1993 01 02 Wedding Present "Hit Parade II" NME

SINGLES GOING UNSTEADY

THE WEDDING PRESENT 

Hit Parade II (RCA/All formats)

THE SEVEN-INCH single is about to die.

Think about it. The chunky plastic coins that once mapped out the progress of millions upon millions of adolescences are heading for the knacker's yard. And accompanying them are the component parts of a culture that still retain a tear-jerking romance: Top Of The Pops, proper jukeboxes, Sunday evenings spent crouching next to the radio to hear the Top 40. They're all expiring, forced into the afterlife by multiformatting, declining sales, The Chart Show and Altern 8.

Still, never mind, eh? The Old World isn't quite dead. It's found its last champion in a scruffy ex-student who loves the seven-inch single like a close relative. He likes appearing on TOTP. He's probably a bit miffed that Pan's People weren't around to shake their stuff to his records. So he hatched the one-45-a-month scheme to guide several thousand Wedding Present fans through the last traces of the things that probably made him pick up a guitar in the first place.

As well as indicating the terminal nature of the Old World's illness (industry bigwigs have seized upon the apparent success of the exercise as prime evidence of the bankruptcy of the singles chart), the Weddoes' one-year plan has highlighted much of what we'll be missing. Like the warming certainty that comes from knowing that what you've bought is the definitive article (as opposed to "part one of an exclusive collectors' edition"). Like the beautifully simple coupling of seriously-constructed A-sides and flips that contain all manner of weird daftness, tike the reassuring "clunk" made by record players when the music has finally been swamped by static and come to a close.

In this instance, such thrills were only available to the hardy souls who got up early once a month and trooped down to their local Our Price. The rest of us have to make do with the two 'Hit Parade' collections, which take the whole project away from its romantk seven-inch setting and leave it vulnerable to all sorts of criticism. After all, without the matching art work, hot-off-the-presses excitement, and clicks and pops and dunks, much of the appeal of these records is lost.

The B-sides are the perfect case in point. The six (spanning June to December) that are collected here frequently plumb the depths of dashed-off stupidity, sounding like the work of people who've mistakenly let their rehearsal-room jokes into the public domain. There's a certain ham-fisted charm to the Weddoes' rendition of Bowie's 'Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family', but the reading of Bow Wow Wow's 'Go Wild In The Country' is wince-inducing rubbish. 'Theme From Shaft' isn't much better. And the instrumental 'UFO' is worse.

But that's not the point They were designed for the one-off chuckle, the "wonder what this is like" moment that's an integral part of the consumption of the traditional single. You’re not meant to put them into your multi-racked CD player and scrutinise them as digitally-reproduced art statements.

The main features (all 12 of which are presented on a giveaway limited edition BBC sessions album) fare better. 'Flying Saucer', which is up there with March's “Three' as one of the best Weddoes A-sides of the year, has a great chorus, toads of visceral guitar-bashing and a vocal that encapsulates the box-bedroom lust that is David Gedge's stock-in-trade. 'Boing' is surprisingly heart-wrenching, while 'Love Slave' splits its time between being hushed, coy and hypnotic, and coming over like the splenetic work of a bunch of Sub Pop signings. And 'Sticky' is, superficially, trad boring Wedding Present, all scratchy guitar and grunted vocals, but there's enough eccentricity in Gedge's squealing of the "Go on, go on, BET OUT!" hook to give it a fired-up. neurotic charm.

Unfortunately, 'The Queen Of Outer Space' comes over like a crushingly unremarkable howler; a song that would turn heads if it was on an unsolicited demo tape, but from the Weddoes sounds like three minutes of water-treading and under-achievement. 'No Christmas', meanwhile, demonstrates the album-tracks-as-sing!es problem that's bedevilled a large portion of the project. Schizoid, dirty and all-over-the-place, it's the perfect song to appear halfway through an album - but hardly the kind of thing that you want coming out of your clock radio first thing in the morning.

Like its predecessor, 'Hit Parade II' is an irritatingly patchy rag-bag that contains a small handful of minor treasures, the odd bit of beguiling experimentation, and a few things that would have been best left on the cutting room floor. Such sentiments, however, are prompted by music emerging from a retrospectively-compiled CD. For several thousand consumer-fetishist Wedding Present fans with shoeboxes full of perfectly-presented singles and recollections of Monday mornings finding out exactly what Gedge and company had forged this time, the memory of the last year should remain unsullied. From their point of view, the whole contrivance has been a weird success.

Next year. Wedding Present records will be available on Super Digipack Free Badge Format, and the seven-inch single will continue its frisbee like flight into oblivion. 'Hit Parade II' stands as another unsatisfactory memorial to the last protests of the Old World. Forward to the future! Unfortunately. (6)

John Harris