At a certain point in 1987, virtually every third record John Peel ever played on his nighttime show was by the Wedding Present. The other two records were more than likely by The Smiths or The Fall. Every once in a while he'd throw in a Bhundu Boys song to break things up a bit.
I'm sure it was never actually quite like this, but it certainly felt a bit like it at the time. Peel was known for his eclecticism of course but his shows could tend towards the relentless and grim. This might be why they're remembered, (or misremembered), so fondly by so many all these years later Just like the Eighties in the UK might be falsely encapsulated by a Charles & Diana memorial plate, a VHS video cassette, an episode of Neighbours, a photograph of Maggie and Ronnie getting together at one of their summits. The birthmark on Mikhail Gorbachev's head, which of course always remained the same shape. Even though it seemed to morph, mutate and contort, like oil in water then, like some kind of cosmic barometer of the times.
The Wedding Present were the band from the C-86 movement that actually made it without changing. That strange scene of scruffy and almost willfully inept guitar bands that had their brief moment just after Live Aid and before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I didn't buy their records at the time. I was in love and WP seemed as dour and inappropriate to any form of actual romance as taking your girlfriend for a weekend in a four star hotel in Leeds when she wanted to go to Paris.
They came from Leeds actually. And boy did it sound like it. I had just started university when they emerged and had a couple of important friends from there on the same Literature undergraduate degree course as me. They were different from most of the students on the course. Most of us were from London and The South East and boy could you tell. Set fair for careers in media, journalism, fiction and The BBC. Probably rather full of ourselves.
But Paul and Gavin from Leeds, and Maurice from Sheffield, (the Northerners I remember most strongly from university days) were definitely different. They had the same caustic edge that bands from that part of the world generally did. The Smiths, New Order, The Bunnymen, The Wedding Present. Dave Gedge, lead singer and guiding pilot of The Wedding Present didn't even bother to enunciate properly, you couldn't make out half the words to the songs which were called things like Everyone Thinks He Look Daft and What Did Your Last Servant Die of?
By 1987 Wedding Present were The Smiths you could afford to see, with a set of songs that generally seemed built on the riff of the Velvet Underground's What Goes On sped up to near breaking point and a lyrical narrative that was pretty much a word for word transcription of the story boards and storyline for one of the younger couples in that week's episodes of Coronation Street.
It was a winning formula. I imagine it depends which Wedding Present album coincided with your first year at University or Polytechnic from the late Eighties to the early Nineties in terms of which you consider their best. I have a good friend who's a bit younger than me who swears by Bizarro. But like I said, he's a bit younger than me. George Best will always do the trick for me in terms of taking me back to my university days which were very, very good and then very, very bad in close succession.. I imagine like most people's.
The Wedding Present charted the important dramas of your first important relationships. The highs the lows, the heartaches and betrayals. Curly getting dumped at the end of an episode of Corrie, wearing a dirty pully which was wearing a hole in the elbow that deserved to be ditched just as much as he did. It was brilliantly done and certainly said everything that most singles coming off the Stock, Aitken & Waterhouse hit conveyor belt at the same time, failed to say about either what was important about life or good about music.
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