Earlier this year, a new book about The Wedding Present called “All The Songs Sound The Same” was released.

It is packed with hundreds of people writing about their favourite Wedding Present / Cinerama song and what it means to them. Lots of current and former bandmembers are included and it was lovingly curated by Richard Houghton and David Gedge himself. Many others provided their own stories for the book. Famous fans such as radio presenters Shaun Keaveney and Andrew Collins and the probable next Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, alongside many less-celebrated ordinary proles like me.

You can buy the book from the band’s website here.

Here’s the piece I contributed to the book about the song “You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends”…

Sheffield (February 2018)

It’s the Tommy 30th anniversary tour. I’m there with my oldest friends Mike, Rich and Simon and David Gedge has just dedicated a song to the 4 of us. As another David once sang “you may ask yourself, well how did I get here?”

The Wedding Present at The Leadmill, Sheffield (3rd February 2018)

West Sussex (30 years earlier)

If you know anything about Sussex, it won’t be anything to do with the unexciting top left corner of it where I grew up. All the best-known places like Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings are in East Sussex. The only famous location in West Sussex is Gatwick and that is right in the opposite corner! The Cure’s hometown of Crawley is over that way too, which made them our not-that-local heroes.

The repetitive strain of our uneventful teenage lives was thankfully enlivened when we started going to watch gigs. The London to Portsmouth train line ran nearby which meant we could get to gigs in both of those, but only if we could persuade someone to take and collect us from the train station. Once we were old enough to learn to drive ourselves, a whole new set of possibilities opened up before us like a vast New Jersey freeway. Access to cars meant freedom, we were inside a Bruce Springsteen song. What else can we do now except roll down the window and let the wind blow back our hair because the night’s busting open and this dual carriageway can take us anywhere. Well, maybe not anywhere but Aldershot, Brighton and Reading were good enough for us. 

We were disciples of the gospel according to NME and Melody Maker and Janice Long’s weekday evenings show on Radio 1 was our holy communion. (I didn’t discover John Peel until a couple of years later) 

So it came to pass that in 1987, I sent off for a compilation tape advertised in Melody Maker called Indie Top Twenty. It’s not overstating it to say that tape changed my life. It was the first time I ever heard Half Man Half Biscuit, still one of my favourite bands to this day. It was the first time I heard Joy Division (unless you count the Love Will Tear Us Apart cover that was on Paul Young’s No Parlez which you definitely shouldn’t!)

It was the first time I’d heard The Blue Aeroplanes. Within 6 months, I would be singing and playing guitar in my own band with our name taken from a Blue Aeroplanes lyric and ending most of our gigs with a very loud and sped-up Joy Division cover. Have that, Paul Young! 

The tape was a gateway into so much more music and looking at the tracklisting I can see that in the aftermath of hearing it, I subsequently bought records or tapes by 16 of the 20 bands on it.

Most significantly, it was the first time I ever heard The Wedding Present and the song You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends. 

The frantically strummed noisy guitars grabbed my attention but the lyrics seemed to be telling an altogether more melancholy tale. A lost, or more probably unrequited, love with a friend from school. 

On another record I love from that time, Billy Bragg said, “I couldn’t stop thinking about her and every time I switched on the radio there was somebody else singing a song about the two of us.”  

When you’re sixteen, clumsy and shy with hormones running riot and heightening every emotion to what often seems like unbearable levels, it feels like every short-term crush is actually “Love Story” and you can hear references to the sad little non-event that you laughingly call a lovelife in all manner of unlikely places. 

So those lyrics really said something to me about my life in 1987. A school trip to the unlikely destination of Ostend had provided me with a precious opportunity to spend a few hours talking to someone else’s girlfriend. That afternoon was the inspiration behind several of my own most cringeworthy attempts at lyric writing but I never came up with anything remotely as good as “a bridge that stood close by the sea, the day that we spent there is ours eternally.”

I bought Volume 2 of the Indie Top 20 tape when that came out. That had My Favourite Dress on it and I loved that just as much. The next few Wedding Present singles bedazzled us further.  Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm was a dancefloor staple at our favourite indie disco (Sister Rays in Brighton) as were the next singles Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now? and especially Kennedy. Just after that came out, we saw them live for the first time at Kilburn National Ballroom and a couple of months later we were back for more at Brighton Top Rank. 

Bizarro…  Seamonsters… Hit Parade… the noisy guitars got noisier, the records got even better, the gigs got wilder. Over the next few years, we saw them many more times in Portsmouth, Reading, Brighton and London. 

But as people do when they get older, gradually we all dispersed. By the end of 1992 when we saw them play in Brighton, none of us were living in Sussex. The venue itself had been renamed from Top Rank to The Event. The times they were a-changing. Over the next few years, various circumstances caused us to make our homes in all manner of glamorous locations… Tokyo! London! Sydney! Istanbul! Auckland! Sheffield! Liverpool! Swindon! Portsmouth! Chippenham! Cheam!

Holmfirth (August 2010)

Jobs, partners, children and the kind of responsibilities that go with being an actual grown-up followed and by 2010, the 4 of us have somehow ended up living almost at opposite corners of England. I’m in the North West. We were all 40 in 2010 and I noticed that a few days before my birthday The Wedding Present were playing in Holmfirth, about an hour’s drive from my front door. What’s more they’re celebrating the 21st anniversary of Bizarro by playing the album in full. 

A couple of years before, we had been to see the reformed Pogues at Brixton Academy and had spent most of the gig watching from near the back drinking our pints and discussing whether it was sensible to go down the front and get in amongst it. Were we too old to mosh? It’s a young man’s game, isn’t it. Eventually we’d had enough beer to give it a try anyway and those sweaty last 20 minutes were the best bit of the gig by a mile!

Having survived that, we knew how we wanted to celebrate the big 4-zero. Go to Holmfirth and laugh heartily in the face of the aging process by jumping around like lunatics down the front and pretending we were 19 again!

That Holmfirth gig was a bit of a Damascene moment for all of us. We realised that we needed to treasure every opportunity we got to see this band that meant so much to us. We went back to Holmfirth again in 2011 and since then The Wedding Present have become the catalyst for us to get together regularly for the best possible reason. Any tour announcements are followed by a flurry of excited WhatsApp messages as we work out which gigs we’re going to and start researching nearby Travelodges and pubs. 

Left to right: Simon, me, Rich, Mike @ The Wedding Present gig, Manchester Academy 14/11/15. Photo by Tom Williams.

In the last decade we have met up to see The Wedding Present in Bristol, Chester, Wolverhampton, Blackpool, Wakefield, Liverpool and multiple times in London and Manchester. And Sheffield which is where this tale began. 

Sheffield (February 2018)

Mike said he didn’t want any kind of big stag weekend. He just wanted to meet up somewhere, have a few beers and go to see The Wedding Present. Great fortune for us that there was a Saturday night gig coming up in Sheffield, a city we all have great affection for. Simon used to live there and we all have treasured (albeit hazy) memories of visiting him up there to explore the city’s pubs, parties, curry houses and chip shops. 

Shortly before the gig, I interviewed superhero drummer Charlie Layton. I told him a little of the backstory you’ve just read and that the 4 of us  were celebrating Mike’s stag weekend at the Sheffield gig. Being the lovely chap that he is, Charlie must’ve asked David to give us a shoutout. We appreciated it all the more because we all know that’s not the kind of thing David is comfortable doing. A bit too naff, fake and showbizzy. Like doing encores. One of many things that makes them the semi-legendary band they are.

Neither Charlie or David would’ve known that the song they dedicated to us was the first Wedding Present song I ever heard, the one on that tape from Melody Maker.

But the title of the song couldn’t have been more appropriate. No matter how it ends, you really should keep in touch with your friends. 

If I’m honest the rest of that song’s lyrics have lost most of their impact. The girl in Ostend is long forgotten, to quote A Million Miles “I can’t even remember the colour of her eyes.” I’m not that lovelorn teenager anymore. Nor indeed am I the overgrown lovelorn teenager that I remained for many years after that. So as good as they are, it’s not the lyrics that get me these days. That’s not what hits me hard. It’s the noisy guitars. It’s still the noisy guitars. It will always be the noisy guitars. Nobody does it better. Baby you’re the best.

More Wedding Present articles on this website:

Wedding Present live reviews on this website:

Podcast episodes where we have played The Wedding Present / Cinerama songs:

Posted by on August 14, 2023 in Blog posts and tagged , , , , .

2 Comments

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About chorizogarbanzo

One of the Wizards on the legendary Trust The Wizards podcast. www.trustthewizards.com

2 responses »

  1. willneville1892's avatar willneville1892 says:
    September 7, 2023 at 3:52 pm

    Great read which reminded me that I too had that Indie Top 20 tape I think!

    Reply
  2. The Wedding Present in Leeds | TRUST THE WIZARDS says:
    December 2, 2023 at 10:53 am

    […] the full origin story of how I became an obsessive Wedding Present fan, read this article which was included in the recent book about the band “All The Songs Sounds The Same” […]

    Reply

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