Love Is All Around by Wet Wet Wet
With their multiplatinum status and more than 25 million records sold in a 40-year music career, Wet Wet Wet are one of the iconic UK pop-rock bands from the late 1980s into the 1990s.
Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, the four-piece band placed all their seven albums between 1987 and 1997 in the top three of the national charts. Then they broke up, reformed in the early 2000s, changed part of the line-up, re-debuted as a trio and released new work for today’s nostalgia circuit.
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Wet Wet Wet gained global acclaim in 1994, when their version of the 1960s song Love is All Around by The Troggs reached number one worldwide for months after being featured in the romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral, which famously starred Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell and Rowan Atkinson, and became the highest-grossing British film in history at the time.
Graeme Clark of Wet Wet Wet today ©️ to the owners
The success of Love is All Around followed through so much so that Wet Wet Wet eventually made the unprecedented decision to stop printing the record and let the phenomenon “die a natural death”, – as band founder Graeme Clark will explain in the course of this interview.
Graeme, how do you feel when you hear Love is All Around playing on the radio or you bump into Four Weddings and a Funeral on the television?
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Haha – it happened last week! I’ve been in the studio writing and creating, and I said, “I’ll take the music out of my head and I’d watch some rubbish television” – and of course, I put the television on, and the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral was on! Listen, I feel good about it, because, to me, Love is All Around is a good song. We did a good version of it. Round about the time it got released, it was ubiquitous – and I just mean it was everywhere you could imagine: I went out to the car and it was there, playing automatically on the radio, I was watching the morning television in the 1990s, and it came on the telly, and I was like “Oh, please!” – and I would turn that off. That was the kind of madness that was around when the song was first released; it was everywhere, and that sometimes had a negative impact. So, of course, you spend your life trying to distance yourself from the song, but there you go; last week, I went and watched the television and it was there, I hadn’t listened to it in a while and so I thought, you know what? It is a good song, we did a really good version of it and it still stands up today. It could have been worse, it could have been something like the birthday song or something that connected with people and then you have this terrible song that you absolutely hate. At least, with Love is All Around, I had no history with it as I didn’t write it; Reg Presley from The Troggs [a 1960s English band] wrote it, so I’ve not had that creative process with it in that sort of sense, it’s something that was just given to us, and that we just did. And for me, that’s the best thing, the things that are unexpected in your life are usually the things of value. We never thought about that song at all, if somebody said to us, “Do this song, it’s going to be your biggest hit ever”, then you would absolutely think about it and go, “Oh, okay, I need to think about this then”. But because we didn’t, we just let our souls and the creative juices flow in this band, we just let it happen, and it did something remarkable, so these are the things of true value in your life, I think.
Love is All Around was famously turned into Christmas is All Around in the 2003 British film Love Actually. How did you feel about it?
This song just had a change of lifespan, and that gave yet another life to it. I’m actually in the process of trying to redefine that song and do a different version of it, so, for me, this song has many twists and turns, so it was nice to see someone else getting a shot with it, and it also took off a bit of the intense scrutiny that was on us regarding that song, it took it off us and put it on something else. So we were thankful for it because then we were able to move on and put some new songs out. But to me, it’s still a great song, and the good thing about now we’re more than 30 years away from it, it’s that I can get a proper perspective of what it looks like and how I feel about it, whereas when you’re right in the middle of it, you cannot see or hear at all without having a preconceived idea.
Why did you delete the Love is All Around record from the shops right in the middle of promotion in 1994? What was the point of stopping selling?
It’s just one of these Wet Wet Wet’s anomalies! What we did at the time was that we were trying to record a new album. We had recorded Love is All Around very quickly, we gave it to the film company that was making Four Weddings and a Funeral, and they said “This is the greatest thing we’ve got here, we can see this going out and growing arms and legs, and we can see this being hugely successful and being a part of the movie”. So, of course, that all started to happen as we were recording the new album, so we were getting pulled as it was number one I think in 19 countries, and we were getting pulled everywhere, we were all over the world flying around to promote this song, but we never deleted the record from the shops, that was a story and a narrative that the press took. What we said was, we aren’t going to press any more copies of the record, we’re just leaving what’s left in the shops, and that would sell out, but we were not going to press any more records. In those times you did have to physically make the record, and the record company had no idea that it was going to be as hugely successful as it was. So of course, suddenly they were frantically trying to manufacture all these CDs and records that they could go and put in the record shops. So it was at that point that we said, well, we need to record a new album – we had already started it, but we were doing all this promotion, so we said let’s not manufacture any more of these records anymore, let the records that are in the record shop sell out, and it’ll die a natural death. That’s what we thought because we just had to move on. It was number one for four months so much that we’d stopped counting it in weeks and we’d started counting it in months. It wasn’t like four weeks at number one, it was four months at number one. It was just an extraordinary time, so sometimes these extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.
Which one of your songs are you most attached to?
Wet Wet Wet live show ©️ to the owners
Well, usually it’s the one I’m writing right now! There are certain things when songs go out that you write or you record, that if they connect with people, that obviously makes you feel great as a musician; I think that’s what you’re trying to do when you’re writing music or you’re creating or you’re doing anything like that. You want to kind of hit the audience between the eyes and sort of make them feel something. So I was always grateful when songs went into other countries where no one really spoke our language, but still, people connected with the music, and that was a big deal for me, because when you start out playing in a band, you’re doing it for your own – we were doing it because we didn’t have anything else to do, there were no jobs around at that time, so we were able to devote all our time to music. We loved music, we grew up with music, listening to the radio. Then, unbeknownst to us, music was going to change quite dramatically over the last 20 years, but when I grew up, it was a big social part. It was your friends. It was what we talked about. So, being able to make music has always been a privilege to me, and I’ve always loved that creative process of trying to create something that then goes out and connects with people that don’t even speak your language. I guess it’s so cliché, but music really is the universal language, music transcends people that can’t communicate because they speak different languages, but just everybody can relate to music in some sort of way. So that was always nice.
What achievements are you most proud of, at this stage in your career?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I think the fact that we’re still here and we’re still playing, to me, that’s a kind of big achievement, because I think it’s hard in the music industry to have longevity and to endure. So, you know, I can point to that we’ve played big gigs, we’ve done gigs with Elton John and played at the Nelson Mandela’s birthday concert – but I think that enduring and your music still having some sort of relevance today, as it did back in the 1980s – for me, that’s a big thing.
Are there any memories from the Nelson Mandela’s 70th Birthday Tribute Concert in 1988 you would like to share?
It was weird that people were just beginning to know our name around the country, and suddenly we were thrust upon the Wembley Stadium. It was a global audience, and we were told “Don’t worry about the 100,000 people out in the park: think about the billion people that are watching on television!” And so that was mildly terrifying to go from playing in front of hundreds of people to suddenly being seen by millions of people all over the world, so that’s what I remember about that. Also, there was a pretty serious nature to that as Nelson Mandela was iconic back then, and it was amazing to be part of that and celebrate a human being that kinda transcends all the generations, something that you would look back on with extreme pride.
What do you think of the current state of music?
Wet Wet Wet today are Graeme Clark, Kevin Simm and Graeme Duffin ©️ to the owners
I don’t want to sit here and say, “Oh, hey, music was better in my day”, but music was better in my day. Look, it just makes you sound old, and music has always been a driver for technology for young people, that’s the way it is. And really, young people don’t want to look at older guys like us or all the people that were around in our day and stuff like that. They want to create their own thing, so music is continually shape-shifting and moving in different directions. And the element is that when you speak to a young songwriter, they’ll say, “Well, my music isn’t for you. My music is for the kids”. Of course, there’s going to be this kind of disconnection between older audiences and younger audiences, so, to me, the trick nowadays is when you can take that disconnection and connect it to everybody and then everybody likes your music – that’s what you need to do. When we were around in the 1980s, people used to say that music was better in the 1960s and 1970s and terrible in the 1980s, and we now look back at the 1980s in the same way. I have a son who grew up in the 1990s, and he says to me, “Oh man, Dad, you were there in the 1980s – what was it like? It must have been amazing”. There’s always this thing, you need a bit of distance from the past to realise what was actually there; nowadays, a lot of music gets kind of thrown in the scrapheap, but I think we will look back at it and find the value of music that was made today or 10 years ago or 20 years ago when the advent of time has happened. So yeah, we can talk about how people buy the music today, and then talk about when we manufactured CDs and LPs, but that bit of it has gone now, that’s not really there, and vinyl has become this kind of funny niche that people have, like “Oh, I’ve got a record player”, it’s this kind of novelty almost, and I think it’s where the music business has changed. But people are still looking for a song, I think people still like the value of a good song, and that’s why I continually do it today, because I’m never going to sell a million records anymore, but I love that creative challenge of trying to create something from a bunch of chords and, hopefully, go and connect with people.
Are there any other differences in the music industry between today and the 1980s?
When it comes to technology, everyone has a laptop and the Abbey Road Studios app, so the theory is that anybody can make a record. In my day, the beauty was that you had to go to these studios, you had to put a guitar and a bass, while now you can just pull it all from the computer, so that aspect of it has changed, but kids and musicians still make fantastic music like that by using the Abbey Road Studios app. In my time, we couldn’t go to the actual Abbey Road Studios when we first started because it was too expensive and we couldn’t afford that, so we had to utilise what was readily available in our bedrooms, that’s how we made our music. And I think that continues to drive kids and I don’t think there’s enough of them coming through, that’s what I would argue, as I think the business has got kind of smaller. There are a lot more bands, but there’s not the access that we had, where you could go and you could get a record deal. For example, we came from Glasgow, and the record business came up to Glasgow and signed all the bands – we weren’t even the best band in Glasgow by any stretch of the imagination, but we got signed along with a load of other bands, and then one would make it. We had a hunger and wanted to make good music, and I think we were lucky that people could see and they bought into it. So, maybe today there isn’t the sort of abundance that there was back in our day, but they’re still there, just few and far between.
Do you think a band could potentially never split? What does it take to stick together?
Wet Wet Wet live show ©️ to the owners
We’ve had moments, we’ve had personal challenges, we’ve had guys leaving, I think part of our story was that we grew up together, we went to school together, we were pretty much schoolfriends and I think that has its difficulties. School for me was about my friends, socialising and learning about life. Once you leave school, then you start your job – and for us, it was to play in a band. When you’re running as a young bunch of kids, it’s fine until you start growing up and doing adult things, getting married, having kids, getting your life together, then you’re not that boy anymore and so, of course, it’s all going to move apart, especially in the richer bands. If you look at Coldplay, they have a troubleshooter who comes in and says, “Here’s the reason all the bands split up – we can nip this in the bud before it happens”. If you get to the point where you can’t even decide what restaurant to eat at night, what chance have you got to make music together? Sometimes, the best thing to do when it gets like that is to step out of that arena and move away, even though I’ve always wanted to come back as I feel that we’ve still got something musical to say. That is my job, and I want to keep doing this as long as I’ve got a breath inside me. Because to me, this adds massive value to my life, music is an enhancement of my life.
What legacy has your music left to the world?
That’s a great question because you obviously want your music to have integrity, that’s what I’d like it to have, that’s what I like to think and that’s the way I would like it to be viewed. I think it remains to be seen, because music is such a personal thing to people. Some people like something, and then you talk to somebody else, and they go like “Oh no, I hate that song” – so it’s a bit like food; some people love Marmite and some people hate Marmite. So I would just like it us to be viewed as a decent band that had musical integrity – that would be the legacy I would hope for.