THE Wedding Present have had eighteen UK Top 40 hit singles… not bad for a band that has, from its inception, stubbornly refused to play the record industry’s game. It all started in 1985 when David Gedge boarded a National Express coach in London with 500 records packed into a pair of his mother’s suitcases and, in this fashion, delivered the band’s debut single Go Out And Get 'Em, Boy! to a distribution company in Yorkshire. That pioneering spirit has been at the core of the band’s philosophy ever since. From George Best, “an unmitigated delight” [NME], the first full-length release on their own Reception Records onwards, the band has charted an appealing, if often eccentric, course of its very own.

2019 marks 30 years since the band released their second studio album, Bizarro, and to celebrate the landmark, David is taking the band out on tour with a gig in Chester just one of a long series of concert dates throughout the year.

"When you're out on tour you just want to get home but then when you've been home for a few days you start wishing you were going off somewhere to play a concert," sighs David. "I guess it's bit of an addiction really because I've been doing it so long now, if I'm at home for any length of time it feels a bit odd."

To combat life on the road, the band are splitting their dates into different sections with mini tours scattered through the year with different support bands and evolving setlist.

"We've been offered an Asian tour including a festival in Mongolia so we couldn't turn that down," laughs David. "We were playing at SXSW in Texas and this guy asked and I thought 'why not?' thinking it would never happen. He emailed me and I still wasn't completely sure about it but it seems to have had bands play that I know like Peter Hook and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and it looked really well organised. Of course if we're going to go all the way to Ulaanbaatar we better add some dates in Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. I'm even going to get the Trans-Siberian Express out there!"

Containing the Wedding Present's first hit single, Kennedy as well as the indie disco classic Brassneck, Bizarro has always been a fan's favourite and David agrees it was a step forward from 1987's George Best debut.

"I enjoy playing all the albums and I'm proud of them too because I think they all stand up in different ways," he says. "I think Bizarro is a better album than George Best - it's got more depth to it and the songwriting is better. George Best is full on and frenetic and is 100mph - even the slow songs are fast whereas with Bizarro you've got more light and shade and texture. It's more of an interesting record to play because we wanted to move on and do something different - we wanted to experiment and do something else.

"It's always fascinating to revisit any of the albums because obviously I'm the only one in the band who played on the original so I'm always interested to see how the other three interpret it. We always try and keep it close to the spirit of the original but some things get changed because of the way people play and I'm always thinking I could play better. It always evolves a little bit."

David maintains he had no idea the two singles off the album would be so popular let alone get the band into the charts.

"I don't think that's ever in your mind really," he chuckles. "You just want to write a song, arrange it and record it in the best way possible and then often you don't think about it after that. A year down the line it comes out and it's popular and people love it and it's always a surprise. Kennedy was one of my least favourite songs at the time and I always thought it was very simple and too straightforward. It works as a live song but it never had much depth and I wasn't particularly happy with the lyric so I never rated it too highly but of course I was totally wrong and it's probably a song most people know even if they're not fans of the band."

As their major label debut, Bizarro took the Leeds-based band into the charts and on the radio across the globe, but David denies it changed him too much.

"We'd had a lot of critical acclaim but being on a major label helped with the elevation of the band because suddenly we had this massive marketing machine behind us and they had money to spend," he says. "Suddenly we were selling records across the world and we were touring more so it was very exciting. It was the culmination of a few years of work and it's always nice to be invited to play different places and be on Top of the Pops."

David looks back fondly on the whole period when Bizarro came out with 1989 the year when the likes of the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses took the indie sound into the mainstream.

"It seemed to be neverending and a bit of a golden era," he says. "A lot of those bands are looked on now with a lot of fondness and we don't seem to have that kind of thing with music anymore. We always had this perverse nature where we avoided things we thought were fashionable so if everyone was putting a dance beat on their songs we'd veer away from doing the same.

"We've always operated outside the mainstream and ploughed a course on our own - we've never fitted in but I've always hoped we could be like New Order or The Fall and be a band who just existed in their own universe. I've always admired that."

The Wedding Present play the Live Rooms, Chester on Friday May 3. Tickets from