THE WEDDING PRESENT SINGLES (Part Thirty-Three)

I have the unenviable task of trying to maintain the quality of the past ten Sundays during which strangeways wrote about the Cinerama era in such an eloquent, informative and entertaining manner.   I’ll do my best, but I have great reservations that I can match the quality that has been on show.

Last time round in this series, we reached 1997.   Time travel now takes us to 15 November 2004.

The first half of that particular year had seen Cinerama play some dates in Holland, Germany and the UK prior to the musicians heading into a studio to begin the recording of a new album.   A number of the new songs had already been aired thanks to a couple of John Peel sessions, the most recent of which had been in January 2004.  The decision was taken to record it in Seattle and to have Steve Fisk, who had produced the Wedding Present LP Watusi back in 1997, work with the band.

David Gedge has since said that it was only during the studio process that he began to think that it didn’t quite feel like a Cinerama record was being made, despite the fact some of the songs contained strings and had what could be described as cinematic touches or elements. The primary instruments were guitars, bass and drums.  After a fair degree of soul-searching, and taking on board what those involved in the recording sessions had to say, the frontman made the decision to have the new album released under the name of The Wedding Present. 

My first exposure to the ‘return’ of the band after a seven-year hiatus was seeing this video on one of the music channels.

As a promo film, it’s quite mesmerising.   David Gedge is singing about driving on wide American highways as he stands on a misty single-track road somewhere in the north of England, and all the while a bare-footed woman is running frantically around London and various other localities for reasons that are wholly unknown.

As a tune, with its loud/quiet/loud way of progressing and coming in at more than six minutes in length, it felt every bit as epic.  The lyrics were everything any fan could ask for

‘and yes, there was one particular glance that made me afraid that you were just seeing me as a chance of getting laid’

It was quite the comeback. 

mp3: The Wedding Present – Interstate 5

It was released as a CD single.   It sold enough copies to reach #62 in the UK charts.  It remains, to this day, one of my all-time favourite songs ever written and recorded by The Wedding Present. 

Here’s the two tracks that were offered up as b-sides:-

mp3: The Wedding Present – Bad Things
mp3: The Wedding Present – Snaphots

At this point, it’s worth mentioning that the musicians who recorded these three songs, as well as the others that would make up the new album, Take Fountain, were four-fifths of the Cinerama line-up that had been involved in the 2002 album Torino.  They would have started work in the belief that it was going to be a new Cinerama album they were recording, and there’s certainly every indication with Snapshots that the songs were a continuation of the type that David Gedge had been composing for much of the previous decade.  It’s a lovely tune.

On the other hand, Bad Things feels a wee bit of a mess.  One of those tunes that I didn’t get my head round back in 2004 and still haven’t come round to liking it twenty years on.

JC