THE WEDDING PRESENT SINGLES (Part Thirty-One)

The Wedding Present more than made up for having been quiet in the previous calendar year. The release of Mini in January was quickly followed by 11 dates in the UK and 14 shows across North America, before the further gigs at Sound City, Leeds and France which were mentioned in last week’s part of this series.

The summer months involved a combination of studio time and 18 appearances on stages on both sides of the Atlantic and on mainland Europe (often on festival bills), but the period from 2 October–21 December saw then play 52 gigs in the UK, USA, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany in support of the new album Saturnalia, released on Cooking Vinyl on 9 September.

The first taster of the album had come a few weeks earlier, with a new single, the first on which new guitarist Simon Cleave had played.

mp3: The Wedding Present – 2,3, Go (single edit)

Again, this is one I didn’t pick up on for a few years, initially via its inclusion on Saturnalia, although in later years I did pick up the 7″ version from which the above is taken (the single edit is almost two minutes shorter and loses the feedback and sonic disturbance on the album version).

It’s not a personal favourite, which I think is a view shared by most fans. It did sell enough copies to reach #67 in the UK charts, and given that Saturnalia would enter at #36 (which was 11 places higher than Watusi had achieved back in 1994), it can be argued that it did its job.

Here’s the b-side to the 7″:-

mp3: The Wedding Present – Up

A noisy effort that is in some ways reminiscent of the C87 era, and as such is a song I much prefer to the A-side. Worth noting that while the single was credited to all four current members of the band (Gedge/Lockey/Cleave/Smith), there’s a credit on Up for Darren Belk who had left the band a few months earlier. It would later transpire that a number of the songs that would appear on Saturnalia, as well as b-sides, had come from riffs originally worked up by Darren and indeed Paul Dorrington who had left the band as far back as early 1995, but credit (and royalties) were given.

The CD version of the single contained two additional tracks, acoustic versions of songs later included on Saturnalia, a 12-track album  primarily released via CD but also available across 2 x 10″ records

mp3: The Wedding Present – Real Thing (acoustic version)
mp3: The Wedding Present – Jet Girl (acoustic version)

There would be one further single lifted from the album…..but that’s a story for next week.

JC