Wet Wet Wet

Brighton Centre, King’s Road, Tuesday, March 1

BACK in 1994 there was no getting away from Wet Wet Wet.

Their cover of The Troggs’ Love Is All Around, as featured on the soundtrack of international hit comedy Four Weddings And A Funeral, sat at the top of the charts for 15 weeks.

But in only a couple of years the band had torn itself apart.

As the band returns to mark the 20th anniversary of their chart-topping album Picture This drummer Tommy Cunningham tells Duncan Hall about the pressures which caused him to leave the band and their the plans for a forthcoming album.

The Guide: Is it hard to believe it is the 20th anniversary of Picture This?

Tommy Cunningham: It gives us an opportunity to look back across our whole history. With The Big Picture tour we will have a lovely visual thing to go on stage to.

Are you planning to play the whole album in sequence?

It’s a retrospective. We’re not trying to do the whole album from start to finish.

As a musician you’re always trying to find a new song, something that makes it fresh for you.

Wet Wet Wet fans want us to go out and do the hits. We used to avoid that like the plague, we hated looking back. Maybe it’s an age thing, or a realisation that we are what we are. We’re much more confident looking back. Picture This has both Love Is All Around and Julia Says on it [two of the band’s biggest hits].

It also gives us breathing space, because we’re working on new material.

Do you look forward to going in the studio?

Wet Wet Wet are in two camps – Graeme [Clark, bass] and Neil [Mitchell, keyboards] are very studio-based – they’re always working on new material. Me and Marti [Pellow, vocals] love going on stage. Maybe it’s that instant gratification we find. Sometimes Marti and I get to go live, other times we have to bow to Graeme and Neil and get our recording heads on. Right now I’m getting the satisfaction of being on stage, next year it will be back in the studio. There is always that tug within a band – which is healthy. You can’t have it being too smooth and nice all the time, it makes everything a bit nondescript. People need to have a bit of friction.

That’s true of so many classic bands – The Rolling Stones and The Beatles for instance.

Those are the cultural icons that show you the path.

We did a song called Lip Service [on 1992’s High On The Happy Side album] which had a line saying: “I won’t be a victim”. I remember thinking “we won’t be victims of the business, we won’t fall into the same holes or hit those pitfalls”. And three or four years later we were down the same path as every single band.

When you’re unemployed you have this belief you can be something big and successful – but as soon as you get everything you want it falls to pieces.

It’s that friction – you get to a point of thinking you don’t need each other anymore. You stop being a band. We had to take seven years to fall out and disappear from each other before the clouds cleared and we could say we needed each other. We realised it was four individuals that made this work.

Was Picture This a bit of a high watermark for the band?

With Picture This we were the boys who got everything we ever dreamed of. We had private jets and a champagne lifestyle, but a beer-drinking mentality. To get everything you want is not healthy. You need to be reaching for something.

The most unhappy time was when we had the biggest success. It doesn’t bring you together. Instead of going around the world as a gang we started going in different directions to keep all the balls in the air. We grew up, people got married and had families.

Looking back in the Popped In Souled Out days, when [first single] Wishing I Was Lucky got into the top 100 that was success to us. Had it all stopped after that we would still have been proud. That alone seemed almost unachievable. We would never have imagined 30 years on we would still be going.

How tough was that period when you were apart?

Every single day you were touched by the memories of the history we had before. Marti was doing theatre, I was running businesses, Graeme did solo stuff, Neil had a small family. Every day something would come along to remind us – something in the street, or on the radio or television that told you Wet Wet Wet had a history. I stopped thinking about the negatives and started thinking about the positives.

What brought you back together?

Tragedy struck. Our parents were still friends, even when we weren’t talking they were still going on holiday together and hanging out. Marti’s mother passed away and that was the catalyst. It was a reason to get back in the same room. Everything stops for births and deaths – you don’t care about anything else. We had to show respect for a woman who played a large part in our lives. When we were on the dole and practising, and hadn’t a penny in our pockets you would go to Marti’s house and she would take you in, sit you down and give you a bowl of soup.

Was it hard reconnecting initially?

It’s like all relationships – if you sit and fill your heart with hatred and negativity it paralyses you. You can’t move forward through that.

When the four of us were in the same room the paralysis was gone. We connected. It was a very sad day, the intention wasn’t to get back together – it was more about “How are you? I feel your pain”.

Even though we grew up wanting to The Clash, or The Jam, a band with an edge, something within us always knew we were a band from a soul point of view. We wanted to get as much emotion in our music and wear our emotions on our sleeves. When your eyes are filled with tears and your heart is broken in two that’s when you say: “There’s a band here – we are brothers and you can’t break those bonds.”

There was another side to it – we had grown up enough and experienced enough of normal life to get a bit of perspective and respect for each other.

One thing we are very good at is cutting each other down to size. If you’ve got a boil on the end of your nose we will point it out to everyone!

In 2004 we found ourselves saying we could actually go out and perhaps do a couple of gigs – maybe people would be interested in us. It was better than we expected.

We are still taken by surprise by the goodwill we have managed to build up.

Wet Wet Wet always felt a little separate from their contemporaries – you were never part of a scene or movement?

Punk and new wave happened when we were 14 or 15, when we were beginning to ply our trade. Dance came along when we released Wishing I Was Lucky. We always stood separately from it. We never belonged to anything other than pop. We always felt the melody should put a smile on your face – and then just about three or four years before we came to an end Britpop came along.

People find it hard to identify us – people say we’re a 1990s band, but we started in the 1980s. But we don’t fit in with people like Duran Duran or Wham!

I guess we are famous because we don’t belong.

Support from Ben McKelvey and Markus Feehily.

Doors 6.30pm, tickets from £42.50. Call 08448 471515.