The Domino Tour: By Christopher Braide
Growing up in New Wave Britain in the late seventies and early eighties, there were four bands that seemed to live permanently on the Rotel turntable in our house: The Buggles, New Musik, Soft Cell, and Squeeze. Those records were on constant rotation. Outside, on the radio, it felt much the same. Cool for Cats, Up the Junction, Video Killed the Radio Star, Tainted Love — they were everywhere. Songs you couldn’t escape, woven into the sound of the country itself.
I wanted to make records like that. I was obsessed. It didn’t feel like a choice.
And somewhere in all of that, long before I ever met Glenn, I recognised something else — a familiarity in his voice. The tone, the high register, the way it sat emotionally and physically felt close to my own. Not imitation, not aspiration — recognition. A quiet sense of kinship you clock instinctively, without knowing why, and file away for later.
I joined the Domino tour in 1999 — a strange, slightly ghosted version of Squeeze, following Blondie around the UK.
Chris Difford was in rehab.
Jools Holland had long gone, and had also fallen out with everyone in the band.
And for a few weeks, somehow, I was Jools.
Ash Soan was on drums. We went everywhere — Bournemouth to Aberdeen — the long British circuit of theatres and arenas, motorways and hotels. Glenn Tilbrook was there, carrying the band forward by sheer will. I’d known Glenn for years, first as an artist, as a writer I admired — and suddenly I was on stage beside him, playing keyboards and singing backup vocals in a band that was temporarily missing part of itself.
We played big rooms.
Wembley Arena. Manchester Apollo. Dublin Point.
A decade earlier I’d stood in those same venues watching Squeeze from the crowd. And now I was walking onstage as a member of the band — albeit a slightly dysfunctional, interim version of it. In Manchester, just before we went on, I had a flicker of a thought: my mates are probably out there somewhere… and I’m in Squeeze.
It should have felt triumphant.
Instead it felt unreal.
Because I didn’t really want to be there.
That’s the truth I didn’t yet know how to say.
It wasn’t Glenn’s fault. It wasn’t the music. It was the position — being drafted into something unresolved, filling a role that belonged to someone else, saying yes because saying no felt impossible. I didn’t have the language for that then. I only had a sense of misalignment.
There were moments where the strain showed. I knew Glenn wasn’t in a good place, and that he was feeling Difford’s absence deeply.
One night in Liverpool, at the Empire, we walked onstage and opened with Is That Love. There was no fan onstage for Glenn. After the first song he walked off. We followed him backstage. Ash and I could hear lots of shouting and commotion — about the heat, about the missing fan. Eventually one was found. We went back onstage and limped through the rest of the show. No drama, no speeches — just professionals carrying on, holding the shape together.
Dublin was different again.
We were opening for Blondie. The room was barely filled. Glenn looked at me, took in the emptiness, and said,
“Come on then — let’s just have fun.”
And for a moment, we did.
Later that night, after drinking — too much, the wrong kind — something in me cracked. There was a bar, a cocky lad from a boy band, full of himself, flanked by attention, and making a point of pretending not to know who our band was. I stood up, moved towards him, acted a bit like a Gallagher and said something like “come on then”. Completely out of character. We legged it before the police were called. It escalated, then stopped. To be fair the guy was being a total dickhead.
Glenn said “cheers then”.
“Let’s go to our rooms,” he whispered.
“If anyone knocks or calls, don’t answer.”
The room was dark — not just physically, but existentially. That particular hotel-room darkness where you suddenly see yourself from above and don’t recognise the person in the scene.
The next morning Glenn called me Bruiser Braide. It was said lightly, and we all laughed — but I had the worst hangover ever as we headed to Scotland.
The final show was Aberdeen.
By then, everything felt thin — nerves, patience, luck. That night after the final show there was a fight in the toilets. Two guys. Ash witnessed one of them glassing the other. Afterwards Glenn said, quietly but firmly,
“Don’t say you saw anything. Just keep quiet.”
The police and the paramedics arrived asking questions, and so we hit the road at around midnight, driving from Aberdeen back to London.
It was a scary night. The kind that stays in your body even when you try not to think about it.
There were some memorable nights on the Domino tour. Playing Wembley Arena was exciting, chatting with Debbie Harry every night at dinner, and Ash and I always had a laugh about it all. But the band was on life support.
I blocked much of this tour out for years.
Not because I was avoiding it — but because I was miscast. I was slightly out of alignment with myself during that time, playing a role I hadn’t chosen, in a band that was temporarily something else entirely. I was being someone else’s Jools while quietly losing contact with my own centre. I’d had a label deal, made my own albums — and here I was watching a band I’d once loved fall apart before my eyes. This was the flip side of the pop dream.
And alongside all of that, something else was very clear to me.
I knew I had to get out and make some money — and write some hits. That was on my mind. I wanted to play at being in a band, and I liked that part of it: the camaraderie, the late nights, the shared sense of purpose. But I also knew it was limited. I loved Squeeze, but even then I could see the road ahead for them — tough work, physical, year after year. Night after night. Great when you’re 25. Unforgiving when you’re double that. You have to be built for it. It might look easy from the comfort of the sofa. It isn’t. It’s gruelling.
I don’t think it’s wrong to be business-minded about music, or to want to sell records. I wanted a life I could finance, so that I could be free to choose. Music is my constant — I would write songs even as a hobby — but professionally, you do have to have hits. That was always the aim. Otherwise it’s a private pleasure, which is fine too. This was no private pleasure, it was all or nothing. At that point in my life, the idea of not being successful in music seemed like a fate worse than death. America beckoned.
I knew I’d made the right turn after that tour. I’d done it. I’d lived the solo artist life in London. I’d made two albums with heavyweight producers. Worked with superstars. Made videos. Toured. Collaborated with my musical idols. Stood on the stages I once dreamed about. Walked through the armed-guarded doors of Atlantic Records at Rockefeller Plaza in New York. And now I wanted to set myself up for life — not to escape music, but to protect my freedom inside it.
Looking back now, it doesn’t read as misery so much as misplacement — followed by clarity.
And yet — when I think of Squeeze, this is not the chapter I choose to hold closest.
I prefer to remember the balmy summer drives down to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Wiltshire, 1993, working on Some Fantastic Place. Long days, light in the air, music made with care and curiosity. For me, that album is their masterpiece — generous, mature, quietly beautiful. It will always be my favourite Squeeze record.
That is the Squeeze I keep.
That is the turn I made.
And I know it was the right one.
Not long after that strange, transitional tour, we played one final show in Puerto Rico for a private bank, where we were each paid a ridiculous amount of money. After that show Squeeze quietly came to an end. Glenn and I, however, remained close. I went on to help him establish his solo career, co-writing the songs Untouchable and Parallel World, and touring with him acoustically around the UK again. This time it was fun. Two blokes, two guitars, and the Good Pub Guide.
When his first solo single Parallel World reached the BBC Radio 2 A-List, he called me to tell me. We were thrilled. In one interview around that time, Glenn said:
“There are two Chrises in my life — one is Difford, and one is Braide.”
I understood exactly what he meant, and felt quietly honoured.
After that, I continued to tour — briefly — as a member of The Producers, the band I was in with Trevor Horn. I played shows with the other Buggle - Geoff Downes as part of Downes Braide Association, and a handful of concerts with Marc Almond, including one at the Royal Festival Hall to nearly three thousand people.
I loved those moments. But by then I knew something clearly: performing was part of my life, not its centre. I was good at it, I just wasn’t built for the repetitive nature of it. Singing the same songs every night would have driven me insane. The studio, the grand piano — the collaboration, the focus, the making of records — was where my real joy lay.
It’s nearly 30 years since that tour, and Squeeze are still out there, playing those songs. I’m happy to see them still doing their thing, and I now look back at my time with the band with nothing but love, and gratitude for what it showed me.
Moments with Michael Hutchence & Dave Stewart:
It was summer in the South Of France, and I was staying at Villa Neptune in Théoule-sur-Mer. Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox owned the house and I had been working with Dave at a residential recording studio about 2 hours away. The studio was located in the Château de Miraval, a 900 hectare estate located in Correns, in the Var department of Provence. The iconic studio is now owned by Brad Pitt, who purchased it in 2008 for $25 million.
We spent a few weeks recording and mixing songs for an album we’d started working on in New York, we also filmed a couple of music clips during some downtime. One of the clips we did using a hand held camera, with Dave sitting in the passenger seat of his Alfa Romeo Spider while I drove. I mimed to a few of the recent mixes we’d done playing on the car stereo, sometimes forgetting the words and breaking into laughter as we headed through the night to Cannes. We enjoyed a memorable evening at a French restaurant, with outside seating, overlooking the marina. All night Dave kept trying to hook me up with a Swedish girl who was one of his helpers, and he was quite mischievous at times. He would love to create little scenarios and romantic dramas between people. All in the spirit of fun of course.
On our days off from the studio, we would go down to the rocks at the back of his house, take a guitar and the hand held camera and record songs by the sea. We made a clip of me doing a version of Real Love on one occasion. The Beatles had just released their version of the lost Lennon demo and I was obsessed with it at the time. We even had a large framed photo up in the studio control room of John Lennon, leaving the Dakota building circa 1980, which we placed on an easel for inspiration.
It seemed like a million miles away from the reality I knew and I was suddenly living in some kind of rock and roll fantasy. Life was always exciting during that time, and I never knew who I would meet next. One week it was Velvet Underground legend Lou Reed or Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher at Electric Lady studios in New York. The next week it was Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry in Nice or a member of Parliament - Funkadelic in London. I remember one time in the Church studio in Crouch End, London, when Dave just handed me the phone and it was George Harrison.
Dave’s generosity was always truly remarkable, consistently demonstrating a kindness and willingness to help. I gave him a lift home one night to his house in north London and as we were driving he asked me ‘Have you got enough money?’ ‘Was the record label advance ok?’ He always had compassion and genuinely seemed concerned for the young musicians he worked with.
Once when we were in New York, working at Electric Lady studios together, we went out shopping for records. He bought me a silver, glitter Gibson Les Paul guitar from Matt Umanov guitar shop on Bleaker street. I saw it in the window and commented on how cool and Marc Bolan it looked and was astonished when he just bought it and handed it to me. I said to him “ How can I pay you back for this?!” “Just love it and play it” he replied.
Meanwhile back at the house, the day after the dinner in Cannes, Dave came over to speak to me while I was lolling about in his pool and mentioned that Michael Hutchence was coming for lunch with Paula Yates. It was a great surprise because I had always been a fan of Michael’s voice and his magnetic stage presence. I couldn’t wait to meet him. Paula had also been a permanent fixture on British TV during my adolescence, presenting iconic shows such as The Tube with Jools Holland, so I was intrigued to meet her too. I always thought she was charming, charismatic, pretty and flirtatious. I remembered her interviewing Michael on The Tube and The Big Breakfast and their chemistry being extremely sexually charged.
INXS had been huge during their early 1990’s peak and had played to 72,000 screaming fans at Wembley stadium during the summer of ‘91. Their popularity had waned somewhat since those heady days, but I still loved the band and had bought all of their subsequent albums. Meeting him would be fascinating in many ways, because to me, he was a real star and somebody I’d idolized as a performer.
In recent years he seemed to be in the press a lot in London, for reasons other than music. He had become infamous for being an adulterer rather than a singer when he and Paula Yates , who was still married to Bob Geldof, had become lovers. He had a toxic relationship with the press and had punched a photographer in the face. He was subsequently sued £20,000 for that particular pleasure, and from that moment onwards, he and Paula were hounded mercilessly by the paparazzi.
One memorable incident in 1996 was when Michael presented a Brit award to Oasis and Noel Gallagher said, ‘Has-beens shouldn't be presenting awards to gonna-bees’. It was a mean spirited thing to do to another musician, especially in front of an audience. I watched it live on TV and saw this once slick and sexy superstar being humiliated by an uncouth bully.
During a press conference the same year he infamously said that ‘Pop eats its young'‘. This statement would become all too poignant in the months to come. He would be yet another cautionary tale in the black book of subversive pop culture, like so many other stars who had burned all too brightly and briefly. For now though, he was coming for lunch and I was rather excited.
The two lovers arrived with their baby Tiger Lilly on a Ducati motorbike which I thought was pretty wild and dangerous. We sat at the table, under the pergola by the pool and chatted away to each other while a lovely Thai lady named Nida, who worked for Dave, served Thai noodles and curry. Michael kept holding the baby up In the air and mock shouting ‘She’s a baby!, She’s a baby!’ He seemed thrilled about it all, and he looked great dressed in a white, short sleeved shirt, with long dark curly hair. Paula kept staring at Michael and me chatting to each other. She seemed to be trying to suss me out, and it was a little unsettling.
I declined a second helping of Nida’s Thai noodles, to be polite, but Paula gave me a look and asked if I was, ‘on the pop star diet?’ The truth is I was more interested in talking to Michael than eating, as we were locked in a conversation about studios. He told me about a studio in Capri where INXS had recorded their last album - Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, and how the band would have to get a boat across to the studio. It all sounded so familiar because I knew these albums, yet I was being told first hand by the actual guy in the band. I loved it. I belonged in this moment. When we chatted together, Michael seemed genuinely interested and engaged and made me feel like we’d known each other for years and not merely for a few hours.
Michael and I were left alone to talk and play music to each other under the pergola for a few hours. One song I played to him entitled Beautiful Things, was recorded that same week on the studio grand piano. He sang along to it and seemed to like it, which was a thrill. I mentioned to him that the live room at Miraval where the piano was recorded had a beautiful stained glass window above it designed by Yes’ Jon Anderson. It was a great sounding space, and to this day I think the Steinway, in that room, with the late afternoon sunlight, streaming through the stained glass, was a particularly inspiring moment.
When I had finished playing a couple of my songs, Michael played some rough mixes of the INXS album they had just finished recording in Vancouver, with producer Bruce Fairbairn. One song that he played was called Elegantly Wasted. I asked him what the album title was and he replied ‘We haven’t decided on a title yet mate’. I said I thought that Elegantly Wasted was great album title, to which he replied ‘Yeah, that’s not a bad idea’. I have since heard U2’s Bono in interviews say that he suggested the same thing to Michael, but I’d like to think I said it first. I loved the rough mixes and told him how I thought they had the band’s classic sound again. it was a perfect, warm summer day in the south of France, and here I was playing music, drinking wine and chewing the fat with the lead singer of INXS.
At some point during the afternoon, Dave and Michael went for a 30 minute ride on their Ducati motorbikes, through the French countryside, with Shelly and Karen Poole on the back. The two sisters, who were also staying at the house, were in a pop band that Dave had been producing back in London, at the same time we’d been working together. Paula relaxed alone in the house and read a book while hers and Bob Geldof’s children, Pixie, Fifi and Peaches swam in the pool with Dave’s two sons Django and Sam.
I needed to make a call to the UK, but I couldn’t recall the international dialing code. I turned to Paula who was curled up on a nearby sofa, and asked for her help. ‘Hey Paula, Whats the dialing code for the UK?’ I asked. She looked up, slightly amused, and replied, ‘Plus, four, four,’. Her expression suggested I should have known this already. I called my brother and told him what I was up to, where I was and who with. I had to tell someone.
All things must pass, as George Harrison once sang, and like everything in life, I knew this moment would come to an end. My ticket was booked for London and as I was packing my suitcase that evening, I remember feeling like I didn’t want to leave, because I was having such a good time. I was 23 and up for any adventure on offer, of which there were many, especially when I was around Dave.
I felt like I belonged here, not back in ancient, cold, rainy old London with the endless buses yawning past my flat in Willesden Green. I didn’t want to go back to that particular reality and the daily quotidian. I would have to screw my head on and get writing some hit songs fast, so that I could get the hell out of that place, because I wanted to be here, in this world, amongst this kind of company. Michael once famously sang the line “You’re one of my kind”. I wanted to be one of those kind and talk, play music and never return to the life I knew back ‘home’.
As I was leaving to get into the car, Michael came to say goodbye with Dave. We looked at the Ducati motorbikes for a moment and I foolishly went to stroke the chrome exhaust of one of them which was still hot and Dave shouted “Don’t touch that, man!” I thanked both of them for a great day and as I stepped towards the car, I turned to Michael and said to him “Next time you’re in London, come over for a cup of tea or something”, to which he replied “I definitely will mate”. I looked back as they both waved goodbye and I headed for Nice Côte d'Azur Airport.
As a kid growing up in the late 1980’s, early 90’s, who had listened, watched and rated him as a singer and performer, I was shocked and saddened by the news of Michaels suicide the following November in 1997, and I could barely imagine the impact it would have on Paula, Pixie, Fifi, Peaches and of course Tiger Lilly.
Paula Yates cut a lost and lonely figure around London, in the years after Michaels death, and she would eventually follow him to the grave 3 years later from a heroin overdose, aged 41. Peaches Geldof, the 7 year old I had met, and who had splashed about in the pool with her sisters, would be taken in the same way as her mother in April 2014, aged just 25 years old. An unimaginable tragedy that I could never have foreseen, as we chatted away under the pergola, listening and playing music.
As I sit alone, at home in Los Angeles and reflect on that sun-kissed day in 1996, I'm struck by the fragility of life. The memories of Michael's warm smile and laughter are forever etched in my mind, a bittersweet reminder of the transience of joy. The subsequent losses – Paula, Peaches, and the shattered dreams – have left an indelible mark on my heart. Yet, I'm grateful for that fleeting glimpse of perfection, a reminder to cherish every moment.
Thanks, Dave, for the gift of that experience. Thanks, Michael, for the lessons in fragility and beauty.
The Inner Life
— Christopher Braide
There are people who become awake gradually, as if through weathering — decades of mistakes and recoveries sanding them down into a shape vaguely resembling wisdom. And then there are others for whom awakening arrives early, almost too early, like a visitor at the door before the house is furnished. I was one of the latter. I understood the fragility of things before I understood how to tie my shoelaces properly. Silence made sense to me. Time terrified me.
At fourteen, I remember sitting in my bedroom, listening to a song I loved, and suddenly feeling a cold, existential shiver:
One day I will never hear this again. One day I will be gone.
It wasn’t melodrama; it was revelation. Sartre’s “nothingness haunting being” — though I didn’t know those words then — had already taken root in me. While other boys were dreaming of cars and football, I was staring at the edges of consciousness wondering where it all led.
I was never hardened. I was permeable, sensitive to the point of clairvoyance. Some children grow armour; I grew awareness. And my mother — with all her own unspoken sorrows — nurtured that part of me with a kind of tender clarity. She didn’t inflate me; she deepened me. We cooked together, laughed together, watched music videos together. She adored me in that rare, steady way that doesn’t distort a child but steadies him.
Her love didn’t make me arrogant; it made me receptive.
Loss entered early.
Heather at school, who vanished between rounds of treatment until she never returned.
Two boys my age — gone before they had the chance to become anything at all.
My cousin Suzanne — luminous, hilarious, aching with bravery — who drove down to see me at my home in California while her body was quietly betraying her. She hugged me in the kitchen, whispered “my favourite cousin,” and I felt pride and heartbreak crash together inside me. She died shortly after.
David Longdon — who looked me in the eye onstage and sang with me like we’d found each other’s frequency late in life — also gone without warning.
And then, the profound one —
my mother.
The soft, howling wind at the centre of everything.
The moment she died, my understanding of life seemed to reorder itself in real time.
Time moved closer. Mortality stopped being an idea and became a presence.
These losses did not harden me. They hollowed me in the most necessary way — made room for compassion, meaning, nuance, awareness. I learned to live with the void rather than fear it.
Meanwhile, in the music world, I was surrounded by men who seemed to be running from the very things I could not ignore. Fame, I learned, is simply running away from death in full costume — a glittering sprint away from the void. Some people never stop running, even into their 60s, 70s, 80s. I watched grown men cling to personas like life rafts, terrified to look behind the glitter curtain in case they found nothing there.
But I was never drawn to that chase.
I loved the work — the quiet, interior act of making songs that felt like excavations of the unconscious. I loved melody, harmony, the sacred act of recording. The fame part — the cameras, the persona, the dressing-up — felt like a distraction from the thing itself, an attempt to put a costume on the soul. I never trusted it. I still don’t.
What saved me — again and again — was the studio.
The piano.
The moment when a chord progression feels like a message from somewhere deeper.
The strange, numinous flicker that becomes a melody.
And perhaps also: the fact that I was genuinely chosen — by the real singers, the true creatives, the ones who instinctively recognised something in me. That gave me confidence without ego. It gave me freedom without delusion.
But spiritually, emotionally, existentially — I “got there” because of everything at once:
the early sensitivity
the early losses
the maternal bond
the talent that forced early maturity
the philosophical mind
the refusal to live as a persona
and the courage to feel what most people avoid
I became awake because life demanded it — because something in me was always watching the horizon while everyone else was still playing in the sand.
I don’t consider it a curse.
I consider it the most precious aspect of my life.
Because awareness — even when painful — gives shape to everything.
It makes music deeper, relationships more intimate, grief more sacred, joy more vivid.
Awakening doesn’t make life easier.
It makes it truer.
And in the end, that’s all I ever wanted:
not applause, not legacy, not the illusion of immortality —
but truth, beauty, clarity, meaning, connection.
To live fully.
To love deeply.
To create honestly.
To feel everything.
To become who I truly am.
I was awake early.
And I’m grateful — even for the ache — because it taught me how to live.