Hollywood Bowl – September 19, 2026
I have missed so many shows at the Bowl this season. I’ve given away 4 sets of tickets and missed another show altogether. Life just had other plans for me. At least I made it to this one and I brought a different friend with me this time too. I had seen the English Beat twice and Adam Ant once (which should have been twice, but I missed one of those shows too) before, but it was my first time seeing Squeeze – and I actually have a few Squeeze albums, so I was looking forward to it. When we saw Adam Ant fairly recently, he wasn’t good. I was so disappointed because he was my absolute favorite for a few years in high school. The English Beat is always good, so at least I knew I would enjoy that part of the show.
We took the bus formerly known as Culver City and now called Baldwin Hills even though this friend lives in Santa Monica because as I’ve said before, the Baldwin Hills bus is superior in every way to the Santa Monica bus. I was surprised to not see my 2 regular guys at the bus, but I did recognize at least one of the Bowl guys at the lot. We got to the bus super early and still were not the first ones on. And then we got to the Bowl super early and made it to our seats super early, even after stopping for a cushion and some snacks.
The English Beat was first up. They played a total of 20 minutes. 4 songs – and 2 of them weren’t even English Beat songs. They were General Public songs – and one of those was a cover! I was disappointed. Why even bother? Why not just add 10 minutes to Adam Ant’s set and 10 minutes to Squeeze’s set? I think Ziggy Marley’s DJ’ing daughter was on longer than they were! And I get Dave Wakeling wanting to play Tenderness because it was a bigger hit than most of the English Beat songs, but if you’re billing yourselves as the English Beat and only playing 4 songs, just pick 4 English Beat songs…or at least 3 English Beat songs and Tenderness.
Next up was Adam Ant. My friend was apparently unfamiliar with Adam Ant because she was very surprised by the 2 drum sets. He opened with Dog Eat Dog and it was not good. The band is fantastic, but Adam’s voice is shot and he’s got this one spin move that he does over and over again – it’s his ONLY move. He missed a lot of notes. By the time he was a few songs in, he was warmed up and starting to sound a little better and I’d get my hopes up and then he’d miss some more notes and do the spin thing and I just sat there shaking my head. But again – the BAND is great. The 2 drummers are fantastic. The guitars sound like they are supposed to. They are all just super tight. Even the background vocals are great. It’s just him. Sigh. Even the song choices were good. He had a smattering of songs from every album (except Strip, thankfully). If it was up to me I would have swapped out Viva La Rock for one of the earlier songs – maybe Christian Dior, Beat My Guest or Car Trouble – but I really can’t complain about the set.
After another brief set change, Squeeze came on. They started off strong with Pulling Mussels (From the Shell) and continued strong through Is That Love and then things took a turn. They apparently resurrected a concept album from the 70’s recently and they played that album IN ITS ENTIRETY. It wasn’t great. No one was there to hear that. Just…no. When I saw Tears For Fears a few years ago, they explained to the audience that they had new music out and they had to play it and maybe we’d like it and we’d go buy the album and then they played a few songs and said, “Well now that’s out of the way” and they played the songs we came to hear. THAT’s what Squeeze should have done. But there was an entire album’s worth of middle-section that garnered a little polite applause. And then they went back to the songs we came to hear and ended the evening by saying “we’re out of time so this is our last song” and playing Tempted. It was a weird time to end because it wasn’t 10:30 and it wasn’t 11:00. It was maybe 10:45. Noise curfew is not 10:45. It’s 11:00! Also, maybe they would have had time for an encore if they didn’t play the entire concept album. I have to say they sounded really good. The voices are still there and the band was great. They just made some bad, bad choices.