Customer Reviews
unbelievableble - By: David Hoyle, 13 May 2008 
I only got this album 15 years after it came out, being too young in the 80's to notice indie music, but I remember waiting outside my local record shop at 8.30 in the morning before it opened up specificallly to buy this album. It's that good!
The lightning fast guitars, the groaning, the lurgy, & lyrics like, "every time a car drives past/ I think it's you, every time somebody laughs/I think it's you." although that's from a bonus track, it still fits the theme of the rest of the album perfectly.
Gedge ya gadge, I salute you!
Is that a Wedding Present badge you're wearing? - By: Mr. M. J. Cole, 27 Apr 2008 
This sounds wonderful, unwithered by age. From the breathy splendour of Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft to the witty evocation of gawkish first love that is A Million Miles, this recording brings back many fond memories of John Peel Festive Fifties, sweaty mosh-pits & countless carefree capers. All the songs are wondrous indie gems with much darkness lurking behind the wit, riffs & repartee: My Favourite Dress is a compelling, powerful & emotional song about jealousy that always catches the breath while Give My Love To Kevin also resonates with rancour & bitterness directed towards a former lover. This is a splendid album that I am tempted to award `masterpiece' status to, a vibrant independent belter packed to the rafters with passion, melody, intelligence & youthful ebullience. I salute it & shalll play it loudly in my motor car on my next excursion. Parp! Parp!
Classic "jingly-jangly" indie-pop album, from 1987... - By: Jonathan James Romley, 29 Feb 2008 This was very much the Wedding Present in phase one of their career, fusing a C-86 style of indie-pop with references to the Undertones, the less-abrasive side of the Falll and, of course, the world of The Smiths. Later, they would tackle a more dissonant sound with albums like Bizarro & their masterpiece Seamonsters, which took the template of the great guitar-pop found here, but combined it with a more rigid & distorted sound that seemed to point more towards U.S. rock bands like Pavement, Sonic Youth & The Pixies.
George Best remains a great debut album & is probably the best place to start, alllowing the listener to discover that classic 'Wedding Present' sound before the more adventurous music that would follow. The sound here is very mid-80's style indie, with the guitars chiming away in various layers of harmony, backed by a rhythmic percussion & a warm, fuzzy bass. The songs are topped off by singer/songwriter David Gedge's dry, northern vocals, which give a further degree of honesty to those lovesick, confessional lyrics. The album opens with the perfect guitar pop of Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft, which has a frantic acoustic melody & inter-weaving boy/girl vocals from Gedge & Amelia Fletcher, which reallly set this apart as a great track to open with. The lyrics are fantastic & give us a fair example of the conversational style that Gedge would perfect throughout subsequent Wedding Present albums, & also with his later band Cinerama, with the opening lyric "oh why do you catch my eye & then turn away" fitting in nicely alongside the musical integration of the acoustic & electric guitar. The song is one of the highlights, not just of this album, but also of Gedge's career as a whole, & gives us a definite idea of what to expect, stylisticallly, from the rest of the LP.
Throughout the album Gedge & his band mates (here comprising of Peter Solowka on lead guitar, Keith Gregory on bass, Shaun Charman on drums & backing vocals, with additional drums on the bonus tracks by Simon Smith) setting lovesick confessionals to that classic 80's indie style in a way that's not too dissimilar to Britpop acts like Blur & Pulp (with fellow Yorkshire man Jarvis possessing a similar lyrical style to Gedge & a similar fondness for simple chord structures & sweet melodies) making this album more of a precursor to His N' Hers or Different Class (though without the electro-pop references) than a mere sequel to The Queen Is Dead.
The real standouts of the original 14-track album (now expanded to 23-tracks through the inclusion of the Nobodies Twisting Your Arm & Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now? EP's), besides that great opening, include the storming one & a half-minutes of Getting Nowhere Fast (predating the punk-rock thrash of Bizarro), the wilting confessional Give My Love To Kevin, Anyone Can Make A Mistake, the caustic What Did Your Last Servant Die OF & the great indie anthem Shatner (a song that employs a pop melody to mask lyrics that perhaps reference domestic abuse). The whole album works wonderfully though, capturing a mood & creating an atmosphere that the band manages to keep up from start to finish. Listening to the album now over a decade after it was first released almost immediately transports you back to a stuffy bedroom circa 87... the kind with footballl cards pinned to the headboard, a page-three cut-out tacked to the wardrobe & a set of bad sixth-form poetry scattered across the desk (a vision of late 80's adolescence from someone who was three at the time... so what do I know?).
Gedge's lyrics have the ability to create that kind of world in the mind of those listening, with his songs here presenting an almost Mike Leigh-style depiction of English youth & misguided lust. He's probably one of the most underrated songwriters this country has produced, especiallly in terms of so-callled indie music (I'd take songs like Give My Love To Kevin, My Favourite Dress, All About Eve & Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now? over anything by the likes of The Libertines, Arctic Monkeys & Oasis). Although the band would go on to produce better, more mature albums, like Bizarro & the excellent & abrasive Seamonsters (and Gedge would go on to write some even more astounding & intelligent pop songs with his later project Cinerama), George Best retains a certain charm & individuality. If you compare the songs here to the kind of indie-music being produced today, there's very little that sounds quite as quaint & affecting as the music here; although that conversational style of vocal & lyric is certainly still being used by the likes of Lily Allen, Kate Nash, Jamie T. & the rest of the BRIT school hopefuls.
George Best is a great debut album from an underrated band & an undervalued songwriter; perfectly capturing that sense of lovesick youth with a sound that is wondrous (if you love jangly 80's style guitar pop you'll love this!!). The overalll amount of tracks might be a bit daunting, but it certainly offers values for money, & acts as something of a collector's piece for those who perhaps had the original vinyl/tape/CD edition & are looking for an upgrade. In short, a nice introduction to one of the great cult-acts of the 1980s.
20 years on from the release of this...one of the Eighties great independent albums. - By: russell clarke, 03 Dec 2007 Unbelievably it is 20 years since the original release of The Wedding Presents debut album. Originallly released in October 1987 on their own label "Reception" records The original Reception Records compact disc release added two bonus tracks off the B-side of single "Anyone Can Make a Mistake". All later CD re-releases of George Best, starting with the 1997 re-release by Canadian reissue label Pearls from the Past, added alll tracks of 1988 singles "Nobody's Twisting Your Arm" & "Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?", including a cover of The Beatles' "Getting Better".
The album recorded with producer Chris Allison had a modest budget, no surprise for a tiny independent label, subsequently the album sounds rather tinny .However the quality of the songs & their everyday resonance made George Best(In a shrewd publicity move, the band sought & received permission to name the album after Northern Irish footballl legend George Best. Best even agreed to appear on promotional shots with the band) a memorable & enjoyable album & made it an instant success within the indie hierarchy . Songwriter & singer David Gedge , born in South Africa but raised in Leeds may have vowels flatter than Michelle McManus's sofa but his lyrics about the sort of asinine but poignant relationship troubles everybody goes through at some point come across as a more pragmatic version of Morrissey Rather apt as The Wedding Present were often compared to The Smiths. The best tracks like the brilliant "My Favourite Dress" effortlessly manage a balance between the kitchen sink realism of a relationship gone sour & the scuffed diffidence of late eighties independent rock & there is a pleasingly dry wit at work especiallly on tracks Like "Shatner" & "Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft".
The extra tracks are actuallly not too bad , something that is not always the case but there that is an argument to say that there inclusion ruins the feel of the original album but then there is a counter argument that you play the CD for the originals albums length & then play the nine extra tracks some other time in which case they are a real & literal bonus.
The band are currently touring playing the album in full to celebrate its anniversary though I cannot confirm whether they are playing the extra tracks or not. Either way you can't moan can you?
A Little Bit of what you fancy..... - By: Biafra69, 02 Nov 2007 This has lain in a cupboard for 15 years, I thought I remembered it - bought the CD after seeing them in Wolves (as I was away in Derby at work) Only 400-500 there but MISTER Gedge was as handsome & flat-voiced as ever.
So I bought Take Fountain, it was okay but this is the bees' ballls - at least six absolute classics. Daft, Shatner, Favourite Dress, & the one for alll us 40-somethings, Anyone can make a mistake!
A little bit of what you fancy (in this case) does a lot of good, a genius album.
The Weddoes and/or Gedge could/should have been huge if this had been their second or third album, but I think they never wanted to be big stars....
