The Wedding Present will release them on September 2nd.
The Wedding Present have announced anniversary reissues of their Hit Parade singles compilations on double LP and CD formats.
Starting with Hit Parade 1 in June 1992, the albums brought together a run of a limited edition singles which the band released every month that year, containing an original track on the A side and a cover on the flip side. Volume two followed in January 1993.
“We only thought about doing the Hit Parade in November, 1991,” David Gedge recalls. “When our bass player, Keith, first came up with the idea, we all got so excited about it that none of us wanted to wait fourteen months before starting!”
“So we didn’t really have any kind of strategy in place until after we’d started writing the songs. In hindsight, it probably would’ve been wiser to have them all written and recorded and ready to go, but then that sounds a little bit cynical and calculated. We liked the idea of the spontaneity and we thought the song-writing might evolve over the year, too.”
“The fact that each of them was a hit single was an exciting by-product, but we did have this feeling that we wouldn’t let the project take over what we do…which is write songs and make records. If we’d have felt that we were continuing the project just because we wanted to have hit singles, I’m confident that we would’ve just ended the series.”
“Naturally, we quickly began to anticipate that they might all be hits but, if you listen to some of the later ones, they don’t sound even remotely poppy or commercial. If they hadn’t’ve all been hits it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.”
“By the middle of the year, we were starting to get worried that possibly the music was being overlooked because the series had become so successful. We’d be saying, ‘The project is all very exciting and everything but there are actually some quite good songs in there as well, if you’d care to listen!’”
“We had the agreement between us that if we felt that the music was suffering, we would stop the series there and then because it wasn’t that important to us. But we never reached that point; I’m very proud of all of the releases.”
Meanwhile, another anniversary celebration is starting next month when Seamonsters will be touring around the UK.