THE WEDDING PRESENT SINGLES (Part Fifty-Nine)

It really was Lucky 7 when it came to the Wedding Present‘s 24 Songs project of 2022 as the single released on 15 July turned out to be a gem.

mp3: The Wedding Present – We Interrupt Our Programme (7″ version)

A spiky and upbeat tune that plays host to a catchy chorus of ‘what we want and what we get are not always the same’.   And it’s one of those Gedge tales, of the type that I’ve always thought he does better than any others, in that he’s on the receiving end of the ending of a relationship.  But in this case, he sounds as if he’s quite relieved about it all.

Spoiler alert!!!   After all 12 singles had been released, they were compiled into an album, unsurprisingly called 24 Songs.  Some of the tracks were now made available in their full form, having been edited down a bit for the 7″ release.  We Interrupt Our Programme was one of those, with the album version not fading out just after the 4:20 mark but continuing on its merry and noisy way for another 80 seconds or so – and it was always the longer version that was aired in the live setting.

mp3: The Wedding Present – We Interrupt Our Programme (album version)

The single was attributed to the four members of the band who were active throughout 2022 – David Gedge, Jon Stewart, Melanie Howard and Nicholas Wellauer.  The flip side, Telemark, is a tune that was dusted down from a few years previously, as it is attributed to the line-up which had been together up until the end of 2019 – David Gedge, Danielle Wadey, Melanie Howard and Charles Layton, which, if you recall from earlier entries in this long-running series, was broken-up when Danielle and Charles became parents to a newborn baby. 

mp3: The Wedding Present – Telemark (7″ version)

The unusual thing about this one is that the verses are delivered in a spoken-word manner, while the chorus is sung.  There’s also a distinct change in tempo and pace just short of the three-minute mark, which is not something that the band have done too often over the near 40 years that their music has been written and recorded. 

As with the A-side, the full length version (just under a minute longer) was made available on the subsequent album.  Not only does it not fade out, but there’s an additional spoken-outro from a female voice, with the words presumably being in Norwegian, given that Telemark is a region of Norway……

mp3: The Wedding Present – Telemark (album version)

One of the many fan sites dedicated to the band, indicates that Telemark was originally part of the live set back in 2019, only to be heavily re-worked and released for the 24 Songs project, and looking back on the set list for the show at the Classic Grand in Glasgow on 25 October 2019, it was indeed aired.  But as this fan-shot footage from a gig in Paris a week prior to Glasgow demonstrates, it was indeed a bit different from the version that was eventually recorded, albeit the change in tempo and pace was there.