Dalliance.co.uk

The Wedding Present at The Duchess, York

The Duchess in York is a tidy little venue. A touch dark perhaps and not the sort which could be used for a quiet drink but a decent place to enjoy The Wedding Present running through the 20 year old Bizarro album.

The Wedding Present are now as they ever shall be remarkable good value live. Gedge injects songs written two decades - and a great deal of the audience's hairline - ago with a kind of vigour which could prompt one to think the he had only just penned the line "Lost your love of life? Too much Apple pie..."

The Duchess in York is the son of the The Duchess of York the famed Leeds venue where many a man of my age found the joy of music. Grant Lee Buffalo, Even As We Speak, Green Day, The Voodoo Queens, Nirvana, Passion Fruit and Holy Bread, Elastica, Not Oasis, Sleeper, The Popguns and on and on the list of bands seen good and bad befits a venue of such legend.

Gedge himself was a regular - he featured in a YTV five minute programme called "My Favourite Pub" - and everyone had a story about encountering him cutting the figure at the time as he did of the Leeds arm of the Madchester scene. In hindsight the bands there and there could not be further apart, but that seemed lost on us at the time and The Wedding Present were taken to heart because while the other side of the Pennines had the antics of Shaun and Bez we had Dave.

And Dave meant it. He still does. New tune End Credits stands up against most other things played while mid-1990s track Real Thing has an edge of the unlistened about it. There is a rich back catalogue and it is worth a trawl as the majority of tonight's gig proves but the highlight is a live version of 2005's Interstate 5

Everything should be new, even the old.