THE WEDDING PRESENT SINGLES (Part Fifty-Eight)

I’ve long felt, in terms of quality control, there’s an enormous risk attached to issuing twelve new singles across a calendar year.  I say that as I would have thought it’s a hard enough challenge for a band, especially one that’s been on the go for over thirty years in some shape or form, to come up with say 14 new tunes in a year from which a decent album could be made up, including a couple that could be held back to support any release of a single in some sort of physical form.  Even when a band comes to selecting the dozen or so songs for the new album, there will most likely be some that aren’t as ‘strong’ as others, a position that surely is only intensified when it comes to working out if something is ‘good enough’ to be an actual single.

Which is my sort of confused way of saying that Once Bitten, the sixth single across the 24 Songs project, released on 17 June 2022 is merely an ‘ok tune’.  

It actually has a really decent opening lyric, the sort which David Gedge has been coming up with all his life.

You are an empress so I’ll grovel
You’re a beauty from a bygone age
You are a pop song
You’re a novel and I can’t wait to read another page

But it kind of descends into some bad sixth-form lovelorn poetry by the end which is just a bit too cringey:-

Is this the moment when we kiss because I’ve been hurt before when I’ve been through things like this?
I long for your touch but it can wait; the thought of getting it wrong again’s too much to contemplate

On the other hand, it has a decent enough tune of the sort that The Wedding Present seem so capable of writing, recording and performing without breaking any sweat.

mp3: The Wedding Present – Once Bitten

It turns out that this is another of the 7″ releases in 2022 when I found myself preferring the b-side, one that was given the strange title of Kerplunk!, which itself is the name of a children’s game invented in 1967 that involves sticks and marbles:-

“With the Kerplunk game, kids test their skills and their nerves. Players compete to keep their hand steady enough to pull out the sticks without dislodging the marbles. One wrong move and the marbles will come rolling down the chute! Take turns carefully pulling out sticks from the Kerplunk bowl but watch out for a marble avalanche sending marbles rolling down the chute! The player who finishes the game with the fewest marbles wins.”

mp3: The Wedding Present – Kerplunk!

This is actually a bit of a hidden gem.  It’s one of those Gedge-imagined tales of bad romance in which he’s been on the receiving end of his partner calling an end to the relationship to run off with someone else, and then he bumps into his old flame about a month later and learns she is on her own again.  He takes a bit of delight in this new twist…….