘All I’m Saying Is…’ Short, sharp, joined at the hip. They were performed as one song. Actually, when I listened back, I realised there were four songs hiding in there! The opening verses were one idea, the couplets kept circling the same thought from different angles. Too-ing and fro-ing between London to Los Angeles was relentless and disorienting.

The bridge was another section, saying ‘It’s half past time!’ I’m brimming with ideas and I can’t catch up!

The song ending was supposed to be a vocal harmony section descending into the next song. I just kept playing guitar accidentally. In the moment.

Listening back later, I realised I’d stumbled into an impression of the intro to ‘Hotel California’. That unplanned guitar figure summed up my entire cultural impression of LA. The shock of being there, the scale, the sunlight, the mythology, and then being back at home in the mundane domestic tea drinking life of a grey skied Londoner. So it stayed in.

And the next song, ‘All I’m Saying Is… ’ The lyrics are self evident.

And now here’s a new song! ‘Winterman’.

‘Winterman’ somehow carries the same tension as the first two. The California sun against the London winter rain and wind. The blanket of grey that descends with the darkness of the evenings and won’t go. The memory of warmth lingering somewhere out of reach. The same sun Brian Wilson built his songs around.

When I recorded the song I played the Rickenbacker 12-string. It was my guitar sound and it sounded right for the part I had imagined to play. Now I hear it differently. It signifies California. Not just because of the Byrds, or the intro to The Beach Boys’ ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, though both are in there somewhere. The shimmer itself is the metaphor.

I’m singing about the rain in England while the 12-string plays the California sun underneath it the whole way through. That’s not an arrangement detail, that’s the tension of the entire record made sonic. I left California but California didn’t leave me.

‘Winterman’ is the penultimate song on Side Two.

‘Hey! Mr. Winterman, give us back our sunshine if you can!’

If you’ve seen the Beatles film A Hard Days Night, or accidentally launched a football over the neighbour’s fence, and had to nervously walk up to the house and ask the grumpy old man if you could have the ball back, you’ll know the songs beating heart.

There’s no point me trying to explain what the lyrics mean, they will mean something different to every listener on first listen. But forty years after the event, in the gap between writing and understanding what I wrote, I can hear two themes running through the record.

There’s a yearning for something out of reach and out of your control.

And there’s the concept of Smash itself. As an event. Something that lands before anyone can see it coming. Disruption that creates a new future.

It can be Smash as a 1960s pop culture world, the hit record, the cultural moment. A Roy Lichtenstein pop art comic-strip universe. The word is enough. Smashing Time, the chaotic anarchic film where everything goes wrong in the most generative way possible. It’s the whole mid-60s mod aesthetic of sensation as impact.

But also Smash as physics. Forward velocity. Irreversible impact. The sound arriving after the event. You cannot reverse-engineer a smash. It happens in motion. Meaning appears during the act itself. The process doesn’t contain the outcome beforehand. The consequence cannot be undone.

I’m reminded of the Who film Tommy and the sequence ‘Smash The Mirror’. It’s ritualistic violence - breaking that mirror. What you thought was destruction is actually liberation.

Behind the shattered glass is the open window to a real world. The mirror wasn’t a wall, it was a false surface mistaken for one.

And that is Smash! A sensation!

For me, the sensation is rediscovering this record. The record exists as evidence of a moment that shattered into a before and after. The term demo was an imposed narrative, not a sonic description of fact. And it’s rediscovery is a revelation.

‘Winterman’ is also a sensation. And you want to smash through to the other side. You know the sunshine is there.

But you have to want it hard enough.

Here’s the song.

Smash!

Deep in the run-out groove of the 1983 Squire ‘Get Smart’ album, scratched into the vinyl, are the words

‘GET SET FOR A SMASHING TIME…’

The Smash LP was written and proposed for release after the 1983 LP ‘Get Smart!’, and then delayed until after September Gurls but was eventually abandoned. It wasn’t planned to be as sonically ambitious as Get Smart, or as power poppy as the follow up, but more experimental. Not in an avant-garde way, and yet not in a way that made sense to the band either! Or perhaps the audience. So it quietly slipped off the calendar.

I’ve always described it as moods or feels rather than an ensemble sound. The idea of approaching its recording just like the previous albums; band learns songs and goes to studio to record them, somehow seemed not to capture the idea. The songs were written very quickly, and as a kind of diary, and experience of dashing between London and Los Angeles mid-1980s and with that, hearing pop music from two very different perspectives.

UK records being played on the radio in LA were framed as the 2nd British Invasion, and somehow, out of their natural environment, they sounded like the future. On Radio One those same records were just British music doing its usual thing of mixing novelty, technology and disrupting the mainstream. But what they did do was to make a ‘band sound’ appear old fashioned and somehow inauthentic to the times.

Smash demanded a production style rooted in 1960s songwriting, but modern enough to sit on contemporary radio without sounding retro.

Flipping between continents had inspired the songs: jet lag, temporal dislocation, liminal states, isolation. The production needed to reflect that same economy-class reality. I didn’t need to pretend I’d travelled first class, and I didn’t need to pretend the record required a top-class studio either. That was a lie. I needed something closer to the truth.

What it didn’t need was a real drum kit as the centre of gravity. That meant a proper studio, a formal session, and someone else’s idea of what the songs should sound like. Regardless of what you asked for, as soon as they heard you play, they assumed you wanted a retro sound and gave you their version of what 1960s sounded like, from their own memory.

I’ve restarted the sessions a few times over the decades. Every time, same conclusion: it sounds wrong. Something’s always missing, and what’s missing is the spontaneous capture of the moment the songs were written. Not a cleaned-up representation of it. The real thing.

So this is what I think.

The record is finished!

It was finished after I had originally recorded it. But it’s taken all that time to understand that the way we valued music back then, how it used to be framed, ‘a real record needs to be recorded in a proper studio with real drums’, got it wrong for this record.

It is what it is, and it’s great!

Fifteen songs that will knock you out. That’s it. Trust your ears. The songwriting and performance define the songs, not the technology.

The album is ten songs on side 1 and five songs on side 2. The ten songs run together like a Beatles ‘Abbey Road’ side 2 approach, short, sudden, finished but unfinished - urgent! Exactly how I felt at the time. Impatient! Agitated!

Here are two songs from the middle of Side 1. ‘Living Day to Day’ segues into ‘All I’m Saying Is…’ They were performed as if one piece. I played the guitar in one go, beginning to end, across both songs at once. It had to be done like that. The technology, and doing it by yourself, didn’t allow for any ‘drop ins’. You played until you got it right.

The album is going to come out later this year. In the meantime, I’ll be talking about it here, sharing the stories, recording ideas, songs, enjoying it instead of worrying about it. It was always good. I just needed to turn down the noise of opinion from outside!