The Wedding Present's David Gedge Chats With Pelican's Trevor De Brauw

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 20, 2017 8:40PM

David Gedge, photo courtesy The Wedding Present

By Trevor Shelley de Brauw

Longtime fans of The Wedding Present—stalwarts of the ‘80s UK indie scene and perennial favorites of departed BBC tastemaker John Peel—are no strangers to frontman David Gedge’s constant embrace of ambitious musical projects. His singular vision was never more clear than in 1989 when the band, risking calls of “sell-out” from their peers, signed to RCA Records only to make their major-label debut release an obtuse collection of Ukrainian folk songs (they’d later cap their tenure at RCA with a monthly run of twelve 7” singles across 1992 that equaled Elvis Presley’s record for the most top 30 UK singles in the span of a year). Never ready to temper their ambitions, late last year the band broke a four-year recording hiatus with Going, Going... , a sprawling, 20-song multimedia album envisioned as a cross-country U.S. travelogue.

But by far the biggest leap in Gedge’s career came when he put Wedding Present on hold in 1998 and started Cinerama with then-girlfriend Sally Murrell. The project re-contextualized him as a sentimental orchestral pop singer, abandoning distortion-laden guitar rock in favor of a crystal-clear production style that nodded toward '60s pop while draping every sonic inch with string arrangements pulled from the Morricone playbook.

With Wedding Present in dormancy, Cinerama evolved over the course of a three-album run to gradually resemble its guitar-driven predecessor, finally hitting a wall in 2004, when Gedge split from Murrell and re-christened the band as The Wedding Present. Though the Cinerama moniker was invoked for a smattering of live shows and one-off singles over the years, the group mostly disappeared until 2015 when Gedge’s label Scopitones announced that a new Cinerama album, Valentina, was in the works. Most peculiar about this announcement was the fact that this was not, in fact, an album of new material, but a song-by-song re-work of the Wedding Present album, Valentina, which had surfaced three years prior.

I spoke to Gedge a couple of weeks before the release of the Cinerama version of Valentina, in 2015. Below is an excerpt from our talks in honor of The Wedding Present’s show at Lincoln Hall on Friday night.

Trevor de Brauw: You reissued the Cinerama album Torino on vinyl for Record Store Day. Do you think you’re going to revisit any other of your releases for vinyl now that there’s a building market?

David Gedge: I think part of the idea there was that Take Fountain and Torino never came out on vinyl, but I think all the other main studio albums came out on vinyl. So it means if you want a complete set on vinyl it’s there. Actually, Edsel Records when they released these extended editions, they did re-release some of the other albums on vinyl as well. They did George Best and Tommy and Saturnalia and Mini vinyl as well, and Bizarro and Seamonsters are already out on vinyl by another label so they’re all kind of there, really.

Trevor de Brauw: I’ve been looking for Seamonsters for 20 years.

David Gedge: On vinyl?

Trevor de Brauw: Yeah. Has it really been re-pressed and I missed it?

David Gedge: There’s a record label over here called Vinyl 180 who released it. It actually came out in two forms. There was an LP and then there was a three 10-inch box set, which was great, actually. I’m looking at it now in my office. But it was very limited edition. They were talking about doing some more of those, but they haven't. I don’t know if you know, but there’s been a greatly increased interest in vinyl over the last few years, and it’s a weird thing because obviously, all the pressing plants had closed down when it was dying.

Trevor de Brauw: Yeah, in fact, it’s a point of contention noew because the turnaround time for vinyl is now something like four to six months, and it’s starting to screw over all the independent labels because they can’t get records out.

David Gedge: That’s the problem Vinyl 180 had gotten. Because they were talking about doing Hit Parade on vinyl for Record Store Day as well this year but it just never got there. I think it’s in manufacture now, but it just took so long that they kinda missed Record Store Day by months. It’s a strange situation and I kinda wonder whether it’s a passing fad again, vinyl, or is it here to stay again and are people going to want it going forward? Are those pressing plants going to reopen? It’s a funny situation.

Trevor de Brauw: There’s new pressing plants that are opening in the States. But it’s a huge gamble doing something like that because we don’t know whether this is a bubble that is going to pop or what’s going to happen.

Trevor de Brauw: Getting back to the archival release question, does revisiting older albums give you the ideas about different directions the material could have taken?

David Gedge: Not really, to be honest. I think the only thing it does is, it kind of informs the current version of Wedding Present, really. I wanted to just focus on The Wedding Present as a linear thing. We were moving forward and there’s no reason to revisit the past. But when we started playing the old albums live I quite enjoyed it and I think it did inform some of the way The Wedding Present worked. But I think Cinerama has always been from a different area in my mind. It’s a different kind of music and it’s a different set of influences and it was always meant to be different.

Trevor de Brauw: You reworked the Wedding Present album Valentina into a new release of the same name by Cinerama. How long have you had this vision of doing two versions of the same album by the two different bands?

David Gedge: Ever since Cinerama started, really. I started working on the project in 1998, and by about 2000, I was thinking it would be great to do one time, a collection of songs as both groups, just radically reworked. But it’s always been on the back burner, in a way. Obviously, as you know, it’s such a huge project to actually make one album by one band. My original idea, I suppose, until I did this, was to do them at the same time. So to write the songs, then arrange them as the Wedding Present; then simultaneously arrange them with Cinerama and go in the studio with presumably the same bunch of people, and a few extra musicians, and record them all together and release them at the same time.

And I think that was too ambitious, really, because every time we got into the frame of mind of doing one album, either as Cinerama or as Wedding Present, I think, ‘well, all of my efforts are going into this project so I don’t want to water it down by trying to do the sister project at the same time.’ And also, I was always worried that one version would inform the other. So I’m kind of arranging one set of songs as one bunch, if it’s the same people arranging the other set of songs there are probably gonna be too many links between the two.

So it was always kind of shelved, shelved, shelved—until this album, where two things happened: Firstly, I kind of aborted the idea of doing them simultaneously. And secondly, I bumped into this person Pedro Vigil from Spain, who I convinced to help me do it. So it wasn’t quite me arranging both sets of my songs, if you like. I wouldn’t say it made it easier, but it made the two projects stand alone as being separate and not as connected as they might have been.

Trevor de Brauw: Do you think Cinerama is going to continue to be an active group? Do you think you’re going to write more music in this vein?

David Gedge: I’d really love to, but I’ve got The Wedding Present to do as well. One just detracts from the other, really, so it is quite hard to get into both at the same time. I think the problem is economics, really. The Wedding Present are a more successful band than Cinerama, so the income from Cinerama record sales and concerts is always a lot lower than The Wedding Present’s, but at the same time it’s more expensive to do because there’s a lot more people, there’s more rehearsals, there’s more instruments, there’s more hotel rooms. Everything escalates. So it doesn’t really make any financial sense. We couldn’t do a Cinerama tour of Britain with a 13-piece ensemble because it would lose a ton of money, whereas The Wedding Present could do it all the time. If I’m honest, unfortunately it’s going to be as it’s always been, really, which is a secondary project that I do as a little hobby.

Trevor de Brauw: A passion project.

David Gedge: I think so, yeah.

Trevor Shelley de Brauw is a musician who operates in multiple genres. He's known for his work in Pelican, Chord, Tusk, Teith, Bee Control, Let's Pet, and Bionic Rat, amongst others. His most recent solo release is Uptown.