Why “Up The Junction” Is A Brilliant Case Study Of Kitchen-Sink Realism
I was doing the dishes one afternoon with Spotify on some sort of New Wave Radio — when a song by a band I’d never heard before came on. Rarely ever anymore in my lifelong music-consuming career do I get this excited about a track still — that feeling that upon hearing it changes your entire day’s trajectory, the kind that makes washing dishes a bearable task. It kept me hooked from start to finish through its timeless, punchy riffs, and its world-building lyrics both full of life and loss; the three-minute ten-second track kept me wanting to know more even after the story was over, and I continued to replay it and explore the rest of the album for the entire night. Personally, good songs make you want to take action — whether it’s to write, make a story, sing, or even just do a little dance. However, the best songs make you want to embark on a deep dive into their history and artistic references and write about them over the course of five to seven pages. In this short essay, I’d like to introduce you to Squeeze and the dynamic of the band that produced songs like Up the Junction, the artistic scene from which the song was born, and finally highlight what is one of the most important facets of song-writing — storytelling and world-building.
A Brief History of Kitchen-sink Realism
Up The Junction, by playwright/author Nell Mary Dunn, is a 1963 collection of short stories depicting the personal lives of the people of Battersea and Clapham Junction, set in its industrial slums. The book, mostly centered around the same four characters, was then adapted into a movie of the same name in 1968. In this adaptation, we see the characters Polly, Pete, Rube, and Sylvie come to life. Polly is an heiress, on the run from her rich and easy west-end London, Chelsea roots.
She walks into a modest confectionary factory across the river Thames in Battersea and meekly asks for a job. This scene perfectly frames Polly in stark contrast to the common folk — amidst the stares and jumpy politeness she gets from her affluent and elegant appearance contrasted to the grimy and unhygienic nature of the factory. It is obvious by the way she responds that she comes from a life where most, if not all, of her needs, were met at the snap of a finger and a pleasant smile. The film tackles provocative themes of early adult life in the not-so-well-off parts of London in the 60s, complete with messy relationships, dangerous abortions, monotony, and an overall sense of hopelessness, as any dreams these characters have, are dashed and whittled away into an eventuality of nothing.
This film is classified under kitchen-sink realism or kitchen-sink dramas as they were most commonly referred to. Kitchen-sink realism is a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s to the late 1960s, whose protagonists could best be described as “angry, disgruntled youths,’ disillusioned with society and the world around them — not so different from a movement happening amongst angry and disgruntled youths right now. Kitchen-sink realism in theatre, cinema, and novels takes these young working-class Britons and places them in situations where their untapped potential for chaos and true self-destruction can be displayed in the most somber and subtle of ways, like in Up The junction — where we see the leads attempt to circumvent their unfortunate circumstances, only to still be betrayed by the world around them. In the LGBT/race-focused drama A Taste of Honey, an interracial relationship is undermined and eventually ruined due to the protagonist’s alcoholic mother detesting the fact that her grandchild would be part-black.
The art scene in the 1950s-60s London was dominated in no small part by the kitchen-sink realism movement in which the working-class Londoners were the focus. They lived in small-cramped apartments and worked in shitty conditions. They found escapism through bottomless drinking in pubs and found interest in exploring socio-cultural issues such as homelessness, abortion, and equal rights. While art made in the genre is notorious for depicting life as nihilistically as you could possibly imagine, one could argue that it’s only the director’s devotion to social realism that makes it so, and through the author’s will to bring the ugly truths of the lost youth at the time to life. Either way, kitchen-sink realism aimed to hold up a mirror to the world, as well as relate to the youth of the London slums.
Kitchen-sink realism was born out of necessity. In the 1940s-50s, British cinema and theatre were overcome with clean-cut dramas and tamed-down comedies aimed to sedate a largely growing crowd of newly-educated writers and authors — it was their time to speak. The movement aimed to spin the narrative of the English working class in a way that could truly relate to them. They were the people overlooked, the extras in the background of a movie about an upper-middle class family, unvarnished and raw. They were you and me, and that is, I believe, why the art that was borne out of that forgotten era remains so timeless and fresh to this day.
Who was Squeeze?
After the brief breakdown of the artistic climate from which the true subject of this essay, the song Up The Junction was born, I think we can really see the themes at play here. Squeeze was an English new-wave/rock band that rose to prominence during the mid-1970s, comprised of guitarists/vocalists/lyricists Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook.
Fun fact, Difford claims to have stolen 50p from his mother’s purse to advertise for a guitarist to join his band that hadn’t even been formed yet, and Tilbrook was the first and only to answer the call-to-action.
And so, they began writing songs together until finally adding Jools Holland on drums and Paul Gunn on the keyboard to the mix to form an actual band. While their single in question off the album Cool for Cats was sung by Tilbrook, the lyrics of most of their other early work were written by Difford, with Tilbrook stating that he found Difford’s lyricism to be brilliant.
Each member of the band had reached adolescence during the kitchen-sink realism movement, and the music they would go on to create reflects it — but like with all counter-cultures, the individual has to seek it out, and seek it out they did. Not much is known about the early lives of Difford and Tilbrook, however, in a Word in Your Ear podcast episode, Difford sheds a little light on what his teenage years were like around that era. Difford pulls out a diary entry he kept from October 1973. It reads,
Work was still. I went up to town with Glenn (Tilbrook) to see Mike Cooper, the book looks fine. We had a long chat over a glass of rum. Came home, freaked out at Sharon Cross — don’t tell me why. Bought Quadrophenia by The Who.
In a 1989 documentary Squeeze did for VH1’s Frankly Speaking series, a younger Tilbrook and Difford get a little bit more in-depth about their songwriting process. Difford shuts himself in for weeks on end writing lyrics and then passes it onto Tilbrook who also continues to write for a couple more weeks, refine them, and start composing music to accompany the lyrics.
Their discography screams edgy and misunderstood new-wave child of London’s kitchen-sink realism era the decade before. Their drummer, Holland himself described Difford and Tilbrook’s writing process as pulling from strange and obscure influences such as old songs sung in pubs passed down by pirates singing sea shanties. Citing one of his personal influences Jimi Hendrix, Holland concludes by calling Squeeze simply a collection of modern men.
Themes Within the Song
Looking purely at the lyrics of Up the Junction, the story easily seems like something straight out of a 60’s London play — dripping with the same encumbered slice of life, yet all too common scenarios more people are likely to find themselves in than not. I believe what makes this one of Squeeze’s most listened-to songs is the way in which Tilbrook’s nasally, yearning tone turns from happy and in love, to hopeless — all in three minutes and ten seconds.
Our protagonist, angry and disgruntled as he is, takes us through a life he’s built with a girl he meets at Clapham junction. They exchange some wit and are instantly taken with each other. This type of instantaneous love can be found in works of song and cinema until your eyeballs sink into the back of your head — however, the way love is portrayed in works drawing inspiration from the movement materializes differently. To use an allegory, kitchen-sink romance is falling in love for the nth time in your 20s or 30s after your last relationship was with a narcissist, and the one before that was with a psychopath. It’s framed dangerously and without much reason. It’s rainbows at the moment with dark clouds dripping with a threatening storm in the distance. It’s a moment in our protagonists’ lives that is doomed.
They proceed to rent out a basement together. Living modestly and day-to-day while slaving away in conditions described as ‘brass and bitter’ were hallmarks of the reality of many Londoner’s lives back in the 1960s — missing out on nights out in the Railway Arms pub because their time together in front of the television was miles more important. When our couple finds out they’re with child, he works eleven hours a day and puts a 10-pound note away each week to get ready for the financial strain. The first loss comes in the form of a memento from their once all-encompassing love, having to sell their television.
With the song shifting key to signify a much-needed high note in the protagonist’s life, we see our boy’s girl give birth to a daughter who looks just like her mother. Unfortunate for many reasons, as at the time of our protagonist’s retelling, both mother and daughter are long gone and sorely missed. With them now under the care of a new husband and step-father after our boy becomes an alcoholic and chronic gambler, one can only assume his undoing could’ve been attributed to his daughter looking nothing like him.
In a despondent concluding verse, we meet our protagonist for the last time, alone in his basement’s kitchen. His efforts to keep his family and the devil away were futile and he yearns for the days he would change his daughter’s smelly diapers again. In the parting titular line, he recognises that he’s well and truly, up the junction.
