They may be about to enter their 27th year, but although David Gedge’s current cohorts are very different from those who formed the band with him in Leeds all those years ago, everything apart from three of the members is reassuringly familiar.
This is of course no bad thing, particularly to an audience which, while it’s gathered its fair share of new faces over the years, certainly boasts a fair number who have stuck with the band throughout their career.
So, with a new album due in 2012, there’s a fair sprinkling of new material to test out on a willing Glasgow crowd (a “sprinkling” equals 4 or 5 songs, according to the frontman). The rather more vintage ‘Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm’ follows what I take to be a new song, though I must confess to not being 100% au fait with every nook and cranny of the band’s back catalogue – unlike many here tonight.
And while the crowd good-naturedly bay for oldies (and Gedge smilingly bats back these requests) there’s much of worth to be found in the new material, as these new tunes follow the tried and tested path of smart lyrics set to strident catchy tunes.
Take ‘Mystery Date’: ”I can’t stand the apprehension / maybe we should kiss to ease the tension” is classic Gedge songwriting. This and another newie, ‘You Jane’, stand out though they will be familiar to listeners of Marc Riley’s 6music show. ‘Queen Anne’ despite being from more recent album Take Fountain, seems to have a noisy Albini-esque feel showing that the band have lost none of their youthful verve, and it does seem the majority of the crowd are pretty well up-to-date given that it receives as warm a reception as ‘Dalliance’ does.
‘You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends’ and ‘Drive’ span the decades while ‘Love Slave’ and ‘Three’ roll us back to that “golden year” of 1992, when the ‘Hit Parade’ project spawned a dozen top 30 singles and – in the case of the former – lead us to wonder just what the Hairy Cornflake (or whoever was on chart rundown duty) would have made of that feedback-ridden slab of Yorkshire’s take on post-grunge.
As the show moves towards its climax we move onto the actual ‘hits’: ‘My Favourite Dress’, ‘Kennedy’, ‘Don’t Talk Just Kiss’… all delivered with the exuberance of a band half their age – indeed, with the same energy that they were recorded with.
Of course, there are no encores – a “hackneyed old tradition” as the singer says in his interview with this very website. Got to love them for sticking to their guns, and thanks goodness that Wedding Present shows are one tradition that this crowd are yet to tire of.
- Barry Adamson - 6 February 2025
- C81-C86-Go! – Creeping Bent at 30 - 3 February 2025
- Beautiful Cosmos - 27 January 2025