You’ll hopefully remember from the 1992 series of Wedding Present singles that the year was rounded off with what seemed like a festive number in the shape of No Christmas. But as I mentioned at the time No Christmas, other than its title, had very little to do with the festive season and was really just about the saddest and bleakest of all the break-up songs that David Gedge has ever written.
He later said in an interview that he maintained the hope and ambition of writing, recording and releasing a bona-fide single celebrating the (supposedly) most wonderful time of the year. His ambition came to be realised at the end of 2008.
mp3: The Wedding Present – Holly Jolly Hollywood
This was the lead track on EP4 of How The West Was Won. It’s a light, almost flimsy throwaway number in which a co-vocal is delivered by Simone White, a Hawaii-born singer/songwriter whose recording career began in 2003 and has, to date, encompassed eight albums with a similar number of singles and EPs. A promo video was made:-
The promo actually has a big part to play in why I dislike this song. David Gedge might only be ten years older than Simone White, but the age gap looks a lot wider in the video, three minutes of footage in which he appears stiff and wooden, not to mention he’s put just too much black in his hair dye prior to the shoot.
As with other songs in the box set, an acoustic version was offered up:-
mp3: The Wedding Present – Holly Jolly Hollywood (acoustic version)
The digital download came, as with the box set CD, came with a cover version of possibly the most famous festive song of them all.
mp3: The Wedding Present – White Christmas
It’s delivered at a funereal pace. I have no love for it, so I’ll leave it at that.
The record label did produce a few promotional CDs containing all three of the above songs for distribution to radio stations. A copy is currently up for sale on Discogs for a little over £20, including postage and packaging.
The promo CD doesn’t have the fourth track that was included in the CD contained within the How The West Was Won box set. It, too, was a cover version, and was the song that had been released as the bonus track with the ITunes download of El Rey some more than six months earlier.
mp3: The Wedding Present – Back For Good
Take that…….and weep.
The Wedding Present went into a bit of a hiatus for a few years, certainly in terms of recording. This was partly to do with David Gedge coming back to live in the UK after quite a few years on the west coast of America, and much of his time being taken up with planning, organising and curating his At The Edge of The Sea festival, the first of which was in August 2009 and which, other than when COVID restrictions prevented it, has been an annual event in Brighton at that time of year. The band did continue to perform extensively, particularly in 2010 with shows celebrating the 20th anniversary of Bizarro.
This series, however, won’t be having any similar hiatus. Tune in at the same time next Sunday, when I’ll have jumped forward to 2012.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
Well, you’ve not held back from presenting the singles, good or bad, and whilst this EP as a whole veers towards the latter, the writing and background is consistently great.
I know what you mean about the video, JC. I’ve never seen it before but I was also struck by the fact that David Gedge was looking weirdly like Jimmy Tarbuck at some points.
It also reminded me of my grandad, whose post-war frugality meant that whilst he continued to ‘dye’ his hair black well into his 80s, he would do so with margarine and boot polish. Unsurprisingly, we kids weren’t that keen on a hug…!
Khayem
Just proves that attempting to write a half-decent Christmas song, even in the safest pair of songwriting hands, is almost certainly going to fail. I have more than enough fingers on my hands to count all those I actually care anything about. This one, despite it being a Gedge number, isn’t one of them.