Congratulate me, I managed to stand up for a whole gig without too much discomfort. Still some discomfort, but nowhere near how bad I felt when I saw Ash back in April. Maybe the chiropractor is having some effect after all! He reckons I have weak knees which might be adding to the pain in my back when I'm standing. So he's got me wearing knee braces when walking, which are definitely helping manage the pain. Why not try them at a gig? Hey... there might be something to this...
Anyway - The Wedding Present in Holmfirth. There's a trend at the moment towards artists with a certain heritage digging into their back catalogues and performing a classic album all the way through, just as it appeared on record - twenty-odd years later. Never one to miss out on a bandwagon (one of his new songs involves a wife cheating on her husband via iPhone), David Gedge is dragging his latest incarnation of The Wedding Present out on the road to re-present 1989's classic Bizarro - and great it sounds too.
I was disappointed to miss out on the support - particularly when I discovered it was Cinerama. That is, the other name for The Wedding Present. Damn them! (My favourite David Gedge memory is still the Cinerama gig I went to where he was running his own T-shirt stand.) Still, whether my back would have stood up to an extra hour's punishment I'm not sure. It was Bizarro I came to see, and Bizarro I got. After an opening set of new songs and a couple of classics, the repeating voice of John Peel filled the Picturedrome, an edited montage of "The Wedding Present / The Wedding Present / The Wedding Present..." before the great man himself introduced the opening track from beyond the grave. (21 years later, David Gedge is a lot more animated than he was in this video.)
Have you ever seen a bunch of late 30-something / early 40-something blokes moshing? It's a sight to lift your heart. And though I couldn't join in myself (that was never really my scene, even as a younger man with a stronger back), I cheered them on through No!, Thanks, What Have I Said Now, Granadaland and the mammoth, showstopping Take Me! I never saw The Wedding Present back in 1989 - hell, I'd barely even heard of them - but I can't imagine them sounding any better than this. Especially on the song below, perhaps their greatest single... fans of My Favourite Dress may disagree, but as Mr. Gedge was happy to point out, "I think you paid to see the wrong album - you should have come when we did George Best."
