Time for another
Love is All Around - West Wet Wet
an entity I don't really understand.
I have never really felt anything about this song. I don't hate it, it didn't bother me particularly that it was Number 1 through the summer of 1994, I could also, probably, sing it all the way through, but, at the same time, it is nothing. Just no kind of song at all, either in the Troggs original version, or the Wet Wet Wet version. To me, who is clearly wrong.
I don't mind the Troggs. I don't mind Wet Wet Wet. I actually really love Goodnight Girl, in a weird way.
But this ... I can't understand why they chose it for Four Weddings ..., I can't understand why people kept on buying it; it's like an album track by a band that almost got signed.
Yet there it is, breaking all records if it had really wanted to. I was watching the Tops of the Pop from 1994 earlier this year, and Marti Pellow forgets the words in one of their first appearances on the show ... I wonder if he thought "well, that's fucked it," but it hadn't..
It is also interesting that at a point where Oasis are just about in the popular consciousness, Wet Wet Wet are, to a man, attired and styled like they're just back from buying "been to see the Maharishi" fancy dress costumes. Groovy, baby.
Interesting that 80s bands Tears for Fears and Wet Wet Wet both made very Beatles-indebted music in the early/mid 90s (were there any others, i'm trying to remember ...?) but were by no means seen as part of the Britpop party.
I'm usually a sucker for the music in iffy romcoms. It can make me love both the song and/or the film far more than is appropriate, whether its Sway in American Pie or Ocean Drive and Stars in proto-Four Weddings, Jack and Sarah. But i can hardly remember Love is All Around being in Four Weddings ... it's just one of the songs played by the shonky wedding band, right? There is some quite nice use of jazz standards in the film, isn't there? I guess the supposed central romance is so secondary to some people's (e.g my) enjoyment of the film, compared to the comic set pieces, the friendships and the general vibes, it barely feels like a romcom at all.
I thought the film held up well for a long time. I didn't watch it, I don't think, in the summer of 94, but soon afterwards, and generally enjoyed catching up with it on TV for years - bonking old Toby De Lisle etc - but saw a bit of it recently, and it really felt, for the first time, wildly dated, twee, misogynistic etc bit unfair really, I just think its comic style has rather been eaten by its many successors.
I also wonder the extent to which Four Weddings had a real-word effect on wedding culture. Richard Curtis says the film was influenced by his own friend circle and their experiences of going to weddings in their 20s and 30s,, so perhaps it was already like that, but speaking to people of the previous generation, it certainly seems there was less picture-book extravagance and by the time my generation of weddings came about, everyone had seen 4 Weddings and envisioned some part of something similar.
My 20s and 30s were full of variations on the theme - castles and grand Scottish hotels, idyllic fields, vast marquees. bumping into the same people, dancing to the same songs. I fuckin loved it, no doubt, but, looking back, surely there was something performative and imitative, perhaps we can all look a little askance at the spiralling costs and the special touches ...
,,, anyway, all that was a long way off on my 16th birthday. I'd only been to one wedding, was about to go to my second funeral.
On the day, sure I was playing cricket again in the Cotswolds. Just starting to emerge from the darkest of the worst of adolescence. GCSEs were done, slightly less terrible haircut. It was the USA World Cup that summer. At school, the next year, people would be mainly being less horrible to each other.
I was still not there musically, but almost there. I'd bought The Jam Greatest Hits, then followed that up with the red herrings of some 80s compilations. I wasn't buying the NME yet but read Caitlin Moran's music column in the Times, read the music reviews in Time Out, was starting to known who was who and what was what. Kurt Cobain had died in April and Blur had released Parklife. The same Caitlin Moran and Johnny Vaughan had briefly presented an absolute mess of a Channel 4 music show called Naked City where I'd been unimpressed by Oasis and loved the Manics doing La Tristesse Durere on a bandstand.
I'm still not there with Blur. It won't be until a November 1994 episode of Top of the Pops where Suede do The Wild Ones and Blur do End of a Century (the episode was just on BBC4, it also had live performances by Sheryl Crow and Kate Bush, as well as Urge Overkill doing a creepy song from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack) that I decide to buy Parklife. I'm surprised, retrospectively, it's not Suede I go all in on. I love The Wild Ones, and had liked all their songs I'd heard. Perhaps I knew I didn't have the hips for it. So Blur it was.
But for almost a third of 1994, it was Love is All Around, doing the same job as Everything I Do, but a fair bit worse.
Marti Pellow ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0VOJ0Z3vY0&ab_channel=Limmy
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