PRESENT TENSE

Rip It Up, Issue 180, 1 July 1992, Page 18

PRESENT TENSE

THE WEDDING PRESENT are just over half way through their most hectic yean They are six singles into their planned seven-inch-single-a-month campaign and they’ve just returned from a brief American tour where they missed the riots by a few days.

"It was scary," lead singer and songwriter David Gedge understates in his quick, clipped Leeds dialect. "You can feel the tension. I would never condone violence, but you can see why it starts. It's a very racist society, it reminds me of South Africa with all the top jobs occupied by whites and the lowest by blacks."

Gedge is reluctantly in London ("It's too busy and in summer it's unbearable") to promote The Hit Parade One, a collection of the first six singles of the year and the Wedding Presents' B-sides. The second Parade gets released in December.

"The idea of releasing a single every month was initially Keith's, our bassist, and at first it was a joke as it seemed preposterous, but when we thought about it we thought we could do it. We felt it would be a change from the usual LP then singles format and from there it steamrolled, including the idea of putting covers on the B-sides and doing videos and issuing Tshirts for each single."

When the Beatles ruled, their singles every three months defined what was possible in that genre and every other act could either raise its standards or chuck in the jukebox. Now the seven-inch format, despite being an aesthetic compromise between convenience and cost, is doomed to be a little dinosaur in the world of the CD single.

"Yeah, we regret the passing of the seven-inch single and that's one of the reasons we did a tribute to it. It's cheap, it's sexy and you get two songs you want without having to buy an album. Think of the alternatives — twelve-inch singles are too bulky and I don't know what it's like in New Zealand,

but Britain's one of the last places to hold on to the seveninch single as in America and Europe they don't bother anymore. Now with CD singles it's all marketing really. When music first started, it was musicians and groups making records and now it's marketing campaigns and cash flow." Hit Parade One captures the Wedding Present in the immediacy of their George Best period, but with the heavier influence of past producer Steve Albini still lingering in the armoured pop that surrounds Gedge's regained pop sensibilities. Writing singles and writing them under pressure has deflected the band off on another fruitful tangent. "We wrote the singles as we went along, although we've written about nine now which means we've enough till October so we're well ahead, but if you spoke to me in two months time and we hadn't written anything then it could get interesting. It's quite strange writing to a deadline. I suppose it's like working for a music magazine where something has to be done and it's done when it's finished, unlike recording an

album where you can work until you're satisfied." How has this three-minute single deadline pressure affected your writing? "Not much, as it's not as if we've sat down and tried to write a hit single or anything. I don't imagine that there will be any nine-minute progressive rock epics, so all we're doing is keeping to the format of the

three-minute single. Although I think certain singles reflect certain months, like 'California', our June single, is a very commercial, poppy song, very summery and it seems to make sense since we are in the middle of summer to write a song like that. So as we approach Christmas the singles could change."

The second side of Hit Parade One features the singles' Bsides, six covers the band considers to be important or influential. Scanning the list from the Close Lobsters' 'Let's Make Some Plans' to Altered Images' 'Think That It Might Happen' it's obviously a highly subjective interpretation of what's

influential or important. 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine'and 'Like A Rolling Stone' don't get a look in, but neo-classics like the Twin Peaks theme, the Go Between's immense 'Cattle and Cane' and the timeless 'Pleasant Valley Sunday' are all subjected to Gedge's pop primitivism. "My favourite is the Twin Peaks one because it's the weirdest and if you could think of a song that would be completely stupid for the Wedding Present to cover it would be that one. It's really slow and it's got synthesisers, but it's such a memorable tune and the ar-

rangement works well. "I was disappointed with our version of 'Cattle and Cane' as although it's a brilliant song we didn't add very much to it. In hindsight, the ones I've enjoyed are the ones where we've changed or added to the song in some way. But 'Cattle and Cane' was the first one and we were nervous about the whole project and so we were guilty of

playing it safe." What covers have you got lined up for the next six singles?

"We've got a massive list somewhere and you know quite soon if they're not gonna work. We tried Michael. Jackson's 'Black or White' and it didn't work, it sounded stupid. So we've had a go at the theme from Shaft and again it's a weird one. The guitar part wasn't too bad, the wah-wah pedal part was fine as it's in the funky style that's near to what I do anyway, but some of the other bits are a bit strange. "We've also had a go at a Mud song called 'Rockette' and

at Queen's 'Seven Seas of Rye', but for the final three we haven’t decided yet." Last year Wedding Present's third album Seamonsters received a critical mauling at the hands of critics who felt that they'd betrayed the pop innocence and sense of fun as laid down on George Best. Seamonsters wasn't easy listening: it was ugly and lustful, but also powerful and coherent, a charnel guts of a record. This singles project seems to be a reaction to the criticism of the darkness of the album. "It was certainly a response to Seamonsters — not to its criti-

cism, as we don't write songs for anyone other than ourselves. Certainly Seamonsters is a very brooding and melancholy record, but we had to do it as once you've done a certain type of album you have to change and of the three albums we've done I think it's by far the best. "The problem is in Britain people see George Best as the classic debut LP. It made the NME as one of the classic debuts of all time, but people forget what we actually sounded like. If you played George Best and Seamonsters at the same time very few people would get up and say George Best is better, as even at the time I thought it sounded very thin and one-di-mensional.

"You talk to people about that and they can't think why you don't like the music of that era and I say the whole thing is badly produced, amateurish and almost embarrassing in parts and they say that's exactly why they like it. I can appreciate that because it was a very naive time, but that was five years ago and you'd feel a fraud reaching back to that era again and again. "We're a different group

now, we've had line-up changes and when we play those songs it's almost like doing a cover version of someone else's work." Was Seamonsters a reflection of your life or mood at the time or was it just an approach you wanted to take?

"It was an approach we wanted to take. It came with the idea of using producer Steve Albini—we'd worked with him before so we knew it would be an intense sound and so I wanted the lyrics to fit that as well. It's a more anguished obsessed sound than normal. In the past, the lyrics have been quite conversational or 'oh dear

my girlfriend's left me' sort of lyrics. On Seamonsters they were a lot more lust-driven, more crazy.

"He brought the sound out of us and that's still there in the first of the singles. I don't know why we never managed to capture that sound before, but he was a really good engineer and since then we've had the experience to re-create that sound. Pre-Albini, I always thought our sound was disappointing." With Wedding Presents' almost romantic seven-inch crusade this year it will be interesting to see if they're welcomed back into the fold by those who felt that Seamonsters was such a cynical plunge. "We've always been cynical. I've never been wide-eyed or reassured about the music industry. I've always regarded it as not a nice place. I suppose you get more cynical with age, but ironically our attitude to our music that songwriting and our records are the most important things is seen as cynical these days. To me, it's the obvious way to work, but because we don't play the pop game we're seen as cynical."

"IF YOU COULD THINK OF A SONO THAT WOULD BE COMPLETELY STUPID FOR THE WEDDING PRESENT TO COVER IT WOULD BE THAT ONE.'

GEORGE KAY