It’s one of the most apocryphal gig stories of all time: the Sex Pistols‘ first visit to Manchester, on June 4th 1976, was played to an audience which included the likes of Howard Devoto, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, in fact, anyone who was to become anyone in the city’s incendiary new musical landscape.
From that full stop came a dominance of British music that was to span post-punk to acid house and everything in between, all delivered with an acidic Northern deadpan and a sneering distrust of all things metropolitan. It was a gig which unquestionably architected two decades of British music psyche.
Across the Pennines however, the impact of the Pistols’ dates in places like Leeds (one of the few gigs not cancelled on the Never Mind The Bollocks tour), Huddersfield, Keighley and Doncaster was less profound. True, both Gang Of Four and The Mekons were inspired indirectly by punk’s brief flurry of free-thinking, but for the most part of the decade that followed the invasion of John Lydon‘s ‘The Idiot-Savant’ brand of anarchism, the area remained a backwater in almost every sense of the word.
Throughout those barren years of being goaded from down the M62 with disparaging comments about Black Lace and The Grumbleweeds, The Wedding Present were pretty much the only thing worth living for. A four piece consisting of singer/guitarist David Gedge, Shaun Charman, Keith Gregory and Pete ‘Grapper’ Solowka, they were the first band on which Leeds especially could pin its hopes. An act with the hardcore ferocity of Husker Du but the pathos of Crossroads, they were also darlings of John Peel like The Undertones were, but still underground enough to be playing to 200 people in a pub back room whilst stoically releasing records on their own label. DIY but partially made so by a lack of options.
In the lugubrious Gedge you had a truly Yorkshire anti hero (although he is a Mancunian): throughout 99% of the band’s songs you felt he sang from direct experience of being the jilted lover, the unrequited victim caught perpetually in the friend zone, a character never far from the little heartbreaks that haunt us all. His honesty was often brutal, making you a voyeur of car crash relationships. It could all have been desperately awkward, but instead it felt that you were there in the room with him, a nice guy being pushed around by a suitcase full of tough luck stories.
It might have been reasonable to expect that the Weddoes’ music would accordingly be full of maudlin introspection. Instead it was the polar opposite, an exhilarating lo-fi helter skelter of guitars being played to within an inch of their lives, a sea of post hardcore riffs alive with an energy which belied the band’s roots in alternative pop. Pretence? No room for that, just concerts packed with sweaty, slightly unhinged proto-moshers who took the band to their hearts like brothers. For an audience in a region fed on scraps for years, these twin sensations of belonging and belief, no matter how erudite, were manna from heaven.
Their arrival also coincided with the ordainment of a cabal of disparate groups into a scene catalogued by the NME’s ‘C-86‘ compilation, in turn the sort of project whose influence has extended way beyond its original terms of reference. After initially welcoming the additional exposure, the band found both the label and its cloying values more of a millstone than a marvel. The Doc Marten you see didn’t fit; the Weddoes were not about anoraks and bowl cuts, or even paisley shirts (although Gedge could be seen occasionally sporting one), neither were they interested in re-creating third hand Beach Boys covers, or whether the surf in Burley Park was up. Tough but tender, their music was in many ways the antithesis of the shamblers they were stuck on bills with, and the only qualities which they shared with most of these art school kids was a lack of appetite for over production.
As a counter point to the slick, ersatz soul, Euro trash and hair metal which dominated the charts at the time, bands like this provided a focal point for anyone whose interests stretched beyond the banality of mainstream radio. Released in October 1987, their début album ‘George Best‘ featured a picture of the wayward maverick on the cover in a Manchester United jersey; an irony not lost on the fervent group of Leeds United supporters who had been helping them to sell-out their adopted home town gigs for the previous 18 months.
Thankfully, it was good enough to span these tribal divides, a bitter-sweet record that wrapped its neuroses around the vitality of Gedge and Charman’s ebullient, chicken scratching melodies. The band coaxed guitar sounds which sounded like angry wasps one moment and then pouring rain another, with the edict seemingly being that love hurts, of course, but that the pain made the sufferer feel somehow more alive.
Etched into every moment of songs like ‘Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft‘, ‘Give My Love To Kevin‘ and ‘My Favourite Dress‘, this contradiction made for a visceral, thrilling experience which no-one before or since has come close to repeating. Famously, it also contained a snippet of a diva-like sounding Gedge admonishing producer Chris Allison – of whom he would recently claim the band didn’t trust in terms of delivering a more nuanced version of the record. Not for the last time, Gedge won.
By luck more than judgement, the band discovered there was a market for this sort of disaffection, a soundtrack for those sidelined by the era’s money-obsessed culture; ‘George Best’ would go on to sell 70,000 copies although, as they were quick to point out, success was of course relative; they’d achieved merely what a Michael Jackson or Bros record would do in a week.
Critical adoration had always counted for little in commercial terms, but Gedge has admitted the band would get letters from fans around the world complaining that their records simply weren’t available. In those pre-Internet days, indie labels may have meant creative freedom but equally they also meant a limited reach. What with Peel’s continuing adoration in addition to ‘unit shifting’, the major labels inevitably came sniffing.
Whilst they ruminated, there was still time to revisit the now recent/distant past via ‘Tommy‘, a collection of all the singles, b-sides and ephemera from the time in which, as popular myth would have it, they lived on toast in order to be able to release the likes of ‘Go Out and Get ‘Em Boy‘ and the rest of its angular grist. This was also the moment when they would at some points in the live set throw out a cover of Orange Juice‘s ‘Felicity‘, reducing the original’s urbane jazziness into a blasted, ripping piece of comic strip din that defied you not to laugh and bounce off other people like a pinball. A goodbye of sorts, ‘Tommy’ was a sea of postcards arriving years after the event, making its existence all the more poignant – like saying a cheery au revoir when you knew really that it was goodbye.
The end of the eighties was a turbulent, momentous time to be alive and of age; the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 typified a time when all the precepts fifties and sixties children had grown up with were swept away as if their existence had been some sort of fabricated in-joke. Now signed to RCA, ‘George Best’s legitimate successor ‘Bizarro‘ did little to reflect the maelstrom. A refinement more than a complete re-appraisal, it cemented the band’s appeal beyond a scene they’d pioneered but had by then outgrown.
A valid criticism made at the time, though, was of its unconscious statement of procrastination, Gedge & Co trying to break free of their stylistic, faster than thou moorings, but never quite willing to fully abate the neuroses. In places it rocked harder and faster than before (‘Grandaland‘), had two killer singles (‘Brassneck‘, the fabulously syncopated Ameri-grump of ‘Kennedy‘) and included a caught between-two-stools minor classic in ‘Take Me!‘. It should have been enough. But the old century was unravelling before our ears ten years before it was due to, new forms everywhere that somehow made ‘Bizarro’ sound a little monochromatic.
There was a point after that they transmogrified, no longer the band you found in the kitchen sink at parties, only a few inches closer to rock stars than they were back in Stallone’s, or the Poly, or The Astoria, but different nonetheless. By this time, that early audience had moved on to dressing down; sun hats, baggy jeans, Ibiza on holiday instead of Filey, acid instead of Rennie.
Those songs though, they remain forever, proof that the more things change, the more life’s a bitch and then you have to go and get a job and a mortgage. Just like one of them though we’d moved on without bitterness, now holding hands with our new friend. Maybe we did look daft as we went Freaky Dancin’, but we certainly had our dream.
‘Tommy’ ,‘George Best’ and ‘Bizarro’, along with ‘Seamonsters’ (1991), ‘The Hit Parade’ (1992), ‘Watusi’ (1994), ‘Mini’ (1995) and ‘Saturnalia’ (1996), were all re-released last month, each receiving the deluxe treatment boasting 3CD and DVD packages including the original album, previously unavailable audio, promo videos, TV footage, original artwork, high quality new packaging, new sleevenotes, ephemera from David Gedge’s extensive collection and new interviews.
Because as we all know, you should always keep in touch with your friends.
