David Gedge
(Mathematics 1981)
Lead singer, The Wedding Present

As the driving force behind the bands The Wedding Present and Cinerama, David Gedge has been making the music he wants for the past 23 years. Eighteen top 40 hit singles, 12 singles released in one year, a legion of loyal fans, and a superlative endorsement by John Peel contribute to the story of David Gedge’s career.

A return to Leeds

In December, the Union’s packed Stylus bar welcomed the Wedding Present’s return to the University. David found time in his schedule to speak about his music and his time at the University of Leeds.

Like many alumni who return to the Union, David walked inside to see a building that had changed beyond recognition. “From the outside the Union doesn’t look that different,” says David. “But if you put me inside and let me wander around, I wouldn’t have guessed I was in Leeds University Union.”

Musical memories

Before David entered the Union, student memories came alive. “When we came up to the Union steps today, I told the band ‘ah, I saw The Clash on those steps!’ he says. “I think it must have been after a sound check for their gig. I suddenly remember them. They took out their acoustic guitars and played on the steps for free for all the students. It was really brilliant.”

David originally landed at Leeds 30 years earlier, in 1978, a year of legendary Refectory concerts. “In that first year I saw everybody who played there,” he recalls. “The Ramones, The Clash, The Jam, Siouxsie And The Banshees and Magazine. And, every new band of note played Leeds. The Gang of Four just had their first EP out and I saw them in the Refectory. It was a great time.” See the Refectory band list.

The Leeds scene proved to David that a Leeds student could jump into a successful musical career. Members of influential bands had also studied at Leeds. “There were groups like the Gang of Four, the Mekons, and a band called the Three Johns. There were some gothic bands like the Sisters of Mercy and all those people. The place was really incredible.”

A good place to be

Having grown up in Manchester, Leeds, the city of his birth, became a logical place to attend University. “My school careers advisor school had told me that Leeds was good for mathematics,” says David. But it was the music scene that really attracted him. “I looked in the NME listings. There seemed to be some really good concerts in Leeds, at the Refectory especially. It made sense to come to Leeds.”

Having been a clever and quiet lad whose family moved frequently, David found a place to be himself at Leeds. “I’d been driven to be a musician from an early age and Leeds was a really good place for me to be.”

“I was always talking to the ents secretaries at the time,” says David. “Andy Kershaw was one of them. He reminded me that I badgered him with a, I was going to say cd, but they were cassettes at the time, to try to get a concert.”

The badgering, along with changing membership in his groups, eventually got him a gig in the Union. David recalls: “We once played in the Riley Smith Hall because a support group had pulled out, so they rang me up and asked if we could do a last minute support slot. I said ‘of course we can. I just live across the road.’”

When the Wedding Present formed in 1983, they developed a loyal following that extended to town as well as gown. “Our first set of concerts was all in Leeds,” says David. “We played at the University a couple of times. We played in the Tartan Bar, which I think is now Stylus, where we’re playing tonight. We also played the Royal Park Hotel in Leeds 6 and at the Adelphi in town.”

Fans would chuckle knowingly at David’s understatement. He did far more than play these venues: his witty lyrics and magnetic performances engendered a loyalty that still brings fans back to his gigs.

A band of students

Although driven by his music, David’s mathematics were good enough to get him accepted into a Masters programme at Leeds. But, he and other Wedding Present members were students with something else in mind. “The Masters was really to keep me going while the band got some success,” explains David.

Keith Gregory, an English student who got to know David by answering an advert for a bass player in the Union, had joined David in an earlier group, called The Lost Pandas. The drummer, Shaun Charman (Economics 1986), kept up with his degree work while the band found success.

Guitarist Peter Solowka, crossed the Pennines to join his old school mate in The Wedding Present. He studied for a postgraduate certificate in education at Leeds while the band got going. The first Wedding Present line-up was complete.

Music and maths

Back when it was still unusual, the band were able to stick to their creative guns by starting up their own record label. Finding success outside the conventional music industry must have required more than talent – they needed some common sense.

David was unusual as a talented musician and lyricist with a very logical mind.  “At school I was always in groups in my spare time but maths just seemed really easy to me for some reason,” he explains. “People say it’s not something you can actually acquire. It’s just a talent of thinking logically. I thought ‘I’m quite good at maths, I’ll have a good time at university and maybe not have to work too hard.’”

David enjoyed parts of his degree and still enthuses about the intellectual stretch that pure mathematics gave him. “I liked group theory and ring theory – things that didn’t have a bearing on the real world. There were some beautiful theories and abstract concepts that are really interesting, but most of it was working out proofs and differential equations. That applied part wasn’t for me.”

Success at last

The first Wedding Present single Go Out And Get ‘Em, Boy! brought them national attention and DJ John Peel championed them on his shows. He said “The boy Gedge has written some of the best love songs of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. You may dispute this, but I’m right and you’re wrong!”

More critical acclaim came when they independently released their first album, George Best, which NME called “an unmitigated delight”, in 1987. From that point on, band members changed but David stayed constant. In 1989, they released another popular album, Bizarro, which featured the hit single Kennedy.

The band recorded 11 legendary Peels sessions, which included a detour into Russian and Ukrainian folk music (Solowka has a Ukrainian background) from bittersweet, breathtakingly honest love songs immersed in whirlwind.

1992 saw a return to pop music when the band released a single every month, all of which made it into the charts and led the NME to describe the band as "casually revolutionary and underhandedly unique”.

Critics loved their top 40 album Saturnalia, with NME exclaiming: "David Gedge has just written one of the best pop albums of the year" while The Melody Maker noted that in the album, recorded in Cocteau Twins’ studio, you could "hear an experimentalism that would send half of New York back to the lab".

When David retired the Wedding Present name in 1997, he spent 7 years performing as Cinerama before starting up the Wedding Present again. The first album with the old name was Take Fountain, which prompted the Times to write: “Fans have long since recognised Gedge as more poet than pop star. Like Byron without the marsh fever, Take Fountain confirms his status as an extraordinary songwriter”

David’s return to the University of Leeds was part of a tour promoting the Wedding Present’s latest album, El Rey.

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