The Comedy of Errors: The Wedding Present - California (23 May 1992)

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California marked the halfway point in The Wedding Present’s year-long assault on the UK Top 40.  It had been a case of so far, so good with their first five singles for the year all charting between Numbers 10 and 26.  California continued the trend, peaking at Number 16.  For me, it’s their best single of the run alongside Blue Eyes. Opening with a minor Hard Day’s Night chord and driven along by an acoustic shuffle-beat, close to baggy, according to one YouTube commenter, all wrapped around a typically wide-eyed and compassionate David Gedge lyric in which he encourages his love to come away with him, while offering whole-hearted support to her while she tries to decide.  He dials down the Kermitisms in his vocal and includes the inevitable line of  goggle-eyed awe at her naked body, a tendency which leads me to believe that the default position of his persona in the songs where he is not trying straining at the leash to be adult after a break-up, is to be the sympathy fuck of women who are being misused by unworthy men.  In other words, embodying the Orange Juice Cosolation Prize theory.
As 1992 moved into 1993, I found myself occupying this role, but with the annoying imbalance that I was offering sympathy but receiving no fucks from the various women I tried to support.  What make Gedge’s efforts all the more heart rending is the undertone of pleading that accompanies it - as though what he is suggesting is perfectly sensible, but that he knows the silly bitch will go back to what is making her unhappy.  Nevertheless, he will still be there for her, because being second best is a better ranking than not being in contention at all.  And maybe there is still hope anyway as suggested by the strident electric guitar chords over the final 25 seconds, which sound like a passionate argument about the merits of running away to the sunshine, before ending on a note like a slammed door.  In true Wedding Present style, your mood can let you decide whether the door closed with Gedge marooned on the doorstep, or with him and his love closing it on their old lives and situation, in order to head for their new, sun drenched beginning.  He presents a compelling case for escape, so I know which way I’m going to lean.  They deserve it.

Peel revealed that The Wedding Present were going to do the decent thing and bundle up the A and B-sides of their singles for the first half of 1992 into a compilation album.  Hit Parade 1 duly reached Number 22 on the UK Albums Chart.

Video courtesy of TheWeddingPresentVEVO