The Wedding Present Cup: Stage 1, Group 8

      

Group 8

• Back a Bit...Stop
• Panama
• Heather
• Go Go Go
• Soup
• Dreamworld
• Give My Love To Kevin
• Secretary
• Softly Softly
• Convertible
• Flame On
• Red Shoes By The Drugstore
• Palisades
• Snake Eyes
• Larry's

The Results

The top two of 'Heather' and 'Give My Love To Kevin' was predictable, although Kirk, ever the outlier, gave the former a zero and the latter only two marks. 'Convertible' was another comfortable qualifier which brought out a poetic side in a few judges: 'a song that sounds like the sun has come out' thought James; Mike suggested that you should 'just close your eyes, imagine yourself midsummer, on a highway, driving God knows how many mph.... '

I had wondered whether 'Secretary' (the song that was at the bottom of my ranking when I did my blog) might be the first non-cover that would fail to trouble the scoreboard, but it did attract some support. Kirk actually gave it a maximum 12: 'They fit more of interest into 2 minutes of this than some bands do in entire albums.' Both Gav M and Ian made the point that DLG is sometimes criticised for serving up TWP-by-numbers and 'Secretary' is at least something a bit different. That said, it did still attract plenty of derision: 'Should be called Excretary, and it deserves -89 points' (Bob); 'Maybe the worst they ever recorded' (Mike); 'Utter rubbish' (Johnny).

In fact, two songs ended up with significantly less points than 'Secretary'. 'Soup' was panned by the majority of the panel. 'The word soup has no place in a song,' asserted Joanna, 'if I could give it negative points I would.' 'This is one of those,' noted Johnny, 'where Bob would say "Gedge had a line he wanted to shoehorn into a song"…and I agree.' He wasn't far off the mark, Bob's actual comment being 'a forced reference to show us that he'd discovered Seinfeld.' 

At the foot of the table was the cover of Tom Waites' 'Red Shoes By The Drugstore.' I would agree with Ian that 'if you are to cover this bloke then you to improve on the original. This doesn’t.' Mike's (to my mind heretical) view was 'I hate Tom Waits. TWP can't make that any better.' 

'Panama' was fairly positively received by a minority, although both Gricey and Gav M were irritated by the handclaps. Once again Johnny predicted Bob's response ('This is one of those where Bob would say "Gedge had a line he wanted to shoehorn into a song"…and I agree') and once again he was pretty accurate, Bob's comment being, 'why does he feel the need to write songs based around a f*cking palindrome?'

'Go Go Go' was divisive, gaining a five or better from four of the panel, but zeros from nearly half of them. Johnny enjoyed its 'chime and melody, underscored by a churn of gruffness' and Keg thought it a 'satisfying tour de force with an earworm chorus.' Ian, however, found it 'too twee.' 'Softly Softly' had its supporters - both Keg and Kirk rated it more highly than 'Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah' - but not enough to give it any chance of qualification. 

'Flame On' did surprisingly well, falling only five points short of going through. It was buoyed by maximum marks from both Keg and Bob ('a glorious racket with lovely quiet passages, a chiming metronome of a guitar line running through it... criminally relegated to a b side'). 

'Back a Bit...Stop' gained marks from all but two of the panel, and 'Snake Eyes' squeezed into the last qualifying spot, despite receiving generally lukewarm comments such as this from Steve M: 'I listened to this and at the end I couldn't remember anything about it... a bit TWP by numbers.' 

The other qualifiers were 'Palisades' (which Steve M described as 'beautiful'), 'Larry's' ('utterly gorgeous... achingly heartfelt, dreamy and devastating in equal measure' according to Johnny) and 'Dreamworld' (although the 'you make me want to shout' line came in for some stick).

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