Much-loved veterans of London’s post-punk rock scene and highly successful chart regulars in the 1980s, Squeeze launched their latest reunion tour in Southampton on Tuesday. Almost a decade since their last split, the band have reformed once more around the singer-songwriters and sole surviving founder members Glen Tilbrook and Chris Difford. The commercial rationale for this tour appears to be various archive reissues and a new live album. But the full house on Tuesday showed an enduring demand for their wistful cockney storytelling.

After multiple personnel changes over the decades, this latest version of Squeeze now includes the bass guitarist John Bentley from their early 1980s lineup. the drummer Simon Hanson and keyboard player Stephen Large have also been drafted in from Tilbrook’s solo touring band, the Fluffers. Both frontmen, now in their fifties, gave a largely static and stiff-limbed performance in Southampton. This show was rich in melody, but low on chemistry.

Squeeze were responsible for some of the finest chart singles of their era, and they opened their set with two all-time classics. The intoxicating, exotically perfumed, disco-rock seduction anthem Take Me I’m Yours was first, followed by the wonderfully bittersweet kitchen-sink pregnancy drama Up the Junction. Now tinged with midlife nostalgia for a long-lost London, songs like this feel like Nick Hornby novels compressed into four minutes.

After such a strong start, problems set in during the show’s flaccid mid-section, which became bogged down in lesser hits and album tracks. For every chiming, urgent Is that Love? there were three or four indifferent plodders including Some Fantastic Place and In Quintessence. Every gold-plated honky-tonk lament such as Labelled with Love came sandwiched between more prosaic slabs of secondhand jukebox Americana.

The energy levels picked up again during a final run of more familiar tunes, beginning with a syncopated, latin-flavoured rearrangement of Goodbye Girl. Reworking more Squeeze numbers in this way might help to shake off their stodgy, museum-piece air.

A breezy Cool for Cats was held back for the finale, as was a soulful Black Coffee in Bed. During the latter, Tilbrook conducted a rousing singalong, having belatedly realised that he was playing to a hall full of fans rather than simply indulging himself. A little more of this sparky, emotionally charged interaction would help to do these fine songs justice.

Tour continues: November 30, Newcastle City Hall; December 1, Wolverhampton Civic Hall; December 3, Colston Hall, Bristol

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