THE WEDDING PRESENT SINGLES (Parts Twenty-Three and Twenty-Four)

We’ve reached September and October 1992.  

By now, it is clear that The Wedding Present are indeed going to equal the record of Elvis Presley with the achievement of 12 Top 30 singles in a calendar year.  David Gedge had said/sang as much with his ‘Nothing Can Stop Us Now’ line thrown in during the performance of Flying Saucer on Top of The Pops back in July.  And unless they’ve already been lucky enough to have picked up a new 7″ every month, the fans could relax in the knowledge that a second compilation was inevitable and not lose any sleep about trying to get the songs…..I don’t have much to ever say that’s positive about the digital/streaming era, but at least things never really sell out completely. It was quite different in 1992.

Single #9 was another slow but noisy one.   A few months previously, there had been a song about threesomes….this time round it was all about a willingness to be dominated.

mp3: The Wedding Present – Loveslave

This is another that I can take or leave, depending on the mood I’m in.  There’s enough passion and noise to make it a good listen.  My problem is that I can’t take the song too seriously after seeing the promo video, directed by Nick Small, a few months later when I bought a VHS copy of Dick York’s Wardrobe.

Paul Doddington, in an interview given to an author a few years back, said:-

‘The videos were very limited in budget, and a bit hit and miss really.  There’s a fine line between lo-fi arty and just rubbish – there were a few that some of us felt were the wrong side of that line…..’

Indeed.

I remember telling Rachel that the next b-side was to be a David Bowie cover, which got her quite excited.  Twenty guesses later, and she gave up trying to work out what it would be:-

mp3: The Wedding Present – Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family

The original closes off the 1974 album, Diamond Dogs.  It’s only a couple of minutes long, and it’s one of those bits of music that really needs to be listened to in context around the rest of the album to be best understood.   The lyric is a six-times repeated chant:-

Brother
Ooh-ooh
Shake it up, shake it up
Move it up, move it up

and ends with the word ‘brother’ repeated in a “stuck-needle effect”.   It really is one of the strangest choices for any band or singer to cover, whilst trying to keep a straight face. At least we were spared the ‘stuck needle’ effect.

Loveslave reached #17, which, coincidentally, was the same chart position achieved by the very next single.

October 1993.   This was the third and last of the 45s I got at the time.  It just happened to be in a shop on the Monday lunchtime…. I hadn’t gone looking for it, but the rush and chaos of the early months was no longer seemingly a thing.

mp3: The Wedding Present – Sticky

A loud and boisterous number akin to so many of the best tunes up till now.  The fast guitars harked back to the earliest material, but the abrasive sound was more in keeping with the later songs.  It’s hard not to dislike Sticky, but it’s one of the few from 1992 that, in my mind, hasn’t aged as well as some of the others.  Mind you, it’s still a great track in the live setting. But the least said about the video the better…this one was directed by David Slade.

The b-side?   Well, it is very different….and has long been one of my favourites.

mp3: The Wedding Present – Go Wild In The Country

The pop element of the original is replaced by a sound that wouldn’t have been out of place on a bIG*fLAME record. It is angular to the point of almost poking your eye out, and it races along at a million miles an hour, only avoiding breathlessness thanks to the brief pauses prior to each new verse or chorus.  David Gedge sounds as if he’s having great fun yelping his way through the song….it’s impossible not to smile.

One more week to round off 1992.  I hope you’ll tune in at the usual time on the usual day.

JC