POP WEEKEND : Squeeze Tightens Tunes in Straightforward Show

Squeeze has a reputation for being clever, sometimes to a fault. Friday night at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center, the British band stuck mainly to straightforward fundamentals and came up with a winning concert.

First, the group fulfilled the Sly Stone all-we-need-is-a-drummer dictum: No band with a superior timekeeper can fall flat. Squeeze had it covered with its dynamic basher, Gilson Lavis. Not only did Lavis drive the band hard, but it was fun to watch him do it. With grimaces, body twists and a flailing of black-gloved fists, he looked as if he was caught up in some mighty task.

Atop that foundation, Squeeze added its trademark interplay of voices: leading man Glenn Tilbrook, with his clear, supple tenor and a dexterous lead guitar style to match, and supporting actor Chris Difford, with his distinctive, tuneful croak reminiscent of Popeye the Sailor. Keyboardists Jools Holland and Andy Metcalfe formed another sharply attuned team-within-a-team, interweaving melody lines or accenting each other’s rhythms.

Squeeze also heeded the common-sense idea that audiences want to hear hits. Although the band’s bona fide Top 20 smashes in the United States can be counted on a single finger (“Hourglass,” which they saved for the encore), Squeeze has a long history of putting out singles that would have been hits in a more just world. Most of them are compiled on the “Singles--45’s and Under” album.

In concert, they drew liberally from that collection, playing 9 of its 12 songs. Most of those old favorites were close re-creations of the records. But departures from familiar arrangements for a ska-inflected “Goodbye Girl” and a Latin-ish, syncopated “Take Me I’m Yours” showed that Squeeze is too inventive to settle for being a live jukebox.

At times on their records, lyricist Difford and melodist Tilbrook have been a little too inventive, overloading songs to the point of clutter. That wasn’t a problem in concert. The song arrangements had enough twists to maintain a sense of surprise, but they were essentially to the point.

With enough crowd-pleasers to serve as a spine for the 95-minute concert, Squeeze did pick spots to stretch out with more demanding, less insistently catchy songs. “The Prisoner,” “No Place Like Home” and “Heartbreaking World” formed a three-paneled look at domestic misery and general malaise, set to dreamier, more diffuse music than the hits.

The show’s main thrust, though, wasn’t to probe emotional and thematic depths but to have fun. With Holland prancing about in a blue velvet suit and shiny spats and doing a humorous Joel Grey “Cabaret”-style routine to introduce the band, and with Tilbrook leading the crowd in calisthenic pogoing and Difford doing a disco bop whenever the going got funky, Squeeze didn’t fail to have a good time or provide one for its fans.

The opening set by 10,000 Maniacs offered promise and needless affectation in equal measure. With a forward-driving rhythm section and a guitar/organ combination that churns up impressive washes of textured sound, the five-member band from small-town western New York state showed an ability to hit a musical crest and keep riding it in a way that sometimes recalled Elvis Costello’s band, the Attractions.

But singer Natalie Merchant’s penchant for acting the part of a little girl caught up in her own reveries, charming at times, grew cloying over a 40-minute set. Merchant has a strong, piercing voice with a folkish cast. Unfortunately, she undermines it by singing in a put-on accent that sounds like Olde English. Merchant’s songs have substance, but she needs to set aside the solipsism and the gimmicks (including the cutesy navy-blue nautical outfit with pinafore that she wore on stage) and concentrate on reaching out to communicate what she has to say.