The year was 1973 and Chris Difford stole 50 pounds from his mother’s purse to put an ad in a local shop window for a guitarist to join his band.

It mattered little that Difford didn’t actually have a band and that only one person responded.

That’s because the person who did respond happened to be the equally talented Glenn Tilbrook, a fellow Londoner. They were both 15 years old.

“I answered it, and I really didn’t know what to expect,” Tilbrook said in a phone interview from Long Island. “There was no band, no tour. But there was Chris Difford who, like me, was writing songs in his bedroom. And we’d played each other the songs that we’d written, and I loved what he was doing and he loved what I was doing.

“It was entirely an accidental meeting that clicked for both of us and changed the course of our lives.”

Together Difford (guitar, vocals, lyrics) and Tilbrook (vocals, guitar, music) became the creative engine behind the band they came up with: Squeeze. They have since been compared to Lennon and McCartney for their artful and prolific output.

A unique dynamic: Glenn is the lead singer, but Chris writes most of the lyrics.

Squeeze is now celebrating the band’s 45th anniversary with the “The Squeeze Songbook 2019” tour, stopping in the Pittsburgh area on Aug. 30 for a sold-out show at the Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall in Munhall.

KT Tunstall will open the show, which gets underway at 8 p.m.

More for your money

Tilbrook said he’s really excited about this tour.

“The band we have at the moment is absolutely fantastic. We’ve expanded to a seven-piece now. It’s even more music for your money,” he says.

If you happened to be listening to the right radio stations during the early ’80s, there was a lot of great new wave music to be heard and much of it came courtesy of Squeeze, a band from southeast London that was an integral part of what’s considered the second British Invasion.

The superb tunes turned out by Squeeze were the soundtrack for many high school and college romances and nights of debaucherous fun. They include “Cool for Cats,” “Slap and Tickle,” “Take Me I’m Yours,” “Up the Junction,” “Another Nail in My Heart,“ “Pulling Mussels (from the Shell),” “Black Coffee in Bed” and, of course, “Tempted.”

Some of these tunes emerged as early as the late ’70s. None of them were top 40 hits in the United States — those would come later. But they were fresh, uptempo, catchy new wave songs with interesting hooks and clever turns of phrase.

Squeeze’s music didn’t really start to resonate with mainstream America until the band broke up and reformed in the mid-’80s. Their 1987 album, “Babylon and On,” yielded their only U.S. Top 40 hits, “Hourglass” and “853-5937.”

Staying vital

As the ’90s wore on, the Squeeze lineup changed constantly before another breakup in 1999. A third incarnation of Squeeze got going in 2007 and has managed to last to the present day.

“When we got the band back together in 2007, we had about five years of just doing old songs. And I think five years is about the limit before you have to do something else,” Tilbrook says. “So, Chris and I started writing again.”

That resulted in the albums, “Cradle to the Grave” in 2015 and “The Knowledge” in 2017.

“I think that was a really big barrier. Both of those records were things that stood up and said that we can still create and not just reproduce. I think that is vital to the band’s well-being, the feeling that we can go forward as well as reflect our past in an honorable way,” Tilbrook says.

While the supporting members have rotated continuously in and out of the group, Difford and Tilbrook have remained at the core, withstanding plenty of tension along the way.

They were saddled with the moniker “The At Odds Couple” when they toured as a duo in 2015. By then, their uneasy relationship, replete with turbulent moments in the studio and an acrimonious breakup, defined an otherwise productive partnership.

“We haven’t been friends for a long time,” Tilbrook says. “I think one of the interesting things about our relationship is that we were friends maybe for the first three years and then, almost as soon as we started making records, we went in different directions.

“We have our professional relationship, and there have been times when Chris sort of hasn’t turned up for things and other times when he’s been super-focused. And I guess I’d say the same about myself,” he says. “But the goal has always been to produce the best that we can.”

Pride in the work

As he looks back over four-and-a-half decades at the amazing body of work in the Squeeze songbook, Tilbrook says he’s immensely proud of it.

“It’s really quite extraordinary the amount of ground that we’ve covered over that period of time. I only look back when we’re doing something like this tour. We went back through lots of songs, Chris and I, and there’s some hidden gems there,” he says. “Sometimes we didn’t record the best versions of the songs, some of the ’80s production was a little over the top. So, we stripped a lot of that back on some of the songs, and they’re amazing. I’m very proud of them.”

Tilbrook says he’s looking forward to coming back to Pittsburgh.

“I love being there. I remember visiting when I was playing a solo show, and I made a little time at the end of the tour and came back and just hung about for a while. I found people to be exceptionally friendly, lovely people to be with,” Tilbrook says.

“I know some of the industry has left, but you still get a sense of it being a working town and I personally always thrive in those sort of environments.”