The crowd were getting everything they were looking for
Guitar-led rock music has not been the market leader in popular culture like it was 20 years ago. The Wedding Present have been offering their indie rock sound for 40 years now and have seen the tides change. Songwriter and frontman David Gedge has been at it all this time with The Wedding Present, minus a brief 7-year hiatus when the band split. That four decades has brought nine albums and filled countless venues over the years for their fans, and for the London leg of this year’s tour, they played to a packed-out Shepherds Bush Empire, writes Christopher Peacock.
The tour celebrates 35 years since the release of the band’s third album, Seamonsters. Supporting them on this leg of the tour was the London post-punk band Desperate Journalist. Looking at the demographic of those attending to see The Wedding Present, Desperate Journalist undoubtedly provided a youthful injection. Their heavy, driving, four-to-the-floor sound was well received. Their show as a whole was understandably muted, as they are the support act, but this did not affect the crowd’s enjoyment of tunes such as Personality Girlfriend and Fault, which went down well. Ahead of the release of their LP, Gilding the Lily, later this year, they surely won many new fans.
The Wedding Present opened the show with a newer track, Limbo. Its dissonant, slow build sets the tone that the heavy jangling guitars in the later numbers in the show will smash through. What followed was a selection of their favourites, like Queen of Outer Space and Montreal, before heading into Seamonsters. At this point in the set, the crowd were getting everything they were looking for as the beginnings of a Baby Boomer mosh pit started to swell. Free water was being handed out for the most enthusiastic of fans at the front. David Gedge is the show. The lineup of The Wedding Present has constantly changed, no band members ever staying around for more than a few years at a time, so in terms of what you are presented with on stage, it is more a man and his songbook rather than a group with dynamics and relationships.
The key for any band that has been gigging for so long is that their fanbases are as enthusiastic now as they were when these albums were released. Reunion tours drive modern arena sales, and anniversary tours for popular albums always seem to do well. Importantly, however, not everybody who bought a ticket for the show would have been driven by nostalgia. A look around the audience, you could see pockets of fans that were probably not alive when Seamonsters was released in 1991, let alone old enough to have visited their nearest Our Price to pick up a copy of the album.
Tickets and Tour Details: www.theweddingpresent.co.uk
