I saw The Wedding Present and Mark Robinson.

March 31, 2026. Day .

Mark Robinson at Gasa Gasa, March 31 2026.

The Wedding Present was the draw, but a few people had to be excited to see "Mark Robinson plays Unrest". I was. Amusingly to me, he was sitting outside in the bar part and Melanie and I asked if we could share a table with him, and he said sure. I didn't know it was him, I didn't know what he looked like.

He announced "I'm going to play fifty-one songs", and then basically played a "mega-medley" (word coined by Wade Hammett) that was just the hooks from every good Unrest song. He only stopped about twice. It was a surprisingly compelling way to play a show, to basically remind his fans how much we liked his songs thirty years ago. Not sure it got him any new fans but it worked for me. Wade also commented correctly that it's quite remarkable to experience the power of a completely clean guitar tone is, provided you strum a lot and turn the volume way up.

He had a couple of the albums on my Discogs want list, but I just didn't have the scratch.

The Wedding Present was here to play their entire album "Seamonsters", but they played, I'd guess, eight or nine songs before they started with that, including at least one new one, and I have to say I liked that part of the set the best. Well, I don't have to say that, but I did.

The Wedding Present at Gasa Gasa, March 31 2026.

I didn't take many pictures, because it feels rude. (I watched one whole song through a guy's elevated phone. It was just easier that way.) So this was the only picture I got where excellent lead guitarist Rachael Wood is visible. Her playing was terrific. Creative, loud and crunchy, appropriate for making the songs into something more than their somewhat simple frameworks could do on their own. She played some songs while capoed up to the tenth or twelfth fret.

The Wedding Present at Gasa Gasa, March 31 2026.

I've always admired David Gedge as a performer and singer. He sounds like he's expressing the point of view of a self-centered, not quite chauvinistic, man whose girlfriend is younger than he is and doesn't always do what he wants. I can't understand all the words, but that's what they all sound like. His song "My Favourite Dress", which they did not play, is a pretty remarkable song about jealousy ("Jealousy is an essential part of love"). It's not metaphorical, it's simply descriptive, or argumentative. He sounds angry, mostly. He growls.

I was sort of not a fan of the production of their records (generally a wall of grunge), and I thought I had hearing loss because the words were mixed so low. On this show, though, I really loved how it sounded. His (mostly) clean guitar mixed with Rachael Wood's (mostly) dirty complicated sound was powerful, and combined with drummer Christopher Hardwick's "machine gun snare rolls" (description by Alec V.), it reminded me of when I could really get excited by music that was mostly just guitars. I guess they could have made the choice to couch Gedge's words in something more sensitive (and they made a couple of records that are "semi-acoustic demos" of their already released material; I like those), but for this show the noise seemed to be the exact sound to carry the words' meaning, or at least their attitude.