The Wedding Present are releasing a live album featuring a collection of archive recordings dating back to 1994.
Spanning 17 tracks, Live 1994 is pieced together from a show that the band played at the venue La Laiterie in Strasbourg in the titular year. The recordings were previously made available on cassette, but will now be given a wider release on CD and streaming platforms.
Speaking about how the recording of the Strasbourg show came about, The Wedding Present founder David Gedge said in a statement: “As The Wedding Present became more well known in the late 1980s, the number of people in the audience at concerts wasn’t the only thing that increased. We also saw an abundance of people selling cassettes that had been illicitly recorded at those shows.
“At first, we felt flattered and, I suppose, kind of famous, but, after we’d listened to a few, we realised that some bloke holding a Walkman in the crowd was never going to produce a good quality recording. So we decided to combat this by releasing our own versions. Between 1987 and 1996, whenever there was some kind of recording device hooked up to the mixing desk at a venue, we would pop in a chrome audio cassette or digital audio tape and record the show.
“After each tour I would then painstakingly listen to them all – such is my unwavering devotion to my art – and pick the best ones to release. In this way, the band’s ‘Official Live Bootleg’ cassette series came to be. We released sixteen of them in total – one or two every year – and, since 2007, I have been working through the pile of tapes and having them remastered to be released on CD.
“We’re now up to 1994 and have arrived in Strasbourg, France, where the 13th cassette was recorded. It’s from the celebrated venue La Laiterie, which we played at again a couple of years ago, actually. But this is from our first visit and, given that it came three months after we’d released our fourth studio album, Watusi, the set features songs from that record together with earlier material. The versions on this live recording are considerably more energetic and electric than the album versions, though!”
Clue Records will release Live 1994 on June 21, 2024.
