THE Wedding Present will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of their ‘Bizarro’ album with a gig at the Academy Green Room on Saturday, May 25.
The Wedding Present have had 18 UK Top 40 hit singles… not bad for a band that has, from its inception, stubbornly refused to play the record industry’s game.
Back in 1985 David Lewis Gedge boarded a National Express coach in London with 500 records packed into a pair of his mother's suitcases. In this fashion, the debut single ‘Go Out and Get 'Em boy!’ was collected from the pressing plant, delivered to the distribution company, and The Wedding Present was born.
That pioneering spirit has been at the core of the band's philosophy ever since. From ‘George Best’, "an unmitigated delight” according to the NME, the first full-length release on their own Reception Records onwards, the band has charted an appealing, if often eccentric, course of its very own.
The British indie rock group was originally formed in 1985 in Leeds, England, from the ashes of the Lost Pandas. The band's music evolved from fast-paced indie rock in the vein of their most obvious influences The Fall, Buzzcocks and Gang of Four to more varied forms.
Throughout their career, they have been led by vocalist and guitarist David Gedge, the band's only constant member.
After years of line-up changes and various record company moves, a new Wedding Present album, Valentina was released in March 2012.
Shortly before its release, guitarist Graeme Ramsay left the band after six years and was replaced by Patrick Alexander (ex-The Young Playthings and The Pipettes).
During 2012, The Wedding Present toured a set which usually featured the whole of ‘Seamonsters’, performed live and in album order. The rest of the set was a mixture of songs from ‘Valentina’ and the back catalogue. In April of that year, The Wedding Present toured Australia for the first time, playing concerts in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne.
On 25 October 2012, the four new songs (‘Journey Into Space’, ‘Pain Perdu’, ‘1000 Fahrenheit’ and ‘ Can You Keep a Secret’) were recorded during the Valentina sessions. They could the be downloaded following the purchase of 'Valentina: The Story of a Wedding Present’, a book documenting the making of the long player itself. Valentina itself was re-released in May 2015 after being re-interpreted and re-recorded by David Gedge's other band Cinerama.
In early 2013 the band started a world tour that included taking in the US, Australia and for the first time New Zealand.
The Wedding Present played 'George Best' and 'The Hit Parade' in their entirety on this tour celebrating the 25th and 21st 'birthday' of these albums respectively.
The band released their ninth album, ‘Going, Going’ on September 2, 2016.
And then, 2017 saw the 30th anniversary of the release of the classic ‘George Best’, an anniversary tour and a feature-length documentary that focused on the record entitled ‘The Wedding Present: Something Left Behind’.
