SPILL FEATURE: WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT WE ARE – A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID GEDGE OF THE WEDDING PRESENT

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT WE ARE

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID GEDGE OF THE WEDDING PRESENT

David Gedge burst upon the music scene in 1985 with his band The Wedding Present. The Wedding Present released their debut single in 1985, “Go Out and Get ‘Em, Boy!” which was followed by two singles in 1986. In 1987, The Wedding Present released their debut album, George Best, which David Gedge refers to as “a collection of singles,” but to these ears, it was an incredibly fresh and exciting album. Since 1987 The Wedding Present has released nine albums and have just released a new six- track EP, Maxi, a follow up to 1996 Mini. The band is currently touring, performing songs you know and love, new songs from the Maxi EP and their classic album Seamonsters, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary.

I was able to catch up with David Gedge, recently, via Zoom. We had a great deal to talk about, including the first time they played Toronto in 1990. “That was the first ever tour of Canada, I think,” he recalled. We started our conversation talking about Maxi.

“It was just because we…it is all because in 2022 it was the 30th anniversary of the album The Hit Parade from 1992. So, we redid that by releasing 12 singles in a year [in 1992 The Wedding Present released a single a month, with all 12 songs being collected on Hit Parade]. Then I noticed that it was the anniversary of Mini coming up as well, so I figured we could do another EP. I always liked Mini and thought it was underrated. Mainly because it was only an EP. I wanted to signify the anniversary of that, so it gave me a little theme, and I decided to call it Maxi and do another six-track EP. It is a little interim EP really.”

While they are promoting the new EP, the band is also touring to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Seamonsters. The group is also performing two brand new songs that have yet to be recorded.

“We are doing the entire album, which takes up half the set, and the rest of the set is some old songs and new songs. It is an interesting album, because of all the albums we recorded, I think this one, and it sounds a bit pretentious, but it is like one piece of music in 10 chapters. There is a certain kind of mood or feeling to the whole record that unifies it in some way. It is always an interesting one to perform.”

MAXI ALBUM REVIEW

Preparing for the tour provided Gedge with the opportunity to discover aspects of the album that he may have forgotten about over time.  “It still feels very fresh in my mind,” Gedge said. “A lot of the lyrical content is based on my life, so it is kind of like reading an old diary, in that respect. At the same time, this is a different lineup than the lineup that recorded it, apart from me, and so it does not sound exactly the same. But I like that, because it is a reinterpretation of it. I am hearing things all the time, and I think, ‘oh is that on the original record?’ and you go back and hear it and it is actually on there, but I never noticed it before. I don’t go back and play my albums until we have to play it. So, yeah, things come back. But as soon as I am on stage performing it, those 35 years disappear and it is just playing those songs like I did in 1991.”

In Gedge’s mind, it was the first time the band recorded an album as a whole. It was their third, but one can see his point. While still sounding like The Wedding Present, it expanded their sound and recording. “We wanted to do something different. The first album was just a collection of songs we had at the time because we were a new band, and then the second one, Bizarro, we started thinking about it and it was a better version of the first album. And after that we wanted to lean into a different space, and Seamonsters was the result of that. We recorded that outside of Minneapolis, which was the first time we recorded outside of the UK. We used a different engineer, Steve Albini, and just the way we arranged the songs changed quite a lot.”

Seamonsters was a departure for the band, and the beginning of the continuing evolution. Gedge has never been afraid to experiment with sound, format, style, or genre. But the core of their albums is their definitive Wedding Present sound. With Seamonsters, the album has aged remarkably well and is probably more fitting in today’s world than 35 years ago. “I don’t think the first album sounds quite as contemporary as Seamonsters. Strangely, it was not critically that well received when it came out. But now, people look back on it and say it was a classic Wedding Present album. But at the time, people thought it was a bit of a change from Bizzaro, which preceded it. But it did sound like a different group and in some ways. I think in the 40 years I have been doing this, I feel like I have been in six different groups. We changed quite a lot, the lineups changed. And we never wanted to make the same album again and again, so we always tried different ways to achieve different sounds and things.”

After 40 years, Gedge is still going strong and the band continues to produce fantastic music. He did indicate there was no music on the way. Until then, we can enjoy Maxi and perhaps catch them in concert. One final question needs answering. Are they still the least complicated band?

“I think we are. What you see is what we are. There has never been any pretense to The Wedding Present. I think that comes from punk, really. We were all teenagers in the late 1970s, and suddenly there was this revolution, where it seemed like normal people who weren’t classically trained musicians could be in a band, and control their own destiny. Then you have the indie record labels that came after that. It all seemed rather obvious. It is a straightforward way of being in a band. I have tried to make it as less complicated as possible.”

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