The wonder of Wet Wet Wet








Willemina Snijders was so kind to translate it all in Engish, thank you very much you did a fab job! :-)

The Wonderful Rebirth of WETWETWET.

The screaming teenages have become mothers but they still get excited about WetWetWet. The group split up didn’t they??? Thought they would never get back together again???
It did look like that until that memorable and very sad day at a funeral last year. Wet Wet Wet is alive and the boys say they are best of friends again and their music sounds better then ever.

Marti Pellow, Scottish, singer, a few year ago in TV Weekend: "The time must heal the wounds and then we will see again".

When we begun we were children, now we are adults, so lets see if we can behave ourselves. Now... they have succeeded in that.
Last year the very populair Scottish band WetWetWet (who sold more then 15 million albums) came back together for the first time in 7 years and ...WetWetWet is not dead, WetWetWet lives!!!!

“Actually", says the meanwhile 38 old singer (Wil : they got his age wrong again,lol) at the eve of the last show in London of the Wets Do It Again Tour in honor of their Greatest Hits album, "was the very first time that we were all together under one roof when my mother passed away, last year.”
The boys came, despite off all the problems between us, to my mothers funaral to give their support to me and my family. Don’t forget we all have been friends from our childhood, consequently everybody knows eachothers family. To have them all there ment the world to me and it got us all speaking to eachother again. That had been long inconceivably. Marti, Neil, Graeme and Tommy could never go through one door anymore they thought.
The falling apart from WetWetWet was such a bitter situation that they avoided each other for years as the plague. Marti was the pariah, for it was his abundant drink and drugs abuse that made it impossible for him to work as singer of the group from Glasgow. Now he says full fire in the dressing room at Wembley Arena: "The passion and the energy that we had as lads when we first started, is still there". Roadmanager Dougie Souness had to get the kwartet to sit a the table and talk.
Pellow: "Dougie has been with us for years, same as all co-workers and they are almost family. And the funny thing is that, now we are doing these shows, everybody has flown in all over the world again to work with us. A lovely feeling, but this aside…….
Good, Dougie made in the course of the years, regular remarks as: "I have the T-shirts ready to get printed for the tenth WWW birthday. What do you want me to do with them?" On a given moment he had, months after the funeral of my mother, sorted out a place of meeting for all of us. That was last year. I just came back from the USA, it was asif I closed off a period of banishment. We all sat at the table and it was complicated, I can tell you. There were lost of things we needed to get sorted out and I found that there was still a lot of pain there, My most important point was that we were not able to talk about things in WetWetWet. And you know that in a relation ship not to talk with each other is fatal. But luckily all of us wanted it to work out better this time and that attitude saved us. We felt that we wanted to get back to how we were when we first started out as a band and how easy that went.

Once we got the business disputes out of the way and after that the other misery that played in the group, it was freely simply. It is become so much easier. How do they say it in French again: "Laissez Fair"?

Keyboardplayer Neil Mitchel (39) has in the meanwhile come to sit with us . "I think that you must not underestimate how much problems it took all of us to get to speaking terms again . But okay on the other side, the differences of opinion that we had seven years ago, the sharp sides of those just vanished after such a long time . We were ready this time to sit down with each other at the table, to talk, and to make music, its natural to us.”
Pellow: "For me it was quite surreally, for there were moments that I had the feeling that it had not been seven years, but seven days, it was so normal to be together again for us.

You stand on a stage, you turn yourself around, see that guy again that always looked after the guitars.... although he’s a bit rounder, bit balder, but here again after all those years! ".
Mitchell: "Even for our families it appears that we have never been away from each other." If we had desided not to get back together, the Greatest Hits CD would have come out anyway, say the two.
Mitchell: "We wanted to make sure the CD got some support."
Pellow: "It is really our history and you don’t want that to come, carelessly almost, on the market as a ball of paper that you throw in the paper basket. You are concerned about the CD and want to make sure it gets the best of chances.”
Mitchell: "It was also the spark that the fire required to flare up, we got the chance to write new songs, what we all quite eager wanted to do. Can we do it again that’s what we wanted to know.
The first time together, with the instruments, was strange, say Marti and Neil with heavy Scottish accent. Pellow: "Everybody was very nervous..."
Mitchell: "as if your going to school for the very first time."
Pellow: "Really all barriers disappeared fast. Finally it is just an old coat that you put on again But we are so much better now.....Lots of limitations that we imposed on ourselves previously, are no longer there.
We discovered the simplicity, dared to leave things out and give the composition a chance. I know now that WetWetWet hasn’t made their best album yet. We know that we could have achieved even more if we hadn’t left things, music wise, lying around.

The new songs that we wrote for the Greatest Hits CD are typical WetWetWet-songs only with so much more depth and power.....Look, as a singer am I blessed with a proper distinguishing voice and certainly as for harmonies you recognise that group. But instrumentaal and musically we have made an enormous step forward."
And that comes simply because all the members in the WetWetWet-loose years not have sat still. Marti has not only been into rehab but also has seen musical theaters in London and New York on the inside. "I played in the musical Chicago and have brought out three solo-CD’s, he says full of pride.

Neil wanted to write songs with others. Not to his satisfaction it appears." From that didn’t come much. I got very frustrated after a few years and disillusioned over the mucisbizz. I found it quite difficult that WetWetWet no longer existed. That’s certainly when I noticed that they are not interested in what you have to offer.
Graeme (Clark bassist) has worked with many others and does still, but Tommy (Cunningham, drums) went into business in Glasgow."
Pellow: "We are back together and making a new CD……...WE’RE BA-ACK !!!! Thats the message
I have no idea if we will interest a new public , but we have such a hardcore fanbase, that I am already very happy to keep them satisfied. They have already seen to it that the Greatest Hits CD went platinum. One thing we know for surtain is that we can make great music. We have proved that already and we have a backpack full of good music that’s still relevant in 2005. We want to add a new chapter in the WetWetWet-book."

Dougie comes walking in and warns the two that they must go to do the soundcheck.
For the Creche-Tour, he jokenly says. Pellow grins the very well-known charming grin.
"We have almost all got women and children, consequently the conversations these days go about Child problems and washing machines. But the good thing about that is, it all puts it well into perspective. We all know what the important things in life are.
I can insure you with my hand on my heart that I have experienced the whole period with my boys this year as a large celebration. The batteries are again overflowing, on many different levels. And it’s a fantastic feeling."
Michell: "Its just now that I know how I have missed playing music. How it feels standing on stage again, were nobody can touch you, seeing how they still love your music even if the songs are 20 years old .....Voor me that’s a dream come true, being a musian again.”

Later that evening in the Wembley Arena you can hear that the thin and hairy Pellow has not lost any power and the band makes music tighter and better then ever. The 10.000 fans in the almost filled hall are almost all women. In there Thirties, mothers, housewives, who just for tonight are teenages again when hearing all those familiar Wets Songs with whom the Wets scored so many Hits.

Everything comes together as the bunch of children from the band come dancing on the stage. The dads soak, the mother fans week...WETWETWET!

Telegraaf - Dutch news paper - 22 january 2005