Squeeze Still Holding Tight to Success : Pop: The British band, which is gearing up to record a new album in September, plays tonight at Irvine Meadows.

Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook isn’t doing interviews on the group’s present tour, according to a band representative, because he’s spending his time on the road writing new songs for the group’s next album.

“That’s interesting,” Tilbrook said by phone last week from San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. “They told the last person I called that I wasn’t going to do interviews because I was saving my voice.”

Tilbrook is indeed leaving most of the calls to the band’s Chris Difford on the current tour--which brings Squeeze to the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre tonight, opening for Fleetwood Mac--so that he can spend more time at work with his traveling mini-studio of four-track recorder, drum machine and such. The group is gearing up to record a new album in September and is at a crucial juncture in its career, though that seems almost to have been a constant state of affairs for the British band.

Formed about 16 years ago, Squeeze has spent most of the interim verging on the success that critics and musical peers have long felt it deserves. The band briefly appeared in the domestic charts with “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)” in 1980 and the Paul Carrack-sung “Tempted” in 1981, but bigger hits eluded them.

Meanwhile, the tunesmithing team of Tilbrook and Difford was being widely hailed as “the new Lennon and McCartney” and “the new Gilbert and Sullivan.” Such heightened, though not unjustified, expectations helped contribute to the frustrations, tensions and burnout that prompted the band to break up in 1982.

The members played an off-the-cuff charity reunion in 1985 and enjoyed it so much that they gave the group a second shot. (The present lineup is singer-guitarists Tilbrook and Difford, drummer Gilson Lavis, bassist Keith Wilkinson and keyboardist Matt Irving.) That second-wind enthusiasm built eventually to 1987’s splendid “Babylon and On” LP and the hit “Hourglass,” which finally introduced them to American radio audiences. It was a short roll, though, where the subsequent, and still more splendid, 1989 “Frank” album “sank without a trace,” to quote Tilbrook.

Squeeze currently has a spunky live album in the bins, “A Round and a Bout,” and is encouraged about having recently signed with Warner Bros., the label that did quite well by Squeeze’s old pal Elvis Costello last year. The band is determined, Tilbrook said, to give its best to a label it feels will respond in kind, which is why he’s generally writing rather than fielding interviews.

That his lyricist partner Difford is doing them suggests that their collaboration doesn’t quite fit the standard picture of composing teams hunkered over the piano bouncing ideas off each other. “Ninety-nine percent of the time we work separately,” Tilbrook explained. “He’ll give me a bundle of lyric sheets and I’ll go sit in a quiet corner at home with those.”

That separation of powers doesn’t always join in a common result, he said. “When we started writing for the next album a few months ago, he gave me about 50 lyrics, of which I’ve been able to write music to only about 16 so far.”

Difford doesn’t always think Tilbrook’s music works for the lyrics, while, Tilbrook said, “sometimes Chris writes lyrics that don’t really astound me. We don’t always agree. For example, there’s a song that made it onto the English version of ‘Babylon and On’ called ‘Wedding Bells,’ which I thought was a great lyric, and dare I say so myself, I was pretty pleased with the music as well. Chris didn’t like either.”

The points of confluence between the two certainly outweigh any differences. “Every time Chris gives me a batch of lyrics there’s certain ones that leap out at me, where I’ll think, ‘He’s done it again. That’s a great subject matter approached in just the right way.’ It’s true of Chris’ writing, I think, that he writes about things that a lot of people can identify with, but it’s always with his vision. It’s not trying to be universal. I think that’s what makes him such a great lyricist.

“I’ll give you a for-instance with this batch of lyrics. There’s a song he wrote called ‘In My Front Room,’ which quite unusually for us is about more general world events. Written a few months ago, it’s about the wall coming down in Germany, about Romania, Mandela being set free: very un-Squeeze-like subjects. But it’s all seen through the perspective of Chris sitting in his front room watching it on TV, which suddenly makes it very much a Squeeze song.”

A representative batch of the best Squeezings appear on the “A Round and a Bout” live album, released through I.R.S. Records on the Deptford Fun City label, the banner under which they released their first EP in 1974.

The live album, Tilbrook felt, “was a convenient time for a couple of reasons to put the cork on that bottle of Squeeze in the ‘80s. They were the last shows we did with Jools (keyboardist Jools Holland, who left the band in January to work on a British TV show), which is the end of an era, Mark II for us. And besides, we never wanted to do a live album because it always seemed it would be a distraction from whatever else we would be doing. But seeing there was going to be nothing happening for this year particularly, between labels, it seemed a good time to put one out. I’m very pleased with it.”

The group has hopes of landing Don Was to produce its next album. Three songs likely to be on it, “Sunday Street,” “To Walk a Straight Line” and “There is a Voice,” appear in Squeeze’s current live set on the Fleetwood Mac tour.

Being the opening act on such a tour involves playing nightly for an audience that isn’t necessarily there to see you, but Tilbrook said, “I think that’s great. It’s a challenge to rally against what could be the audience’s indifference to us. I find that situation very inspiring.

“The first couple of shows went disastrously for us. The whole production was running late so we didn’t get a sound check and our sound guy was off at his sister’s wedding. It generally wasn’t very good. But I think we’re getting through now.”

Though far from ever being a punk outfit, Squeeze did initially ride in on punk’s spiked wave of enthusiasm and reaction to bloated “superstar” rock. At that time, Fleetwood Mac was often cited as a prime offender in that category, but Tilbrook sees nothing odd in being billed with the veteran multi-platinum-selling band.

“I think it’s a great pairing,” Tilbrook said. “Watching Fleetwood Mac, they’ve got some great songs and arrangements. I think they’re an interesting band. And I think their audience is the sort of audience that could be listening to us, if only they knew about us.”

Fleetwood Mac and Squeeze play at 8 tonight at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. Tickets: $19.50 to $27. Information: (714) 740-2000.