The Wedding Present

Legendary UK act The Wedding Present releases its first new full length in over three years. Titled El Rey, the album was recorded in early 2008 in Chicago by Steve Albini, marking the band’s first record with the noted producer since 1991’s renowned Seamonsters. Manifesto Records will be the U.S. record label.

Written while frontman David Gedge was living in Los Angeles, El Rey burns with West Coast sunlight; Hollywood seen through the eyes of a gritty British Northerner. Speaking about El Rey in MOJO Magazine recently, Gedge said: “I’ve been living in West Hollywood for the last year or so, and while I’m not going to claim that this is my ‘L.A.’ album, there are some references. I suppose the themes are lust, jealousy, betrayal, regret, obsession, super-heroes… the usual. We chose to record with Steve this time because the new songs were sounding very guitar-ry and quite dark. It’s been good. As you’d imagine, really; Albini knows his stuff.”

TWP returned from an eight-year hiatus in early 2005 with the release of Take Fountain. The long-awaited album brought them back into the spotlight with all the style and sophistication associated with a legendary group, but fans were also pleased to see the band had lost none of the growling angst with which they had burst onto the scene with the 1985 debut, George Best. The band was a favorite of the famed late UK DJ John Peel.

The Wedding Present will be touring North America in the Fall 2008 with the line-up of: David Gedge (guitar and vocals), Terry de Castro (bass), Graeme Ramsay (drums), and Chris McConville (guitar).

The Wedding Present have had eighteen UK Top 40 hit singles...not bad for a band that has, from its inception, stubbornly refused to play the record industry’s game. That was back in 1985 when David Lewis Gedge boarded a National Express coach in London with 500 records packed into a pair of his mother’s suitcases. In this fashion, the debut single GO OUT AND GET ‘EM BOY! was collected from the pressing plant, delivered to the distribution company, and The Wedding Present was born. That pioneering spirit has been at the core of the band’s philosophy ever since. From GEORGE BEST, “an unmitigated delight” [NME], the first full-length release on their own Reception Records onwards, the band has charted an appealing, if often eccentric, course of its very own.

With the early releases on their own label The Wedding Present acquired a reputation for bittersweet, breathtakingly honest love songs immersed in whirlwind guitars, so it was extraordinary that UKRAINSKI VISTUPI V JOHNA PEELA, with the band exploring traditional Eastern European folk music, should be the major label debut on RCA.

The next step, made with characteristically twisted Wedding Present logic, was to enlist noise-mongering [and, at that point, relatively unknown] sound engineer Steve Albini’s aid at a time when everyone else was releasing ‘Madchester’ dance mixes. The resulting SEAMONSTERS, recorded in the snowy wilds of Minnesota in just 11 days, suggested a more thoughtful Wedding Present.

The band came up with their next intriguing idea in 1992. By the end of December, The Wedding Present had released twelve singles, one per month, equalled Elvis Presley’s 35 year old record for “most hits in one year”, rekindled everyone’s interest in that ultimate pop format, the 7? and led the NME to describe the band as “casually revolutionary and underhandedly unique”.

WATUSI, produced by Steve Fisk (a prime mover in the celebrated avant-garde scene of Seattle), whisked the band off into another new area with its lo-fi pop, three-part a capella harmonies and Waikiki-ready surf strains.

In 1995, the band released yet another 7? single, SUCKER, and completed a British tour with two drummers. Although the record sold several thousand copies and reached No.3 in The Festive 50 (the late BBC DJ John Peel’s end of year listeners’ poll) you won’t see it in any other charts, because, typically, it was only available at the concerts or by mail order.

The band returned to a more traditional form of record distribution with the car themed MINI, “a gem of a record” [Melody Maker] in which Gedge cloaked his tales of love, lust and infidelity with automobile symbolism in what can only be described as a concept album.

For the next full length LP, the group decided to apply a decade’s worth of studio experience and produce the record themselves. Thus, the Top 40 album SATURNALIA was released by Cooking Vinyl to a flurry of critical approval.

It was at this point in 1997 that Gedge started work on a new project called CINERAMA. A fittingly titled outfit, Cinerama indulged Gedge’s love of film music from John Barry to Blaxploitation via Ennio Morricone. Cinerama started life as a duo, Gedge and his girlfriend Sally Murrell, together with a shifting line-up of collaborators. 1998’s VA VA VOOM “turbo-driven melodies and bittersweet vignettes taking in everything from John Barry to the Zombies” [The Times] featured The Church’s Marty Wilson-Piper and Emma Pollock from The Delgados. Then, in 1999, Gedge rescued the rhythm section of the disbanded Goya Dress (Terry de Castro and Simon Pearson) and combined them with Wedding Present guitarist Simon Cleave. From 2000 the line-up remained relatively steady, apart from Finnish drummer Kari Paavola later replacing Pearson and Murrell’s eventual retirement from live performance.

Surely on pace to rival the abundant shelf filling of The Wedding Present, Cinerama released a clutch of singles in support of their debut LP, as well as a number prior to 2000’s Steve Albini-recorded DISCO VOLANTE “dangerously, seductively sweet” [Melody Maker]. Notable were the heart-rending SUPERMAN (complete with alternative Spanish take) and the six and a half minute epic HEALTH AND EFFICIENCY (also available in French!).

The third Cinerama studio album, TORINO (released in 2002), was much darker than the first two, with Gedge returning to a guitar driven sound and deciding to write predominantly about infidelity.

At the end of 2002, Gedge and Murrell unexpectedly split up, and he decided to leave Leeds, his home for the preceding twenty-four years, and move to Seattle in the USA. Following the end of this fourteen-year relationship, Gedge began writing a collection of songs apparently influenced by his despair over the split. TAKE FOUNTAIN, the resultant album, was recorded in Seattle by Steve Fisk [who also produced WATUSI, The Wedding Present’s 1994 LP] and released, perhaps ironically, on St. Valentine’s Day 2005. This saw Gedge reviving The Wedding Present name for the first album since 1996’s SATURNALIA to a torrent of critical acclaim. TAKE FOUNTAIN “is as eloquent an emotional discourse as he has mustered. Gedge has never before assimilated harsh rock textures to orchestral arrangements with such power.” [Mojo].

In the wake of TAKE FOUNTAIN’s success, and after almost an eight-year hiatus, The Wedding Present set out on a mammoth twenty month concert tour of Europe and North America which included most of the major festivals and ended in November 2006. In December of that year Gedge relocated to Hollywood, California, where he is currently living and writing but ventured back across the Atlantic in October 2007 when The Wedding Present performed the GEORGE BEST album live as part of a George Best “Twentieth Anniversary” Tour of Europe. Following that tour the band reassembled in at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago to record El Rey.