Fuse Festival: David Gedge and the BBC Big Band + The Vessels, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. 

The Vessels are attempting to tame time, stretching seconds like elastic, compressing minutes into spaces fit to burst. Hunched over their instruments one moment, guitar and keyboard notes soaked in endless reverb, pulling the pin with an explosion of feedback and percussion the next,  arms and bodies flailing wildly.

Like Sigur Ros, the easiest, laziest comparison to make, the wax and wane of this Leeds-based five-piece’s predominantly instrumental sounds from debut album White Fields and Open Devices - and you can’t make out what they’re saying in the occasional lyric anyway - isn’t as abstract as it may seem at first.

After all the sturm und drang has faded away, it’s clear that this most urban of bands, playing in the most urban of settings, want to capture the mystery and the majesty of the great outdoors, of seas and skies and hills, images of which are being projected behind them in the great indoors.

It’s a dramatic and skilful performance and the crowd inside the West Yorkshire Playhouse for this Fuse event, possibly the biggest number of people to witness such full-blown experimental rock in the city since the days of the Futurama festival in the early 1980s, respond enthusiastically.

But the Vessels’ very own cleverness finally tells against them.

Despite all their efforts to ape the ebbs and flows of nature, the casual clothes and fashionably scruffy facial hair, this Leeds band never quite go with the flow, they always remain in control.

Modern alt-rock has its own set of conventions and structures, musical chains which mustn't be broken

Once the largely-forty something audience’s applause has died down, Yorkshire’s finest greeting one of their own on home turf, albeit in an unusually arty setting, it doesn’t take more than three songs for the fear to set in that tonight’s headliner may be attempting a mission impossible.

Indie god David Gedge is also playing with time - but can he really recapture a past that was never his?

For that small section of his fanbase who revere his brief but fruitful spell of romantic, cinematic pop in his Cinerama incarnation in the late1990s, the idea of remodeling songs from his lengthy back catalogue to enable a top class, 18-piece orchestra to refashion them in the swinging style of the late 1950s is a bit of a surprise.

For those Wedding Present diehards for whom indie starts and finishes with no-nonsense guitar riffs and down to earth lyrics, the idea of Gedge singing with the BBC Big Band must seem like the maddest thing he, or anyone else of his stature from that generation of rock history, has come up with.

It’s the sort of thing that might be expected from Morrissey or Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout, though neither has actually attempted what he is attempting.

Oh well, Gedge has an ace up his suitably lounge lizard jacket sleeve. Everyone wants him to succeed, even those among the crowd who view jazz as the last four-letter word.

Once the shock of what is occurring has passed, the exciting novelty of the opening minutes worn off and the original adrenalin evaporated, a worrying question arises.

Is this Gedge with the BBC Big Band or Gedge versus the BBC Big Band?

Looking a little like the debonair sleazeball played by Dean Stockwell in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Gedge cuts a slightly lonely figure - a rogue outcrop in a sea of BBC musicians.

He’s not known for possessing a voice suited to jazz or swing - or a knowledge or love for either form of music.

His breathy vocal style is distinctive but limited, based on honesty rather than overwhelming melodic powers.

So far in his 25-year career he’s successfully pulled off confessional in the context of intimate backings, aggrieved and defiant on the sort of intense, riff-based, guitar songs which earned The Wedding Present a mention in the Guinness Book of Records in 1992 for scoring a new top 20 hit every month for a year, and sardonic on his more playful, pop numbers which, ironically, rarely chart.

Faced with such an accomplished, not to forget, large orchestra, his matter of fact vocals risk being overpowered at any moment, the BBC Big Band blowing up a storm around him.

As he paces back and forth, waiting for his cue after another impressive sax or trumpet solo, he’s starting to look like a cross between a nervous parent and a condemned man facing the gallows.

Their his songs, ranging all the way from 1987’s breakthrough album George Best to last year’s El Ray, or they were, rather.

Arranger Tommy Laurence has done an amazing job of reconstructing what were simple numbers melodically into complex arrangements worthy of a band of this high calibre

Which makes Gedge’s job even trickier. Just as he’s not sure whether to go the whole ’Live at the Sands’ hog in his stage movements, settling for the odd, slightly bashful click of his fingers, vocally he finds himself forced to stretch for musical shapes which were never likely to be a good fit.

By the time the setlist reaches the early classic My Favourite Dress, Gedge’s own usually avuncular self-confidence is heading for the stage door.

It takes him two false starts and some jokey apologies before nailing the opening notes to his, and everyone’s else’s, relief.

The mini-drama proves a turning point, bursting the bubble of nerves inside this high-brow venue which has seen plenty of drama in its time.

From now the good-natured Gedge will fall back on his likeable, self-deprecating wit to distance himself from both the band and the ambitious nature of the event itself.

Which is disappointing but understandable in the circumstances.

He’s not going to swing, he never was. It’s not really his event. It’s been hijacked by the conductor, Steve Sidwell and his accomplished colleagues - with Gedge’s own permission.

The one thing which survives this bold and brave but flawed experiment is quality of the songs themselves.

The brilliant twists and turns of these radically rearranged versions put Gedge’s lyrics centre stage revealing these bitter-sweet bedroom tales to be just as clever, witty and touching as fans always said they were - question marks turned to song.

As the band shakes his back catalogue like a dog with a bone, utterly sure of itself, the words float free into the gods.

There’s even a few moments when the show manages to metamorphose into the strange, fantasy mix of the Rat Pack and the John Peel Show the crowd might have dreamt of in advance.

The afore-mentioned My Favourite Treat is a genuine success at the third attempt, the arranger for once letting the pretty melody and pithy words speak for themselves.

The less is more principle also applies to stripped down versions of Boo Boo from last year‘s El Rey album and Don‘t Touch That Dial from 2005‘s Take That Fountain.

Accompanied mainly by double bass and vibraphone on the former and solo piano on the latter, Gedge voice finally comes into its own and glimpses appear of what might have been - or still might be.

Suddenly it’s possible to imagine Gedge as a solo performer in a late night club at the dark end of the street, surviving on his character and his songs, like an English version of American Music Club’s craggy-voiced Mark Eitzel or Nick Cave,Leonard Cohen, even.

Pushed so far out on a limb, the crowd may not quite have got what it wanted; Gedge remains less an indie Frank Sinatra, more an indie Alan Bennett.

Tonight could have been his coronation, the moment when his fans saluted a veteran indie hero finally ascending to high brow respectability by singing jazz in an upmarket theatre.

In the end, David Gedge failed to turn the clock back but in taking such a big chance he may have opened up the possibility of new futures.

Graham Chalmers

© Modern Music Review (2009)