The Wedding Present, Settle Victoria Hall, Settle. Friday August 14th, 2026.
I hadn’t seen the Weddos since their heyday (and mine!) in the late 80s. I recently read an article in which Andy Burnham (aka the Prime Minister) listed his favourite albums, with George Best coming in at number five. This inspired me to see if the band were playing live and, low and behold, they were playing at the oldest continuously functioning venue in the world – the Settle Victoria Music Hall.
If you don’t know, Settle is a lovely small market town on the western edge of the Yorkshire Dales. So after a day’s hiking, I headed across to Settle on what had become a beautiful, warm summer’s evening.
The hall is small – I’d put the capacity at around 400 – 500. The crowd was eclectic. Hardcore fans, farmers, hipsters dressed like farmers and lots of middle aged locals happy to see a band play in the Dales.
Support was provided by the excellent Voodoo Radio, a father and daughter duo from Barrow in Furness, who could make it in stand up on the club circuit if the band doesn’t work out. High energy, good fun.
And so to The Wedding Present, the patron saints of the broken hearted. There was a time after The Smiths broke up when the Indie Guitar Crown was theirs to inherit. George Best is a great album and Bizarro isn’t too shabby either. But along came the Mondays, the Roses and the Primals: the scene moved on, The Wedding Present didn’t. The crown was lost.
David Gedge is a fine lyricist with stage presence, My Favourite Dress (the second song of the evening) is a classic, guitarist Rachael Wood played with great energy and skill, but as the evening wore on, it increasingly struck me that TWP are a essentially heavy guitar band who made a jangly guitar album at the start of their career. Gedge was invited to play Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft a second time, he made to do so but then commented that they had 300 songs – this at the point when I felt they had two variations of the one song of forlorn love: fast or very fast, loud or very loud. At one point I was reminded of Status Quo.
And so my response to the evening was like one of their songs: I wrestled with an inner dialogue, replayed the past in my head but ultimately, regrettably, wistfully recognised we had drifted apart.
But was it any good?
It was like meeting up with a friend you haven’t seen for over 30 years. You were fast friends for a few years, but upon meeting again, you accept you have both moved on and it’s not the same. However, as the song goes, “No matter how it ends, you should always keep in touch with your friends.”
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