David Gedge: 'I thought I’d write a bit on my own for a change'

Rarely one to let a significant musical milestone pass without celebrating it, David Gedge has spent this year marking the 30th anniversary of The Wedding Present’s album Watusi and 35 years since the release of their major label debut, Bizarro.
David Gedge of The Wedding Present and Cinerama. Picture: Jessica McMillanDavid Gedge of The Wedding Present and Cinerama. Picture: Jessica McMillan
David Gedge of The Wedding Present and Cinerama. Picture: Jessica McMillan

This month the Leeds-born singer, guitarist and songwriter is toasting another landmark with a ‘reimagining’ of his ‘other band’ Cinerama’s first LP, Va Va Voom, to coincide with its 25th anniversary.

“It never ends, really, does it?” says a smiling Gedge, now aged 64 and snow-white of hair, via video from his home in Brighton. “I always think next year will be a bit quieter and then in the end it’s not.”

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By his own confession, he is “a glutton for punishment” when it comes to projects suggested by others. “People say ‘why don’t you do this, why don’t you do that?’ and I’ll say, yeah, that sounds quite a good idea and it ends up me doing all the work,” he says.

“I remember we did extended editions of (The Wedding Present’s) albums and we had this meeting with the record label, Edsel, and they said, ‘It’s a brilliant concept, these albums in multiple discs and sleevenotes and all the rest of it and it’ll be great – yeah, do it’, and then who’s checking the artwork, who’s finding all the tracks, who’s listening to test pressings, who’s doing the interviews to promote it? Oh me, then.

“I can’t complain, really,” he chuckles.

To commemorate Va Va Voom’s silver anniversary, Gedge decided to re-record the entire album with new arrangements for strings. It’s now presented alongside a live recording which he made last year at his annual At The Edge of The Sea festival in Brighton.

Looking back on his decision to pause indie guitar band The Wedding Present’s activities in 1997, he explains that he had “always had an interest in other kinds of music” and felt that was an apt moment to explore some of them. “I’d always had an interest in film soundtracks, especially John Barry and Ennio Morricone, then also general pop music of the Sixties and Seventies, and so I felt like I wanted to do something along those lines but I didn’t feel like The Wedding Present was the appropriate place for it and I didn’t want to have to persuade everybody that hey, I know you’re an indie rock band but this is what I want to do next.

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“We’d had a really busy time, we’d done three American tours that year, so we were planning to have a little break anyway and I just thought well, I’ll do this, and it coincided with a period in the Nineties where writing stuff at home on the computer became a lot more affordable and easy for someone like me who’s not an expert in either music theory or IT. There were samplers and sequencers and digital recording equipment and it all became within my budget for a side project, so I thought I’d write a bit on my own for a change and look at trying to arrange orchestration and things like that, which was all new to me.”

Orchestrating was, he says, “a learning curve and it took me a long time to master it”, recalling how he wrote a for two oboes using a sampler only for a studio session musician to tell him that it wouldn’t work. “I said, what do you mean, I can hear it on the demo, and he said, ‘No, the oboe is like a bagpipe in a way, it’s got a lot of overtones in it, so it’s a solo instrument’. Obviously he tried it and it sounded terrible.”

He adds: “I still don’t know that much about music theory, it’s unintelligible, it’s written in a really archaic way, but in terms of writing tunes and harmonies, (Cinerama) was a good little side project.”

Indeed, what he intended to be a six-month hobby with his then-girlfriend Sally Murrell turned into a full-blown band that lasted eight years, and it only stopped in 2005 when Gedge realised the songs that he was writing for what would have been Cinerama’s fourth album were better suited to his old outfit The Wedding Present.

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“I remember we did a session for John Peel of songs that were going to be on (Take Fountain) and it had already gone a little bit more guitar-y, and when we’d done sessions for Peel before we had string players and trumpet and flute but this time we didn’t,” he recalls. “I can’t remember why exactly, maybe it didn’t need any orchestration, and the producers at Maida Vale had done so many of our sessions over the years and the producer Miti Adhikari said, ‘It’s just a four-piece, it’s just guitar, bass and drums, it’s The Wedding Present – who are you trying to kid?’

“I was adamant it was Cinerama but then we started recording the album when I was living in Seattle for a year and Simon (Cleave), the guitarist, came over to record with me and we were just outside the studio and we were thinking ‘maybe it is The Wedding Present record’. We didn’t want people to be disappointed thinking it was going to be like Va Va Voom.

“Also, Cinerama was never quite as successful as The Wedding Present and I wanted Wedding Present fans to hear this record. Most people I asked said it sounds like The Wedding Present influenced by Cinerama. That effectively ended Cinerama; the musicians in Cinerama then became The Wedding Present. I still do Cinerama occasionally, but not as often.”

Gedge’s early exploits in The Wedding Present have been chronicled in graphic novel form in two memoirs co-written with ex-Wedding Present bassist Terry de Castro and illustrated by Lee Thacker. He says there is definitely more to come. “We were supposed to be doing it this year because there were two years between the previous ones and I was thinking 2024 would be good for volume three,” he says. “We have started working on volume three but I just haven’t had the time, really, because it’s been a busy year. We did Watusi (reissue), we did the Bizarro tour, we’ve done Va Va Voom 25, my own festival and we’ve been writing songs.”

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The six new songs will feature in a mini album, to be released next year – 30 years on from a similar extended play disc that they brought out on Cooking Vinyl. Gedge suggests the new tracks – a couple of which were aired on the recent Bizarro 35th anniversary tour – mark a new era for The Wedding Present following the departure of guitarist Jon Stewart who co-wrote material for band’s 24 Songs project in 2022. “He’s been really busy with Sleeper since then and he suggested this person, Rachael Wood, to be his stand-in and she’s kind of been the stand-in permanently ever since and I started writing with her,” Gedge says.

“I think Jon was from more of a Britpop background, Rachael’s from more of an indie rock background, so the new songs do sound a bit rockier and harder. I think The Wedding Present have always had that. We’ve always straddled this divide between jangly indie pop and the Seamonsters era which was quite intense and rocky. I feel like we’ve got back to that side again, for bad or good.”

Also next year is the 40th anniversary of The Wedding Present’s formation from the ashes of Gedge’s Leeds band The Lost Pandas. “To me, it’s like Status Quo,” Gedge quips. To mark it, the group will play at the University of Leeds, where Gedge was once a student. “It was just a quirky idea,” he says. “We’re playing at Peter Hook’s festival in Scarborough on the Saturday and we just thought since we’re up there and it’s May – by coincidence May was when the first single, Go Out and Get ’Em, Boy!, came out – and I thought let’s go back to where it all started. We were all students or ex-students at Leeds University.”

Five years after it was first mooted, a musical based on the songs of The Wedding Present is finally due to be staged in Leeds in 2025. Reception is the brainchild of Yorkshire-based theatre director Matt Aston. “He approached me years ago,” Gedge says. “I know nothing about musicals but it sounded like an interesting proposition. The way he sold it me was my lyrics are little stories and he felt they would really work in that kind of format, a bit like Mamma Mia!, I suppose, so I said yes. I’ve not really had any involvement with it, he had a Kickstarter to launch it but then it was hit by the pandemic and he got busy with other things, but now he’s returned. I think it works quite well because it’s the 40th year of The Wedding Present, so in a way it would’ve been a better time to aim to release it now anyway.”

Va Va Voom 25 is out now. The Wedding Present play at Leeds University Union on May 9. https://www.scopitones.co.uk/

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