Mention “Wet Wet Wet” and the response will vary depending on who you’re talking to.
Music fans of a certain age will recall a good-looking 1980s music act grinning from the front pages of every teen music magazine, while those from their hometown of Clydebank will recall the local football team’s shirts emblazoned with the band’s logo.
Less favourably remembered, perhaps, will be two of their three number one hits – a cover of The Beatles’ A Little Help From My Friends which at least aided the Childline charity, but their take on The Troggs’ Love Is All Around, thanks to its appearance in hit movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, remained at the top of the charts for 15 weeks, causing the weary band to ask for the single to be deleted.
Aficionados of the 1980s act may well point you towards The Memphis Sessions, the band’s second album which garnered critical acclaim for their mix of pop and soul.
But music fans from the early 1980s will recall a string of hits from the band’s heyday: Wishing I Was Lucky, Sweet Little Mystery, Temptation, and Angel Eyes, and their parent chart-topping album, Popped In Souled Out.
And it’s this classic set that former lead singer Marti Pellow has decided to reinterpret, with the help of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Pellow left the band – who continue with a replacement vocalist – for the second time in 2017, appearing in musical theatre in the West End and Broadway, and that may have influenced the new recordings, made at Glasgow’s famous Armadillo theatre and scored by Pellow’s long term musical director Grant Mitchell.
Pellow says of revisiting the album 40 years on: “The lyrics to these songs were written in my teens, but they now carry a deeper resonance for me and some of the nuances that I might have overlooked back then started to reveal themselves. The process was not about fixing something that was broken but showcasing the songs in a different light, allowing them to keep giving. Adding orchestration allowed the songs to bloom into something different but equally interesting.”
He continues: “Performing and recording with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra live in my home town was a dream come true for me,” adding: “I fell in love with the songs again like little treasures from my youth.
“I looked back on my younger self and thought ‘Fair enough, well done son’.”
This article originally appeared in the Portsmouth News.
Also chief newshound at Jockrock
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