"Suddenly It's Tuesday" - Part 14 (The Top Ten)

 

Well, here we are at the finishing line: 91 days, 15 posts, approximately 24,000 words and 13 hours and 16 minutes of glorious music later...

I know that most will be keen to get straight to the final order, so I'll keep the acknowledgements to the end.

Here are the final playlists:

Wedding Present Spotify Top 100

Complete TWP YouTube Playlist (in reverse order)

10 Interstate 5

(Single, 2004)

I didn't include 'On Ramp' (track 1 on the UK version of Take Fountain) as a separate song on this list because [a] it's two minutes of ambient noise and can't really be ranked alongside 'proper' songs and [b] for me, it deserves to be included as part of the full 'Interstate 5' experience (the link to the whole thing is here).

Although Interstate 5 itself (a 1400 mile highway that runs from the Canadian border to Mexico) makes no more than a cursory appearance in the lyric, it's an appropriate title: the song has an epic, expansive quality that suggests hitting the highway, putting your foot down and escaping the mundanities of everyday life. There's little to choose between the single and LP versions: the former opens with an abrasive, insistent single chord that feels like the song is revving up, uncoiling; the latter, following 'On Ramp's chilling ambience, has a dark, ominous tone. In both cases, they unfurl into a snaking, malevolent groove that grips you and simply doesn't let go.

The lyric is a neat role-reversal from your traditional seduction song: it's 'her' that's just after casual sex; 'he' is reduced to withering barbs - 'will you even recognize my face this time next year?' There's an almost embarrassing pathos to 'I thought just boys were meant to behave in this way?'

Musically, it's a powerhouse; taut, and full of barely-restrained energy. Kari Paavola excels, driving the song with muscular flamboyance, especially during the 'there was one particular glance' passage. The double snare hit and guitar onslaught that follows 'I guess I’ve not succeeded' is another gut-wrenching moment. The song concludes with a two minute coda that throws in a twangy Western soundtrack, sweeping strings and Mariachi horns. It works: a different kind of epic, one that gives you a bit of a breather after the intensity of the previous few minutes.

The promo video (below) is, to my mind, one of TWP's best. Although clearly low budget, it has a bleak desperation about it that really suits the song.

9 Dalliance

(Single, 1991)

I mentioned in part 11 (in the entry on 'Gone') that TWP's partnership with Steve Albini led to a shift in the band's sound: less fizzing jangle; more gritty distortion. The tone of the lyrics also changed. Whether the fact that David turned 30 between the release of Bizarro and George Best had anything to do with it is just idle speculation on my part, but there was certainly a change in focus from youthful romance (see 'Bewitched' below) to more mature relationships. This darker, more adult inflection was immediately apparent in the Seamonsters' lead single and opening track.

Inspired by publisher Sarah Johnson's account of her affair with Leo Cooper, husband of writer Jilly Cooper, 'Dalliance' finds Gedge as vulnerable, shattered and embittered as he has ever sounded. The song opens with an understated yet menacing rumble; the drums shuffle tentatively; there's a ghostly arpeggio. There's a sense of barely restrained anger at the injustice - the other man has taken her back, despite the lies - and the callousness ('you don't care'). The anger is turned inwards too: frustrated at the fact that he still wants her after all she's done, the narrator can't even find the words ('I'm so...) As I've mentioned in previous posts, David has a real knack for a simple turn of phrase that captures a distinct image or emotion. Here, he evokes the frustration and impermanence of the doomed, clandestine relationship with the line 'throwing presents straight away / because you could never take them home'.

It could be argued that 'Dalliance' follows a predictable path, from quiet to louder to very loud. But that doesn't matter, not when the escalating tension is so deftly handled. The scratchy, insistent guitar introduced in the second verse drives the song towards its inevitable eruption, and when it arrives, it's perfect - a headstrong rush of incendiary noise and emotion.

We're not done though. The explosive moment is followed by a 16-bar barrage of noise and then a final verse, a passage that, live, tends to lead to utter mayhem down at the front of the audience. But just when you think the band are at full throttle, they step it up yet another gear for the final, frantic chorus, Gedge battling successfully (just) to be heard above the glorious cacophony.

8 Bewitched

(Bizarro, 1989)

Despite 'Kennedy's dip into slightly more abstract territory, Bizarro generally stuck with the same vignettes of romantic regret, frustration and loss that populated George Best. Despite the fact that Gedge was in his late 20s when these two albums were released, there's something very teenage about many of these stories. This is by no means a criticism. These lyrics weren't immature or childish; what they did - often incredibly vividly - was to capture that period of time bookended by holding-hands-in-the-park crushes and moving in together / 'where is this relationship going?' uncertainties. 

This era of sixth-form couples, house parties and first relationships to have anniversaries measured in years rather than weeks is where we find the protagonist of 'Bewitched'. Over a churning, circular riff punctuated by bursts of stomping distortion, he is the personification of clumsy timidity, never finding the courage or the opportunity to express his feelings ('why do my steps get this small when I reach your front door?') The sweet charm of Doris Day's vocal (taken from 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered') hovering in the background seems only to mock his romantic yearning. Gedge again demonstrates his ability to paint heartbreak and rejection in only a few words ('I wait outside for you to come back out / and your light goes out') and signs off with one his most memorable lines: 'there’s a thousand things I wished I’d said and done / but the moment’s gone'.

The instrumental second half of the song sees the stomping riff swirl away in ever-decreasing circles, echoing young love's fading hopes. The moments leading to the crashing dénouement, as the music fades into almost nothing are - especially live - one of those hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck moments. I saw TWP play this at Huddersfield Poly in January 1990. As the band gradually slowed and quieted the riff, everything else seemed to fade with it. The brutalist concrete architecture, the outrageously overpriced cans of Red Stripe, the six inches of snow outside and the thought of a perilous car journey home - all of these mundane things dissipated, and just for a few seconds nothing on earth mattered except the wait for that thunderous chord . And when it came, I swear I had to take a step backwards from the sheer force of it.

The LP version exits in a haze of feedback and a contrastingly melodic farewell from Miss Day. The version below, recorded in Leeds four months after my Huddersfield experience (and taken from the ✶Punk video) captures it in all its live glory.

7 Blonde

(Seamonsters, 1991)

The first recorded appearance of 'Blonde' came courtesy of TWP's eighth Peel session, recorded in October 1990. Whilst the crunching chorus and wah-wah infused closing cacophony were already in place, the intro was rather different from the LP version. The early incarnation opens with an understated shuffle from Simon Smith and jangling chords that seem more Bizarro than Seamonsters, although the new, harder edge was embraced in the choruses and finale.

Come the album, Simon Smith in particular had transformed the intro, deploying a brutal, muscular beat that combines and contrasts beautifully with the delicate, hesitant guitar arpeggio. The song deals with rejection ('you won’t be getting in touch - oh, do you ever?'), and although it's one of Gedge's more opaque and minimal lyrics, it contains both the witheringly snide ('oh, you’re clever') and the achingly forlorn ('I’m just some name in your book / that’s why you gave up writing weeks ago'). Yet again, David gains the maximum emotional effect from the few words, especially in the  desperate closing howl of 'that's all you took me for'.

The Peel take is a fine one, but the LP version wins out due to its atmospheric, bleak intro. In addition, the slow fade-out, combined with the equally gradual fade-in, gives the song a circular quality, emphasising the endless cycle of rejection and heartbreak. (For contrast, here's an exquisitely tender acoustic version from Locked Down & Stripped Back, featuring Melanie Howard and Terry de Castro on guitar.)

6 Suck

(Seamonsters, 1991)

Given the name of the blog, I imagine that nobody will be surprised by the appearance of 'Suck' in the final ten. As I explained in the introduction, I chose the title because it's a phrase that is one of the best examples of something David frequently does incredibly well: capturing the startling thrill of a connection with someone new; something electric, dangerous, undefinable; the all-consuming obliviousness to the passage of time where there's nothing in the world but the two of you. 

The intensity of the music - the taut, clattering drum fills, the headily melodic bass line, the grainy drone of the guitar - is matched perfectly to the theme. The rest of the lyric is an edgy mix of romance ('I can’t fall asleep / even in my own bed / until you’re near'), sexuality ('feel your body sliding all around me') and darkness ('you thrill me with your screaming') that culminates in a series of impassioned, sustained notes and David's final guttural 'suck it all'. 'Suck' is an intoxicating blend of precision and power; and of love, darkness and obsession. 

5 Flying Saucer

(Single, 1992)

After five tracks' worth of brooding intensity, July's Hit Parade offering brings a bit of light relief (not least because you can watch TWP's bizarrely entertaining TOTP performance of the song). No dark obsessional angst here; instead David indulges his love of all things comic-book and sci-fi in concocting a gleefully cartoonish lyric - 'my fireball / is going to call'; 'oh I want her / she kind of launched a / flying saucer right inside my head'.

It's a perfect combination: a cracking, hooky pop song with a heads-down three-chord thrash finale. If 'Flying Saucer' doesn't put a smile on your face and elicit at the very least some appreciative head-nodding, then there's no hope for you. The only thing wrong with it is that the closing passage always feels at least a couple, perhaps even five minutes too short.

Nothing wrong at all with the original single, but even that is eclipsed by this blistering version from Paris, 2006:

4 Anyone Can Make A Mistake

(George Best, 1987)

Judging by the advance comments from those readers who took the time to work out which songs were in the final ten, this might be the final week's most controversial choice...

It was the slashing, fuzzed-up guitar-only outros that first hooked me on George Best, but this is the song that has stayed closest to my heart over the last thirty-odd years. The first verse is full of those kitchen-sink drama rhyming couplets that define the era, such as 'do you have to ring her up so soon? / that’s rubbing salt into these wounds'; and was there ever a more Gedge-ish opening line than 'when I set foot upon the bus / you laughed and said "that’s the end for us!"'?

Like 'Keep in Touch', 'Anyone' manages to be simultaneously joyful and melancholy, the exuberantly skittering guitar framing a disconsolate separation story ('what can I say to change you mind? There’ll never be another time'). Gedge's muttered asides at the end of each chorus - 'oh I know that now' and 'it’s so clear to me now' - have a weary poignancy, but the latter is followed by an uplifting, frentic finale. Objectively, it's no more than breakneck sprint through a standard four-chord progression, but the energy and passion the band inject into it still takes my breath away three decades later. 

Like 'Flying Saucer', the coda could go on forever for me, as it transports me back to lying on the narrow, uncomfortable bed in my first year student room, smoking a cigarette, daydreaming about what it would be like to thrash a guitar on stage and wondering vaguely about the future might have in store. And sometimes that's all you want from a song.

3 Take Me!

You might think that the early singles and the George Best songs might have exhausted Gedge's capacity to find different ways of expressing the rush of young love and the frustrations of miscommunication, but Bizarro's penultimate track finds him still going strong. 'The things that you said last night', he ponders, 'did they mean nothing or were they filled with hidden clues?' before uttering one of his most iconic lines: 'can you really have stayed till three? / orange slices and that Fall LP'. (Orange Slices was, of course, a long-running fanzine, although orangeslices.org.uk is now sadly defunct.) The mere mention of 'her' name is like 'a panic and a rushing sound in my head... a huge weight pressing on my chest', but life is never easy for a young lover: 'I spend hours trying to look my best / but I still meet you the day before I wash my hair'.

Two high-octane spins round verse-chorus plus a charming little middle eight ('warm hands and the things you say...') and you have a perfectly formed if rather breathless pop song. Of course it doesn't end there; what elevates 'Take Me!' to the heady heights of number three is its extravagantly lengthy end section. It's a thrilling ride, an exhausting exploration of the possibilities of thrashing the living daylights out of a simple D-A-G progression and seeing where it takes you. I've mentioned previously the clear influence of the Velvet Underground songs like 'What Goes On' on TWP of this period (Gedge himself has alluded to it) and it's at its most noticeable here. 'X sounds like Y on acid' used to be a lazy music journo cliché, but it's hard to resist the temptation of describing 'Take Me!' as the 1969 'What Goes On' on speed.

Watching it being performed live, it's almost impossible not to feel exhausted on the musicians' behalf, even if they do have the 'Status Quo' section around the five-minute mark to give them a little bit of a breather. I'm sure I can't be the only amateur guitarist to have tried (and failed) to play along with it in its entirety. 

At the time, the song suggested some sort of logical conclusion to the Wedding Present sound; you wondered where on earth they could go next. Perhaps this was what the NME meant in their Bizarro review when they said that TWP were 'treading water rather than walking on it'. Of course, we didn't yet know about Mr Albini and Seamonsters. But before that paradigm shift, you could simply revel in nine minutes of truly glorious noise. Or, as one commenter on the video below puts it, 'Two minutes in "yeah this is pretty cool." Four minutes in "it's the same tune but I'm still strangely transfixed." Six minutes in "this is my life now, nothing else matters, please never let this end."'

2 Perfect Blue

(Take Fountain, 2005)

The final Cinerama album, Torino, has often been described as a Wedding Present album in all but name, but it's probably fairer to say that it saw a new sound emerge - one that saw Gedge start to wed successfully the lighter sound of Cinerama with a more traditional TWP approach. The first signs of this hybridization came with the 2000 single 'Wow', which - although it still included such distinctly Cinerama elements as flute and bongos - concluded with a four-minute guitar-heavy workout that harked back, albeit tentatively, to the 'Take Me!' days. 

Torino took this process a step further. Although songs like 'And When She Was Bad' and 'Health And Efficiency' were awash with strings, they also contained crunching guitar passages that were a long way from anything ('Wow' excepted) that we'd heard on Va Va Voom (1998) or Disco Volante (2000). Changes were also afoot live. In the summer of 2002, just two days after Torino's release, my good friend Gricey and I went to see Cinerama play at a small pub in NE Leeds called the New Roscoe. In the first few years of Cinerama, David had refused to play any TWP songs (requests would be met with the response 'you've got the wrong band') but we had heard vague rumours that a few might be about to appear in the set. Positioning our selves down at the front of the tiny stage, we couldn't help put take a peek at the setlist, and were delighted to see that 'Bewitched' was the opener (they played 'Octopussy' too).

The Wedding Present finally re-emerged officially at the end of 2004, and released Take Fountain in February 2005. You might have expected them to treat Cinerama as something David had got out of his system and make some sort of effort to turn the clock back to the TWP glory days. The fact this didn't happen is because they didn't even decide it was going to be a TWP album until they were mixing it. As David explained, 'when we started Take Fountain we all thought we were making the fourth Cinerama album and so that’s how it was recorded'. And so the transformation was an evolution rather than any sort of nostalgic u-turn, resulting in a beautiful balanced marriage of the two approaches. 'Perfect Blue' (first played live as a Cinerama song in 2003) is the pinnacle of how successful that was.

It's unashamedly sentimental. David's 'I can't believe I deserve a woman as wonderful as you' schtick is well-worn by now, but there's a heartfelt sincerity about it that stops it from becoming at all, as David puts it, 'drippy'. Instead, lines like 'it wasn’t rehearsed, there really was no warning / now you’re the first thing in my head each morning' - crooned over a bed of tender guitar, swooning strings and Terry's dreamy backing vocals - feel like being bathed in warm sunshine.

The extended coda builds slowly and subtly, and for much of it it's the strings rather than the guitar that construct the emotional heft, a swelling tide of anticipation. When the guitar finally enters (4:28) the whole thing is so impossibly stirring that you think that must be the peak, but then the French horn adds a final flourish that is just utterly transporting. During their extensive tour to promote Take Fountain, 'Perfect Blue' was regularly deployed as the set closer. If, like me, you were fortunate enough to attend any of those gigs, you'll know that the song was often extended to eight or nine minutes in length, the final section a deliriously exciting swirl of epic guitar.

I know that Scopitones stalwart and veteran of (literally) hundreds of TWP gigs Peter Mark Craig will be bitterly disappointed that his favourite song has fallen just short of the number one spot. So I shall dedicate this review of it to him.

1 Crawl

(3 Songs EP, 1990)

Of course, whatever I put here will cause rabid disagreement from all quarters... But - given TWP's history of always doing things on their own terms and rarely taking a predictable path - I think there's something rather fitting about the number one being neither an album track or an A-side. In fact, to all intents and purposes, 'Crawl' is a B-side: when 3 Songs was released, most fans saw 'Corduroy' as the 'lead' track and it was 'Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)' that got most of the mainstream attention.

It opens with an unassuming, almost shy acoustic strum (I don't know the name of the chord, but its a C slid up two frets should you be interested) before a deep, coiling bass line and taut, understated drums emerge. Gedge's voice is deep and steady, almost tender but also strangely dispassionate, which stands in intriguing contrast to the optimistic tone of the opening words: 'everyone here can be a millionaire / just take these wings and fly up into the air'. As a jangling arpeggio emerges, Gedge seems to turn to the familiar subject of the 'other man' ('it’s time for him to crawl back under his stone') although there's nothing that follows that really puts this into context. In fact, the lyric remains stubbornly enigmatic throughout; although there are lines that feel like they might be pieces of a familiar story ('you stopped me once and you could do it again'; 'you’re right, I haven’t changed from before') there's no obvious thread that runs through it. This absorbingly cryptic ambiguity is emphasised by the repeated hook line, the unexplained 'it wasn't really like that...'

I've said repeatedly in these posts that TWP are often at their most effective when they just do simple things exceptionally well. In addition, their best work is frequently characterised by their ability to build suspense and tension before releasing it in a emotionally stirring fashion, whether it be through sudden eruptions - 'Bewitched', 'Don't Touch That Dial' - or gradual building and layering - 'Perfect Blue', 'What Have I Said Now?' (or in the case of 'Dalliance', both). 'Crawl' certainly ticks the first box. It contains moments of exquisite simplicity: the chord change at 1:56 is nothing more than an obvious shift from G-A, but here's something unfathomably gorgeous about its timing that it melts my heart; Gedge's 'ah!' at 2:06 is one in a long line of exclamations that transmit a wealth of feeling in a single syllable and tee up the finale perfectly. What's really impressive about 'Crawl', however, is the way that it meets that second criteria - not in the usual five or six minutes, but in a compact 2:44. The fact it takes you on such a thrilling, mysterious journey and rouses your soul to such great heights in under three minutes is a mark of genius.

If you'll forgive me a second nostalgic trip to my student days, I bought 3 Songs in September 1990, three years after I first heard 'Anyone Can Make A Mistake'. I had graduated only a couple of months earlier, and was poised at the beginning of what was to be a rather aimless and wasted year. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and whilst I'm not going to pretend that 'Crawl' provided me with any answers, it provided great comfort to me at the time, because it suggested that there was magic out there to be tapped into somehow. I don't really believe in magic of course - not in the supernatural sense, anyway - but back then, 'Crawl' was my magic. And it always will be.

So that's it. I'd like to thank all of the good folk at Scopitones and on the 'Barmy Army' Facebook group for their support, enthusiasm and constructive comments. I'd also like to thank some of the TWP fans on Twitter who have recently welcomed me so warmly and offered me their support also. Thanks to David and Melanie for having me on their recent quiz night and also to Leigh for his invaluable gedgesongs site and his personal support.

I will get to Cinerama at some point, but I might need a couple of weeks off first!

Thanks for reading,

Steve

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