WET WET WET
AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY
THREE YEARS AFTER RECRUITING FORMER LIBERTY X SINGER KEVIN SIMM AS THEIR NEW FRONTMAN, WET WET WET ARE FINALLY READY TO EMERGE FROM COVID-ENFORCED HIBERNATION WITH THE NEW LINEUP’S FIRST ALBUM, THE JOURNEY. “WE’RE ABOUT TO GET INTO THE RING AND START SWINGING.”
PAUL KIRKLEY
There’s obviously no good time for a global pandemic. But for Wet Wet Wet, the world’s COVID-19 shutdown came at a particularly tricky point in the Glasgow soul-pop collective’s unfolding story. “Rebooting the band with a new singer was never going to be easy, even before you add the pandemic into the mix,” sighs bassist and principle songwriter Graeme Clark, talking to Classic Pop over Zoom from his home studio in Surrey “Plus I’m 56, man. The clock is ticking!”
“I felt like we’d gained a bit of momentum over that first year,” says the new singer in question, former Liberty X chart-topper Kevin Simm, of the band’s well-received 2019 tour – the first since former frontman Marti Pellow’s messy departure two years earlier had threatened to leave the Wets high and dry. “Having started out feeling like we had to prove people wrong, it was looking really positive. But since then it’s been a case of hanging on for dear life, hoping it all opens up again.”
“There’ve been some dark moments,” agrees Tommy Cunningham, the drummer who, four decades ago, formed Wet Wet Wet with Clydebank High School friends Clark, Pellow and keyboardist Neil Mitchell. “It’s been a kind of mental torture, wondering how the band can move forward, how we can perform.”
Somehow, though, they’ve emerged at the end of it with a new album, The Journey, most of which has been completed remotely (though they did manage the odd studio get-together). “Graeme has worked incredibly hard,” says Tommy – who, for all his talk of darkness and torture, is looking positively relaxed in afluffy white towelling robe, with a fag on the go. “Because these songs had to be good. They can’t just be songs we happened to have on the shelf. We have to make sure that we can still compete at the same level.”
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