THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

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.

JC

The third EP inside the How The West Was Won box set contained an edited version of the opening track of El Rey along with three previously unavailable songs – in essence, this particular EP was what most likely made fans go out and buy the box set.

Santa Ana Winds is one of the strongest and most memorable songs on the new album, which is no doubt why it was selected as its opener.   It is a pounding rock number, one with a great bassline courtesy of co-writer Terry Di Castro as well as sorts of Albini trademarks throughout; the fact that a few songs afterwards failed to reach similar standards is very much a contributory factor as to why my overall reaction to the album was one of disappointment  – at this point I should add that I gave El Rey a fresh listen a few weeks ago when preparing these run of posts related to 2009, and there’s certainly more to like about it than I had been thinking all these years….but it’s still low down on my list of favourite TWP albums.

The edited version cuts out the 40 seconds or so from the album version, omitting the morse-code style intro and gradual build-up.

mp3: The Wedding Present – Santa Ana Winds (edit)

The other three tracks make for decent enough listening, but at the same time didn’t really offer too much in the way of truly memorable tunes. 

mp3: The Wedding Present – Hulk Loves Betty
mp3: The Wedding Present – Drink You, Eat You
mp3: The Wedding Present – Twenty Jackies

The box set, of which there were just 1,000 copies pressed, was released at the end of October.  EP#4, or at least most of it, would end up receiving a digital release before the year was out.

JC

Myself and Rachel headed down to Brighton last weekend to take in the annual At The Edge of The Sea festival (aka Gedgefest) at the Concorde 2 venue down on the eastern side of the beachfront. 

Three acts on the Friday night and ten on Saturday afternoon/evening.  We didn’t catch everyone on the Saturday – a mixture of having to take the occasional rest or getting ourselves into a prime spot inside the main indoor space (Le Bikini Stage) for the next scheduled act meant we didn’t always venture to the smaller outside space (the Swim stage).

While I could easily write 20,000 words on everything, I’ll do my best to keep things brief, but it still means splitting things into two pieces. 

Friday night’s show had two support acts I knew nothing about beforehand. I could have sought out their music before going down south, but I felt that hearing things fresh on the night was a better way to go about it.

Taffy turn out to be a four-piece band from Japan.  Much like Butcher Boy did last week at the Glasgow Weekender, they prove to be the perfect opening act for the festival, evoking memories of the very best of that decade between 1986 and 1996 when indie-music was very much in vogue.  Three blokes fronted by a female singer who was also very adept on guitar. My mind was wandering off to the Britpop era, and recalling that while there may well have been too much indie landfill associated with the ‘movement’, there were loads of radio-friendly poptastic tunes that have more than stood the test of time. 

mp3: Taffy – Tumbling

A mental note was made to seek out Taffy’s back catalogue (turns out there’s been six albums going back to 2012).

Projector are from Brighton, and are another four-piece band made up of three blokes and a female, but they prove to be quite different from Taffy, making more of a boisterous and noisy post-punk sound, with the set drawn from their debut album Now When We Talk It’s Violence that was released earlier this year.  It was an okay show, which I don’t want to sound as if I’m damning it with faint praise because I did enjoy them, but Taffy were a tough act to follow.

Friday night at The Edge of The Sea always closes with a set by The Wedding Present, with the audience knowing that Saturday night closes with a totally separate set by the band.  Friday was billed as them performing Watusi in full plus other songs across a 90-minute show.

I’ll cut to the chase – this turned out to be a show that, overall, felt a bit deflating for a few reasons.  By bit deflating, I meant it only merited a 7/10 rating in my book.

The line-up of the band has changed almost beyond recognition from this time last year, with Jonathan Stewart (guitar), Melanie Howard (bass) and Nicholas Wellauer (drums) all departing rather suddenly without explanation, which I found really sad as I felt this particular unit was as good as TWP had sounded at any time since they had come back into being almost 20 years.  

David Gedge now has, again, a completely new set of musicians comprising Rachael Wood (guitar), Paul Blackburn (bass) and Vince Lammi (drums).  The band have been out on the road a fair bit since last November, with many of the shows being centred around the 30th anniversary of Watusi, which was given the deluxe re-issue treatment on vinyl earlier this year across 2x LPs with b-sides from the era and a few alternative mixes being made available.  As such, they were more than ready to take things up a notch.

They opened with Brassneck. It was loud, boisterous and quite manic, but it certainly got the audience going.  We Interrupt This Programme, one of the highlights of the 24 Songs project from a couple of years back was next, followed by what can only be described as a blistering take on Dare, the closing moments of felt very much like an unsaid tribute to the late Steve Albini with the guitars cranked up to full volume and the drums pounded to the point where the skins must have been close to breaking.  

And then Watusi was played in full, from Track 1 to Track 12 in the same order as the album.  The problem here is that Watusi is, and I’m being generous, a tad on the patchy side.  Maybe inconsistent is a better description.  Fair play to the band, the songs I’m not so keen on came across well in the live setting – with a special mention to Catwoman which was stretched out to its full seven-minute length at an ear-splitting volume that My Bloody Valentine would have given their approval to. 

mp3: The Wedding Present – Catwoman

But there’s no doubt that the show lost all sorts of momentum, exemplified by what felt like a limp run-through of Hot Pants, the instrumental which closes the album.  I suspect David Gedge was fully aware as he put the show together that he ran the risk of annoying a fair bit of the audience as there proved to be barely a half-second gap between the final note of Hot Pants and the opening and unmistakable riff of Kennedy, long-regarded by most TWP fans as their finest song.

The rest of the evening passed in a flurry of excitement and much moving of limbs in a moshpit of folk who really should be old enough to better, while the rest of us just swayed and moved a bit less energetically to Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft, Once More, Take Me! and Bewitched.    Five closing songs that were just about all anyone could have asked for, although I still had a regret that this line-up didn’t quite do them justice in a way that Stewart, Howard and Wellauer would have. 

Outside into the still warm but breezy August evening for the 30-minute walk back through the city centre to our hotel close to the railway station and discovering that our ears were ringing, such was the sonic assault of the evening. 

Yes, it had been The Wedding Present, and while Rachel had thought it was a magnificent show (she has a penchant for loud music belying her years!!) , I couldn’t help but think I missed the old line-up.   I suppose, like Mark E Smith once famously said “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s the Fall”, it’ll always be The Wedding Present when David Gedge is on stage with three other musicians on guitar, bass and drums. 

I was also already thinking ahead to the Saturday and wondering what sort of set would close the festival given what had been played on the Friday.  OK, there would be nothing from Watusi which was a good thing, but four of the best from Bizzaro had been aired while just one song from the 21st century catalogue had been played.    It was going to be intriguing.

Part 2 of the review will appear tomorrow, again as a bonus post later in the day.

JC

El Rey was released at the end of May 2008.  It contained 11 tracks, but rather annoyingly, there was a 12th track made available but only through a download via the ITunes store.

The CD was purchased.  And for the first time since The Wedding Present had ‘reconvened’,  I found myself rather underwhelmed.  Looking back, my expectations were far too high, thinking that El Rey, with the involvement of Steve Albini, was going to be Seamonsters Mark 2.  It does have a number of more than very decent moments, but overall it doesn’t quite have the consistency of most other albums.

As mentioned last week, the album was preceded by a digital release of The Thing I Like Best About Him Is His Girlfriend.  I was certainly anticipating a physical release for any future singles to be taken from the album, but that’s not how it turned out.  I genuinely can’t recall if there was a digital download made available for this one, but there was a promo video put out for fans to enjoy

mp3: The Wedding Present – Don’t Take Me Home Until I’m Drunk

Track 8 on El Rey, and one that was co-written by guitarist Chris McConville who had joined back in 2006 but was soon to leave again after the promotional activities around touring El Rey were completed at the end of 2009.   It’s the sort of song you could imagine Cinerama writing and recording, not least for all the references to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the song title being akin to a line spoken in that film by Holly Golightly, played memorably by Audrey Hepburn.

Later in the year, a box set called How The West Was Won was issued by Vibrant Records.   If you want to buy a second-hand copy via Discogs, it is listed under the singles section of music by The Wedding Present.   If you head to the band’s website, it is listed under the albums section.  No wonder it is proving awkward to keep track of what should be curated as a single for this particular series.

My rule of thumb is that EPs should be included.  How The West Was Won contained four separate CDS, each being called as EP, and each with four tracks.  The first of them saw the first physical non-promotional release of the ‘Girlfriend’ EP, while the second was called the Don’t Take Me Home Till I’m Drunk EP.

In addition to the album version of the song, there was an acoustic take and a remix, which was the work of the song’s co-writer, Chris McConville:-

mp3: The Wedding Present -Don’t Take Me Home Till I’m Drunk (acoustic version)
mp3: The Wedding Present – Don’t Take Me Home Till I’m Drunk (Team Wah Wah remix)

The former is, again, what you’d fully expect from its description. The latter has all sort of instrumentation and technical gadgetry thrown at it. It’s certainly different, but it really acts as a reminder that TWP songs don’t really benefit from any sort of radical type of remix.

The EP contained one entirely new song.

mp3: The Wedding Present – Pinch, Twist, Pull, Release

There’s no production credits given within the box set, so I’m not sure if this was one that was worked up in the Chicago studio with Steve Albini or at a separate session – the band had been in a couple of studios prior to making the trip to Chicago.  It’s kind of TWP by numbers, but I don’t mean that in a derogatory way.  It’s a slow, brooding and sad number, with quiet and loud moments throughout, with the protagonist trying hard to explain why this particular relationship has come to an end.   It wouldn’t have been out of place on many an album, and feels as if it was kind of wasted by being tucked away on this EP.

I’ll return again to How The West Was Won next Sunday.

JC