Hard, Fast and Beautiful | |
| David Gedge was recently described in NME as "one of the most consistently brilliant songwriters in Britain" and, unusually, I find it hard to disagree with them. From 'My Favourite Dress', 'Once More' and 'Everybody Thinks He Looks Daft', through 'Brassneck', 'Kennedy' and 'Silver Shorts' to 'Gazebo', 'Spangle' and 'Big Rat', (and those are just some of my favourites) The Wedding Present have probably touched most of our lives at some point. If you're the same age as me, you probably came in sometime before George Best, and then drifted out when you stopped listening to Peel, or got into dance music, or else just latched onto something new and therefore more exciting. I, though, drifted back in by chance in 1995, when I caught a live show at the first Benicassim Festival in Spain; there was a beach, a backstage pool, endless sunshine, a free supply of wine and, errr ... the rest is a bit of a blur actually. But I found myself wondering what I'd been missing out on all the time I'd been too broke to buy records. Then a work-mate made me a tape of Watusi, and it was barely out of the car-stereo for about a year. Roll forward to 1997 and The Wedding Present was put on hold for a year while David Gedge pursued a solo project. The solo project became Cinerama, the core of which is David and his partner Sally, and a year became, well, four at the last count. Their second album, Disco Volante, has just come out, and there are still no immediate plans to reactive The Wedding Present - Cinerama is 'just too much fun at the moment'. And so much better, I'd say. Whilst I like The Wedding Present enormously, a new name and having no-one else to answer to seem to have given David a freedom musically that he never felt he had in the confines of a band, where there was an expectation of what things should sound like and there were other people to please. In Cinerama the music is more laid-back, more filmic, more orchestral; instead of writing thrashy guitar-parts he's writing string arrangements and seeking out harpists, trumpeters and accordion-players; the band even has a resident flautist. It's pop, in the purest of forms, with tunes that lesser bands would kill for - but, to lift Cinerama into a league all of their own, combined with lyrics that are well-written, powerful and captivating. And, having touched us in our teens in the mid-late eighties with tales of love gone wrong and heartbreak and jealousy, David Gedge has grown up with us, and now writes about the sort of messes and muddles we get ourselves into as thirty-somethings. To an extent the subject matter is very much the same - relationships - except, because he's older, the focus has changed. But that's fine because I'm older, and I've changed, and grown-up relationships are something that few other songwriters I consider listenable seem to write about. |
| He pins things down with detail so you're transported immediately into whatever scene he's set, be it by the denier of someone's tights, the glimpse of a thigh, by the sound of laughter echoing from bathroom tiles or the London phonebox a friend waits outside of whilst he frantically tries to organise his love-life He rhymes, but unobtrusively and chooses his words carefully, and somehow everything he relates manages to seem absolutely real. It's happening to him, but you know it could just as easily have been you. There's 'Kings Cross' - and even the title is perfect, so instantly evocative, you know you're going to get something a little seedy - but then, on the other hand, it's just where the train to Leeds goes from - where he backs away from something that might have been, and just goes home instead. Or, 'Apres Ski', in which an older woman has a one-night stand with a much younger man and 'It didn't mean a thing, it's not embarrassing, it's just disappointing'. The incredibly sexy post-coital recent single, 'Lollobrigida', is all breathy sighs and accordion '...I ache, you're wet...', errr, perhaps I should skip over the rest, actually. There's a huge string-laden almost ballad-y epic called 'Superman', about failure to live up to other people's absurdly high expectations. And 'Your Charms', the next single, has a chorus that's been stuck in my head for months now. And then there's 'Manhattan'. A song made perfect by backing vocals where the word lap descends into la-la-las as the first verse descends into the chorus. A difficult decision is made and something is passed up - 'after a kiss like that some men would leave their wife, but I don't want to destroy my life'. And then, in the middle, a spoken section where the girl discusses him with her friend, and it's so well scripted and so well staged that it has me instantly nostalgic for girl-talk in NY cocktail bars with my friend Kat when things have fucked up in my own life. As they seem to all too often in New York. I've had it down as the best song of 2000 since it came out in February, and I don't think I'm about to change my mind in the next few months. Cinerama discography: Kerry Kerry (single) - July 98 © Clare Wadd 2000 |