Back to the Present

TIME, AS anyone who’s become romantically entangled with a sadistic carriage-clock will tell you, can be a cruel and fickle mistress.

Take the poor old Wedding Present for instance. Back in 1986, Leeds’ finest were hailed as the second coming by a British music press desperate for something loud, melodic and homegrown that wasn’t necessarily The Smiths. Now – a seminal debut album and seventeen top 40 hits later – the standard-bearers of what I’m amazed was never dubbed ‘the New Wave of Gritty Northern Realism’ are treated by their former allies with the same disdain most people reserve for discovering their neighbour’s an Arsenal supporter.

“The criticism can get pretty over the top,” admits mainman Dave Gedge whose only crime against humanity, from what I can see, is looking like a younger and slightly less grey John Major. “Some of those things could hurt but then you meet the journalists who’ve written them and think, who exactly’s the inadequate one here? If you turn round and say, ‘the new Wedding Present album’s crap because of ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’’, I’ll accept it even though I mightn’t agree with it.

“What do get annoying are the personal attacks that have nothing to do with music or are part of an official editorial policy to slag you off. The weeklies, especially, survive by playing games with people’s careers. Suede are a prime example – they’re not bad but no way are they the saviours of rock ‘n’ roll that they’ve been made out to be. Unless their next record’s a Ziggy Stardust or Meat Is Murder, they’ll be deemed to have failed which is potentially quite damaging. I know they played a major part in their own downfall but the Happy Mondays are another band who suffered because they were hyped out of all proportion.”

Yup, Shaun Ryder’s revealing autobiography, How We Went From Being The New Rolling Stones To The Biggest Gobshites On The Planet In One Swish Of A Journalist’s Pen, should be in the shops any day now.

If you accept that no publicity’s bad publicity, Dave should be cock-a-hoop at the coverage afforded him by his recent spat with the Princess Di of Grunge, Courtney Love. For those of you who missed the ringside report in the last issue of Hot Press, the singer found himself subjected to a pummelling of Mike Tyson-style proportions at Reading when he confessed to Love that not only did he know producer Steve Albini but he quite liked him.

“There’s a lot of bad feeling towards Steve in the Nirvana camp because of the war of words surrounding In Utero,” he explains, “and now that Kurt’s dead, Courtney’s launched a one-woman crusade to get back at anyone who ever crossed him. I’m not sure if she was trying to hurt me or was just being over-playful but within five minutes there were these stories flying round that she’d bottled me and I’d been carted off to hospital.

“It was over before it started – Everett True, who was acting as her minder for the day, prised us apart and she staggered off to her next encounter. I found it incredibly sad, though, that the main topic of conversation backstage that weekend was, ‘did you see how fucked up Courtney Love was?’ It’s almost as if she’s become a performing widow – ‘roll up ladies and gentlemen, please, and watch this woman fall apart before your very eyes’. She deserves better than that.”

In direct contrast to self-confessed media sluts like Manic Street Preachers and Primal Scream who gladly live their careers out in inch-high headlines, The Weddoes have never been ones to kiss and tell or snort and report.

“If these people – and I’m not particularly referring to the Manics or Primals – took as many drugs and shagged as many groupies as they claim, they wouldn’t be alive. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen ordinary groups turn into rock monsters the moment the bloke from the NME walks through the door. I’m sure if we popped a few Es and went blue in the corner every now and again, we’d get far more positive press than we do. And in terms of pop music, that’s perfectly valid because your image and attitude is every bit as important as the records. You could even argue that by not going ligging every night of the week and having highly-publicised bust-ups with your celebrity girlfriend, you’re deliberately presenting a non-image. That isn’t actually the case with us but I’m sure there are groups who deliberately contrive to be down-to-earth because they reckon it’ll help ‘em flog albums.”

At this point, the word ‘Levellers’ doesn’t so much jump as double-somersault wearing a diamanté-encrusted bodysuit, into mind. And while we’re being bitchy, what does Gedge make of baggy wannabes like Blur suddenly transforming into chirpy cockernee geezers who’ve been into the ‘Oo and Small Faces all along, squire!

“We’ve never done a Blur and completely reinvented ourselves but, by the same token, we’ve always been aware that you have to keep on evolving and if you line the new album up alongside George Best or Seamonsters, there are pronounced stylistic differences. Unfortunately, from the point of view of our old record company, the changes in The Wedding Present’s music have come independently of everyone else. We’ve always done the wrong things at the wrong time – when Manchester was happening, we were recording with Steve Albini which is as far away as you can get from that baggy stuff and now that grunge and hardcore is God, we’re entering one of our poppier phases.”

Does it worry him that The Weddoes are often regarded as being the epitome of white-boy indie rock?

“We’ve done a dance remix before and there was a cover of the ‘Theme From Shaft’ on one of the singles but I’ve never been completely happy with it. It’s like people saying, ‘why do you always write lyrics about relationships?’ The answer is I’m good at it, in much the same way as I’m good at playing guitar-driven, indie-type music. I enjoy trying to appropriate different culture into my songs but when I do, they usually end up as the third track on the 12” because they’re not quite convincing enough.

“If we were 15 and starting out now,” he reflects, “it’d be different. Even if you’re not an ardent raver, chances are you’d be aware of dance culture and there are a lot of multi-racial outfits that simply wouldn’t have existed during the ‘80s. I’m told that The Wedding Present have been a big influence on Cornershop and if that’s true, I’m dead chuffed because the stuff of theirs I’ve heard on John Peel is excellent.”

Another band pressing for a place in The Weddoes’ youth team are Ash whose current single, ‘Petrol’, is basically a distillation of all the spinetingly bits from George Best with a hint of Dinosaur Jr sloppiness thrown in for good measure. What’s more, the northern popsters readily admit the lineage and brought their Uncle David over to Dublin last month to produce a couple of B-sides.

“We had to cram the sessions into a weekend because they’re still at school. It did strike me that perhaps they’re wearing their influences a little too proudly on their sleeves but when you’re 17 or 18, you’ve got time to develop your own sound. When I was their age, all I was worried about was passing my Maths A-Level, so in that respect they’ve definitely got a head-start.”

This week sees the release of Watusi, The Wedding Present’s first new product since 1992’s Guinness Record-breaking string of twelve consecutive chart singles. You’d have thought that taking up almost permanent residence on Top Of The Pops would have been a nice little earner but according to their now former record company, RCA, the exercise was about as financially rewarding as a D.U.P. bring-and-buy cake sale on the Fall’s Road.

“It took us 10 minutes to think of the idea,” Gedge reminisces with a chuckle, “and four months to persuade RCA that it wasn’t an elaborate plot to destroy the music industry. ‘Fun’ isn’t a word that gets bandied around too readily in corporate rock circles and having conspired with their fellow major labels to kill off the 7” single, they weren’t overly-thrilled that one of their bands wanted to devote a whole year’s work to the format.”

Did Dave enjoy rubbing shoulders – and perhaps other parts of his anatomy – with pop’s shiny happy people?

“I’m supposed in my position as spokesman for the indie masses to say, ‘no, they’re a bunch of wankers’, but most of them were very decent. In fact, Jason Donovan went over the top to prove he was a decent bloke. I assumed he’d be a nice polite children’s TV type but he was f-ing and blinding and generally trying to prove he was one of the lads. I tell you who are actually quite laddish and that’s Take That. There are some stories I could tell you about them that definitely wouldn’t get printed in Smash Hits!”

Alas, discretion becomes the better part of valour and save for a veiled reference to exotic fruit, Dave refuses to divulge the shenanigans that Jase, Robbie, Gary, Mark and Howard get up to when they’re not wetting pre-pubescent knickers.

While Watusi is unlikely to prompt any mass resignations from The Wedding Present Fan Club, there are a couple of deft touches on the album that propel the group into uncharted territory. ‘Click Click’ finds Gedge harmonising with Heather Lewis in an almost indecently close fashion, ‘Big Rat’ is the nearest British indiepop’s ever gotten to Tony Bennett and ‘So Long, Baby’ purloins its middle-eight from The Pogues. Intrigued? You bloody well should be!

“Seamonsters - which was our last proper studio album – was a very intense, melancholy sort of affair,” Dave reflects, “and this is a lot more poppy. Our main reason for choosing Steve Fisk as producer is that he has this superbly extensive knowledge of weird groups from the past and is always suggesting bizarre twists to lift songs out of the ordinary. We wanted to avoid the thing whereby you have a verse and a chorus and then launch into a huge great big wall of noise. It can sound brilliant but it’s too easy and the danger is you end up using the same formula for every song.

“In many ways, this is a new beginning. We don’t have to bully or coerce Island into doing stuff for us like we had to towards the end with RCA, Steve has revolutionised the way we work in the studio and we’ve a different bass player who’s got his own ideas about where we should be heading. I’m honestly more excited about Watusi than I have been any other Wedding Present album, including George Best which eight years on is still the yardstick all our records get measured against.”

Acts don’t come any harder to follow than The Weddoes’ debut LP, a record choc-full of wry melodies and the sort of effortless pop whimsy that one previously feared had gone out of fashion with The Kinks. Suddenly it was alright to be a trainspotting obsessive, furry-hooded anoraks became the last word in street fashion and Clearasil shares plummeted as everyone developed designer pimples.

“It was definitely the first and almost definitely the last time that we’ll be fashionable,” the author of this sartorial madness laughs. “It was part of that C-86 jangly pop scene and because there hadn’t been anything particularly new or exciting since The Smiths, the press couldn’t get enough of it. It was very much a product of its era – I listen to it now and it sounds really thin and flawed which I suppose was half the appeal. There aren’t too many critics who agree with me but Seamonsters was ten times better than George Best.”

If The Wedding Present were releasing George Best now rather than in 1986, which exponent of the beautiful game would be lending his name to the title?

“I don’t know if any of today’s footballers can match Bestie because, basically, he was a sporting hero, rebel leader and pop star all rolled into one. Ryan Giggs is up there with him in terms of ability but he’s not a Che Guevara or Mick Jagger, is he? Paul McGrath’s quite good in the drinking and womanising department but in terms of glamour and having a ‘fuck you’ attitude, you’d probably be rushing out to buy Eric Cantona.”

Er, what’s the French for “fat bloody chance”?