THe wedding present review
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.”
David Byrne American utopia review
David Byrne – American Utopia, The Film!
Is it a gig? Is it a film? No! It’s a Spike Lee directed film of a theatrical performance of David Byrne’s American Utopia show, screened for one night only in the UK.
With American Utopia, Byrne had the brilliant idea of making his fellow musicians mobile and more participative. In basic terms, instead of having a drummer stuck behind a drum kit, the drum kit is deconstructed, and we are treated to up to six percussionists carrying various parts of a drum kit/percussion instruments and so they can move, dance, synchronise with other performers. Similarly, the keyboard player carries his keyboard. It works brilliantly.
As the screening was for one night only (although I’m sure it will be repeated), it’s rather pointless to review the film. That said, it’s hard to fault the show: Byrne’s voice has held up remarkably well; the show is superbly lit and choreographed; the musicians play faultlessly and the songs (despite a lull two thirds of the way through the performance) are some of the best and most iconic of the last 50 years. Byrne talks between most of the songs, giving them context and texture, which I found to be really enjoyable and interesting.
But is any good? Yes, it’s brilliant.
So, that being said, it perhaps makes more sense to review going to the cinema to see a film of a gig. I’ll preface this by saying I love going to gigs (and I saw American Utopia live in Manchester in 2018) and I’m a big fan of the NT Live films, where there’s a performance of a play is shown at the cinema.
So, what’s it like sitting in a cinema watching a gig?
A bit odd, in my opinion.
Look, my wife loved it – comfortable seat, clear view, no pushing and barging. A friend of mine also went to that Manchester performance of American Utopia – he and his kids spent half of the night standing up/sitting down to let people pass them to go to the lavatories. This paled into insignificance compared by the unease caused by the drugged – up middle aged couple in front of them who spent the evening turning around and gurning at them and telling them that although Byrne was good, he was “No Lionel Ritchie”. Quite.
So there was none of that nonsense and we were home and hosed by 9:30pm. There’s a lot to like about that.
But I like gigs, I like to look where I want to look, not where the camera points me. I want to sing along a bit. I want to dance (well, sway rhythmically from time to time) and this was so odd as no one danced in the cinema. I want to get a bit sweaty. Above all, what I got last night was sound which had been cleaned and digitised and that was the biggest shortcoming for me – at a gig the sound is around you, there’s a richness but a dirtiness to it. The guitar crashed on “Once in a Lifetime” last night but it’s a bit like it came with subtitles – *Sound of guitar crashing* – rather than it being, well, a guitar crashing 20 feet away.
Eight years on, I can still remember American Utopia live; I doubt I will really remember the film version eight weeks on.
But is it any good? Having slept on it, I have concluded that the trick is not to regard a film of a gig as a substitute for a gig. It’s its own thing, its own artistic entity. As such, yes it’s good.