From the opening, bruising, thrashing, energetic guitar salvos through to the slow, aching, desperately disparate chorus Ringway to SeaTac is a heartbreaking paean to the loss of a love still held so dear. It’s the final weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds of a way of life slowly self destructing in microcosm. The pounding fits of anger, hate and disgust are parried perfectly by the sullen, distraught slices of melancholia. Just as the big bang was his birth, this is the story David Gedge’s life imploding and falling in on itself as the romance that he thought would last forever crumbles to dust.

When the writer was setting himself out to make the album whence the track is lifted (Take Fountain) he was nursing the wounds of the recent demise of a long term relationship, and whereas he has used other peoples emotions as song fodder in the past he now had his own, intense feelings of loss, and of hope for the future to draw upon. With all this in mind he boarded a plane from Manchesters Ringway airport which transported him away from his recent troubles and landed him at Seattle Tacoma (SeaTac) airport in America. It was here that his most heartfelt, raw and emotive work of recent years was penned and crafted into a set of songs that it is impossible not to be moved by.

Through it’s two minutes and forty seconds Ringway to SeaTac pulls the listener in, holds them down with a rough and ready struggle before breaking down in pieces as it declares...

“...watching you walk back to your car, was the lowest point of my life so far...”

Composure is regained and in a fit of pique our hero explains how he is ”good at hiding pain” and anyway he’ll “be five thousand miles away”. It’s a great stab at bravado, but easy to see through, no amount of cock-sure swaggering can cover up the innate sense of loneliness, of pain, and of isolation. Sure, yeah, there is a whole world out there that is shrinking fast (as he once told us), and how we should take it all and make it last forever – well it’s easy to say, but when you’re in the depths of despair all you really need to do is work through it all, slowly and surely and go from there. It’s the old time heals all wounds scenario, it’s a cliché, and why is it a cliché? Well, it’s a cliché because it’s true.

Maybe penning these songs has allowed David Gedge to move on, away from what was an integral part of his life, and start afresh, maybe the demons are exorcised, it’s to be hoped so.

Brought along with the title track are two songs from opposite ends of the David Gedge songbook. Shivers is a whimsical ditty first previewed in their last Peel Session in the weeks before the man himself was cruelly taken, it evokes feelings of listening to those old 78’s round at your grand parents house in the days when the radiogram provided a welcome refuge from cold winters, dark evenings, from a time when central heating was unheard of and we made our own fun. They are times we’ll never get back, and might not even want back, but their aura is summoned with this delicate male/female duet that tells a story two lovers slowly realising just how they had drifted apart, that there was nothing left, it was all over.

Contrasting more dramatically than I could begin to describe is American Tan a one and a half minute dizzy romp of layered scuzzball guitars that opens with a wail of feedback and closes equally as abruptly. The subject matter is a little more uplifting with an illicit striptease from the object of ones desire providing the story board to the thrillingly to the point soundtrack.

In all, a neat package, which is surprising considering just how different the songs are, but they provide a perfect little set which, as always should be cherished.

The Wedding Present continue on the road through Spain and France before returning to the U.K. in November, if you haven’t seen them yet this year then what are you waiting for?

Johnny Mac

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