Hope on horizon with Wet Wet Wet Sussex dates
It was a fluke that the concert announcements came as we were all enjoying a glimmer of vaccine hope before Christmas, says Wet Wet Wet’s Graeme Clark. Since then, of course, we have entered a third national lockdown. But the dates were a statement of hope, Graeme says. “We might be going to get back to how things used to be. It might be a little bit different, but the essence is there, the hope is that 2021 is going to be better than (last) year. What I have found really difficult is living with the uncertainty. When you are living with uncertainty, there is no closure. It is just open-ended. You are just thinking ‘Where is this going? How is this going to end?’ For all of us, it could have been something like the next four or five years of this. But I don’t care how long the vaccine is going to take to roll out because at least now we know that the end is in sight.” Wet Wet Wet play The Hawth, Crawley on November 16. They also play Portsmouth Guildhall on November 9. Tickets are now on sale for dates which still seem an awfully long way away. At least the band managed to get a gig in before the end of 2020. The eight-month gap is the longest they have ever had in a band history stretching back not far off four decades. 2020 was tough: “We are usually out there amongst people playing our music, but really that’s only half the story. The other half of the story is writing the songs, and it has been like an extended writing time. But you have to do it on your own. “It has brought into sharp focus that music is the thing that glues and bolts onto our life. It means so much more to everyone when you have got something like this. I hope that is what it has brought back. Let’s face it, we are the great consumers. We go to the great church of Ikea on Sundays and buy flatpack things. And that hasn’t been on the agenda. You have just got to hope that we emerge more appreciative. There has been a lot of talk of music having no value because it is free. I hope that we can go back to a different way of valuing it.” Certainly longevity and love for it stand the band in good stead: “We were very much together growing up, sharing the same classrooms, that same background together, and from a very early age, I knew that I wanted to play songs, from when I was 14 or 15 years old. It was not quite laid down, but I knew that that was the only thing that interested me. We were just lucky enough to realise that dream that we all shared. “If you look at Glasgow, for example, there were lots of better bands than we were, and I don’t know why and at what point the light shone on us in particular. But really there were a number of things that happened for us. We came from the west of Scotland, from Glasgow, and Glasgow was metamorphosing, changing from being this dark and violent city into a place of great beauty. We became almost like the poster boys for that. It threw us up on the crest of a wave. We became successful. I often wonder if we had come a bit earlier or a bit later, it might not have happened. We were lucky that we were like-minded people together.” And at that moment in time. “Timing is everything, just as it is in music. And we were lucky that we were surrounded by a lot of good people. But no one is as surprised as me that we are now talking about it nearly 40 years on. If somebody had told me back then that we would be having this conversation now, I wouldn’t have believed them. The thing about it is that you can’t analyse it. The real story is that in 1980 and 1981 when we left school, I met these guys that used to come to my mother’s living room.” No one had a job. These were desperate times: “But that enabled us to centre our thoughts on learning an alternative apprenticeship. For those two years, we were learning to play music...”