Review – The Wedding Present, 25th November 2007, The Point, Cardiff
For many people in 1987, the break up of the Smiths was made that little bit less traumatic by the release of The Wedding Present’s debut, George Best. It was a comfortable fill, if not a square peg sliding into a square hole. Gedge is certainly no Morrissey. He is the Osborne, the Sillitoe, that Morrissey could have been if he hadn’t drowned in Wildean playfulness. Morrissey will mock you and make you feel small, Gedge just wants to kick your fucking head in. It was an honourable crows nest view of the nineties to come, the swagger of the better bands the decade would introduce to us, and feyness was vigorously disallowed. But it was also a sleeves-rolled up product of the grey eighties, as if Springsteen was from Macclesfield. To Gedge Thatcher was a bitch in-law whose bitch daughter had shagged his bitch of a mate. If you wanted to know about Britain in 1987 you looked toward the Weddos, for here was a just-about-pretty girl in a bedsit with bad hair, no hanging around cemetery gates or musing about the Sandinistas. It was political in as much as every character was a product of Thatcher’s callous regime, people betraying people, trampling on ideals and dreams, kicking each other when down. It was the most politically astute music of the decade, because it gloriously attacks no one, just shows them all in the circumstances of the staid, emaciated working class catafalque that was Thatcher’s Britain.
And it was twenty years ago. George Best is not my favourite moment of the Weddos brilliant catalogue, and I would place it lower than most of Cinerama’s offerings too, but that is my preference, many would disagree, and they are probably right. But this an historic tour, it is important, significant, reflective of the social blah blah blah… they open with Dalliance from Seamonsters and I am sold, Gedge can do no wrong from here on in. As far as the Wedding Present go; Gedge is the only original member on stage and it only seems to matter at first. Although we all have a loyalty to nostalgia, Gedge is the Weddos and they sound like them because the sound is wonderfully basic, the songs beautifully simple and the ethos heartfelt and real. The playing of George Best in its entirety displays the raw brilliance of the album, a work that has not blunted at all in the twenty years since it rough-edged its way into the ether. Nobody writes like Gedge, you begin to fear, because no one has the balls to display themselves and every act of their human life with such a post mortem exactitude. It is moving, scary, and profoundly sincere. It is raw and grating, you are with him but are glad you get to go home, glad you can experience this without being able to write the same way. This gig is the closest I have come to psychotic tears of traumatic joy since my last breakdown and I would happily go through it all again. News of a new album just over the corrugated rooftops brings an excitement that is both intellectual and childlike, like getting a Quentin Blake illustrated copy of Proust as a birthday present – but hopefully not a wedding present, not if this is how men and women treat each other.