I'm really quite surprised that our paths never crossed in late 80s Leeds, AB. I thought I'd managed to locate every lower division football indie kid at the uni. (Bearing in mind that being publicly 'out' as a lower division football fan in late 80s middle-class student circles had you marked out by your contemporaries as a complete weirdo)

I am too. I think we might have discussed this before and found out that I was there a couple of years before you. Did you write for the Leeds Student?

I had a clique of lower division indie kids who used to stand in the away end giving each other mutual lower division support at places like York, Halifax and Hull whenever Leeds weren't playing at home. For some reason, people thought we were weird.

Yeah weren't you a year or two before my time there (88-91)? I did a few bits for Leeds Student but not much - I was a self-indulgent, lazy and apathetic student, much of the time.

That's it. I was there from 1986 to 1990. I was involved with lots of meetings in pubs for the Leeds Student, but didn't get round to writing an awful lot for it. I did a report on a Bradford City match and a review of Raymonde (!). My masterpiece, though, was a centre-page spread about football fanzines, including the Orientear.

It's only now, thanks to otf, that I realise how complicated it must have been for me back then liking bands like The Smiths and the Wedding Present at the same time. Thank God I wasn't too much up my own arse to enjoy them.

Yeah, I don't see what, musically or otherwise, The Smiths and the Wedding Present have got to do with each other at all, and I certainly can't suscribe to the theory that the latter are to be reviled because they mopped up the former's fanbase.

"George Best" (most of it) and "Bizarro" (all of it) are, imho, two albums still worth listening to - as the band's continued popularity would seem to indicate.

Even were there this connection, I'm still puzzled as to what point I have missed by quite liking the Wedding Present.

Or have I missed the whole point of this thread ?

Seamonsters is great but I find the earlier stuff hard to listen to now.

I'll happily agree with the majority of people on this thread, in that SR is barking up the wrong tree.

Being slightly younger than most, I only really cottoned on to The Smiths late on - 1986 to be precise - but at that point, I didn't really "get" them, but then I was only 12 when 'The Queen Is Dead' came out. In fact, it wasn't until WEA plundered their back catalogue in the early 90s that I owned a Smiths album. I liked the Smiths because they made great pop songs, pure and simple. I didn't understand the lyrics, because on the whole, I didn't know the lyrics. I also didn't go overboard because some of their stuff was too miserable for me at that age.

As for the Wedding Present, I first encountered them just under ten years ago, and I liked the song, but couldn't find it in the local record shop. It was only a year or so later when I started work, that one of the guys at work, saw it as his mission to educate the younger members of staff about music, would bring a list of his record collection in, and do copies for people. By this time, Kennedy and Brassneck had been released, so the first tape he did was 'George Best' and 'Bizarro'. Two very different albums (the jangle-pop of 'George Best' owes a lot to Pete Solowka, but his playing is much more in the background of the rockier, and more professional sounding 'Bizarro'), with no similarilty at all to The Smiths, other than them being Northern four-pieces who played guitars. Musically and especially lyrically, David Gedge is the anti-Morrissey. Morrissey is inspired by Wilde, Gedge has admitted stealing lines from other people's arguments.

As for Seamonsters, I'd agree with dalliance that it is the lost great album of the 1990s. Had any other band recorded it, I think it would have been better received by certain areas of the music press (Ted Kessler and Dele Fadele were the only two journos I can recall who gave early 90s TWP good reviews). TWP were already seen as out of fashion, and almost embarrassing, considering that while the rest of indiedom was telling the world that there had always been a dance element to their dance music, TWP were giving RCA Ukraininan folk songs, and Steve Albini-produced tracks. Maybe if Seamonsters had come 12 months later, it would have been better appreciated.

As for the gig this week, I didn't go. Gedge has always said that three quarters of a TWP gig would contain the album they're touring, and with the exception of the numbers that Terry De Castro contributes vocally to, 'El Rey' doesn't do much for me so far. It's full-blown lo-fi, even more than Saturnalia was, and Gedge's voice just doesn't suit the music.

Dalliance's agricultural metaphor of the ploughing of furrows says all that needs to be said about The Wedding Present.

Ploughman Rock.

So....on the basis that agricultural is the last thing you would ever level at anything Smiths related, where's the connection you were driving at ?

I think it was that listening to both the Smiths and the Wedding Present wasted time which could otherwise be more profitably spent listening to Kylie. And Jason Donovan, presumably.

Phoebe wrote:

QUOTE:
As for the gig this week, I didn't go. Gedge has always said that three quarters of a TWP gig would contain the album they're touring, and with the exception of the numbers that Terry De Castro contributes vocally to, 'El Rey' doesn't do much for me so far.

Shame, you missed a good set list. 6 of 21 songs were from the new release, but 9 other albums were represented on the night.

TWP had nothing to do with the smiths. If anything when I got into them, I always saw them more in line with the c-86 movement. Still, for those who stayed with the band it's easy to see Gedge's songwriting grow in both maturity and intensity through the years. There's also a diversity too, for whilst a Gedge song remains recognisible instantly, there's a world of difference between George Best to Seamonsters to Watusi to Saturnalia to Cinerama releases to TWP on their return.

But then I wouldn't expect the BSL lads to understand, anymore than I understand why they still listen to Modern Romance et al.

dalliance wrote:

QUOTE:
So....on the basis that agricultural is the last thing you would ever level at anything Smiths related, where's the connection you were driving at ?

The fact that a whole generation (or at least a large percentage of a generation) of Smiths fans jumped ship to The Wedding Present on the basis that they were kind of the same thing - The Smiths: The Next Generation, or The Smiths: 2.0 - when in fact they were The Smiths minus.

I thought I'd already explained that point clearly enough to be understood, but obviously not.

Did that really happen? It's a bit galling to have lived through such a pivotal and profoundly significant historical event and find 20 odd years later that you missed the whole thing.