pre-Indie Tracks Indiepop interview

The wedding Present will be headlining this year's Indie Tracks Indiepop festival which is held at a heritage railway in Ripley Derbyshire. eFestivals spoke to frontman David Gedge whose career path has often involved unusual decisions, such as recording a set of Ukranian folk songs for their first major-label offering and releasing a single on the first Monday of every month for a year.

Where are you at the moment?
I'm currently in Hove in East Sussex, a stones' throw away from the sea. I've kind of been backwards and forwards recently. I was living in Leeds until 2004, it's a long story, I split up with my girlfriend, basically, so I needed to move somewhere else, and the girlfriend I'm going out with now is from Seattle. So I moved to Seattle, and we lived there for a year or so, and then we came back to Sussex for a while because we had loads of gigs to do and stuff. When it came to writing the new album, I thought 'well, I quite like the idea of living in another country.' And that's how I ended up in L.A.



And it's partly because our bass player Terry (de Castro) actually has lived there for 10 years, no I think, and for this new album she was my main co-writer, so it kind of made sense to be in the same neighbourhood as her. Also, I've always been perversely attracted to Los Angeles, because being a fan of pop culture, film, music, comics, and stuff have always meant more to me than literature and architecture shamefully. So I was quite intrigued with the idea of living there.

what made you decide to play Indie tracks?
They approached us and said, 'do you want to come and play at our fantastic festival?' We do get quite a few offers, but that one kind of stuck out as being one I was interested in because of the train scenario.

So do you know much about it?
Only what I've seen on their website, and what people told me. I spoke to somebody who had been there before, who said they had a great time, and it had a great atmosphere, they liked going on the trains and it's quite interesting. so I'm quite looking forward to it.

Have you headlined a festival before?
Oh yeah, over the years we've headlined a few. I suppose the biggest one, well actually we didn't headline we were second from the top of the bill, in Reading Festival once. We've headlined a few in continental Europe, I thought we had headlined a few in Britain, but to be honest, we've done so many now, I can't remember.

It showcases a lot of new acts, will you have any advice for them on promotion as you had some innovative ideas when you were promoting yourselves?
I don't know really, I've not been the most commercially successful of artists. I think my ideas tend to be more kind of industry challenging, a lot of the stuff that we've done has been quite perverse, and made us lose fans rather than gain fans, so I'm probably not a great example of somebody who wants to make it big in the fabulous world of pop music.

I do wonder if bands would actually be able to do half the stuff you did back then?
No, to be honest, I bet they couldn't. Musicians typically are kind of lazy, drunken idiots, and quite a lot of the things we have done have been quite difficult a lot of effort that not everyone could have done.

There's a revival of the eighties happening in popular music at the moment with the worst pop side of it is their more interest in the old indie bands alongside that?
It's funny isn't it? It's weird because when I started using the name The Wedding Present again, purely by chance there seemed to be a lot bands around that were either reformed Eighties bands, or sound like they are Eighties bands. I think it's quite remarkable the way it moves, its cyclical. I was inspired by the bands that were around twenty years before us, growing up, listening to the radio. And it just happens again and again, it's weird being part of it all. It's funny how that happens.

Do you know any of the bands on the bill alongside you at all?
Actually, I've not a look at the bill yet.

What's been your best festival experience over the years?
The best festivals for me have always been in Spain, 99% of that is down to the weather I think. If you listed all the places in the world where it would be great to have a pop festival, Britain would come third from the bottom, above Iceland, well Iceland are probably better than us.

It just rains, it just rains in Britain, it's cold, it's disappointing, it's muddy and it's grim. Then you go to somewhere like Spain and it's almost purpose built and there's a couple of festivals there which are really good one is Benicassim and one is Primavera. If you ask bands which festivals they prefer, they always say those two, because it's sunny, you know you're near the beach. I think on the whole festivals in Britain tend to be more serious than they are abroad for some reason, there's a lot bands are trying to get on and squabbling about where they are in the running order and stuff. In Spain it seems a lot more relaxed somehow. I don't know if I'm looking at it through rose tinted spectacles because I'm not from there and it's all exotic to go to those places, but I've always had a really good times at those ones.



So when you go to a festival do you tend to stay and soak up the festival, or just play and get out of there?
no, I like to if it's possible. It's a great opportunity to see loads of bands and I'm always one for that. We went to Bestival last year, and we're actually playing at Bestival this year too. We went there last time, and really enjoyed that one. We played at Reading a few year's ago but that was quite hard because I felt a bit old really. We had a wander around there after we played, and we had all these kids coming up to us, who literally weren't born when The Wedding Present started. It was very un-rock n roll, they were approaching me like I was a school teacher or something, "Excuse me, Mr Gedge... I've never seen this group before and really enjoyed it." I felt like their Uncle or something. It was a very odd feeling. When we played, you could see The Wedding Present fans were the more portly of the audience. I think festivals like Reading are very fashion orientated with whoever in the NME this week, where as the small ones are much less fashion driven I suppose.

If you could pick your own festival headliners who would you have at your festival?
My Bloody Festival without a doubt. I'm really looking forward to playing Bestival, because they're playing on the same day as we are, and it will be great. It's sold out as well, and I've not seen them since they got back together, so I'm looking forward to it.

Will there be new material from El Ray in your set, and is that a departure in sound?
Is actually yes, it's a strange one because we went back to work with Steve Albini again, who did Sea Monsters a few year's ago, and I was a little bit concerned because I didn't want us to go over old ground again. Although the band is all different people apart from me, there is a characteristic recording style that Albini has. But I'm really pleased to say that it sounds nothing like it. It's a powerful record, it has that Albini hugeness but it's quite poppyas well and I think it's down to our guitarist Chris (McConville) who's a very articulate guitarist and it's quite fancy in some places. It's a nice mixture of light and dark and nothing like Sea Monsters which was quite a relief really.

With such a wealth of material, how do you go about deciding a set list then?
You know, it's an absolute nightmare, and you know how I do it is, I don't do it anymore, because I can't there's well over 200 songs, you've got to slim them down, for a normal set it's bad enough. But for a festival headlining slot, it's got to be shorter usually and a bit more full of hits. Our bass player Terry does it now, she's been with me for about 10 years so she's got a feeling for the history group but she wasn't in The Wedding Present before the big break of Cinerama years, so she's a bit more objective about the early stuff. I can't tell really I'm notorious for leaving really good songs off the album and putting them on B Sides.

We don't have crap songs, a lot of bands come up with material that's a bit boring and sounds like filler, and what they do is put it on the B side of a single. What we do is abort it, and write another song that's better. So what happens is when we record, we have a collection of songs all of which are good enough for the album. An album has to work, you might have a really great song but it doesn't fit the album, sometimes it's left off for a specific reason, then people say 'oh my god, I can't believe you left that one off, that would have been a great album track.' It's very similar with a set, you can't just pick the most successful songs of the last twenty years and just build a set around that. But it doesn't always work like that because you need some kind of structure to it, slow bits, and fast bits, and loud bits, and quiet bits. So it's extremely difficult, and it gets more difficult with each passing year that I don't retire, because there's an extra load of songs to go on there.



I think she does quite well, she seems to satisfy most people, we've never been a band that panders to the audience, we've always tried to hold something back. Tried to make the sets not just straight forward poptastic, but tried put something there that challenges the audiences. One of our Reading Festival appearances we headlined the second stage and the set was just all new songs really, which I think in retrospect was a mistake because it wasn't all our crowd and so they wanted to hear the odd indie hit. I don't think we're quite as stubborn as that these days.

Terry's come up with some ideas to play some B sides actually, the set she's working on for the summer contains four B-sides which never made it on our albums, and then four or five from the new one and there'll be the odd hit in there.

Is there anybody you'd like to collaborate with?
No not really. In Cinerama we collaborated with quite a few people, primarily on the first album, we had Emma Pollock from The Delgados sing on a couple of songs, and that was absolutely brilliant because she is one of my favourite singers of all time. Then we had a couple of other people but by and large I think there's been so many line-up changes within The Wedding Present over the year's, every album is like a collaboration with other people.

People think that's a bit weird but I think it's actually helped the group, because every album or too we have fresh blood in there, and a whole new set of inspirations and enthusiasms. It is like starting again and we seem to have started again about eight times, and it's helped us move on each record. Every album we've made apart from the first three, since then they've all been completely different, I think we might have lost fans because of that. You do a Bizarro indie pop record and then everyone goes this is nice, and then they buy Sea Monsters which is a dark grungy rock record and they think oh my god and they don't buy another of our records.

Most bands don't do that. I was listening to the radio once and it was an interview with the Lighthouse Family and they said they were working on a new album, and they stopped half way through because it didn't sound like the Lighthouse Family and they scrapped it and they went back and started again. Now, to me, if I was making a record that didn't sound like me I'd be quite excited about it. 'Wow, where's this going? Let's see what happens.' Again that's probably why I'm not massively successful, it's about cornflakes,when people buy a box of cornflakes, then you go back and buy a second box, you still want it to taste like cornflakes. Over my career with The Wedding Present, and then Cinerama was completely different, and then we did that Ukranian stuff, but for me I enjoy it. Bands like R.E.M. apart from 2 songs it all sounds the same to me, I don't get it. I think 'why do they bother?' But then they're extremely rich and extremely successful, so obviously they're right and I'm wrong so there you go! It's an odd one for me.

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