The Wedding Present: Hit Parade 1

My main motivation for buying this was almost certainly to hear The Wedding Present doing Neil Young's Don't Cry No Tears, which had been the B-Side of one of the twelve singles they put out in 1992. But I was too slow off the mark to buy that single, just as a I was too slow to get the Neil Young cover feature of Uncut last month with its special CD. So I had to buy a whole album instead.

I think The Wedding Present got some record (pun not intended) out of their little conceit: the only artists to be in the Top 30 every month of the year, apart from Elvis, or something like that. On this evidence, however, the A-Sides of the singles weren't up to much. Let's Make Some Plans is great, a classic wedge of Gedge: "Let's make some plans, so they can go wrong". But there's nothing else in the original songs to touch that.

The pleasure is in the cover versions. Don't Cry No Tears is unremarkable, and so is Falling, the Twin Peaks theme song. But it's nice to hear The Go-Betweens' Cattle and Cane, and Gedge fairly tears into Pleasant Valley Sunday.

There must be a Hit Parade 2 somewhere with the second half of the year, but I've never explored that.

MusicBrainz entry for this album