Cinerama derived their name from an early widescreen film projection process that preceded IMAX. After placing the Wedding Present on sabbatical following their 1997 tour, David Gedge assembled the new project.
Gedge’s lyrics continued to explore his longstanding preoccupations with courtship, romance, love, lust, and infidelity, while the music reflected his longstanding fascination with film scores from John Barry to blaxploitation, the classic songcraft of Bacharach/David, and the quieter registers of Scott Walker. The result sat in an easy middle ground between twee and Tindersticks—more forceful and robust than the former, yet far less somber and austere than the latter.
Although primarily a duo alongside his partner Sally Murrell, Cinerama drew on a rotating cast of collaborators and full-time members. The 1998 debut Va Va Voom enlisted the Church’s Marty Wilson-Piper and Emma Pollock of the Delgados. In 1999 Gedge recruited the former rhythm section of the disbanded Goya Dress—Terry de Castro and Simon Pearson—as permanent members, while ex-Wedding Present guitarist Simon Cleave had already appeared in the lineup from the group’s very first performance.
Matching the Wedding Present’s prolific release pace, Cinerama issued numerous multi-format singles around Va Va Voom and several additional recordings before delivering the Steve Albini-recorded Disco Volante in 2000. Among these was the band’s first release on their own Scopitones imprint, issued on Valentine’s Day that year, along with the single “Manhattan,” whose B-side covered the Smiths’ “London.” Issued only weeks later, the compilation This Is Cinerama gathered the group’s initial four singles. Frequent guests on John Peel’s BBC program, Cinerama eventually issued three albums drawn from those sessions. Their third studio album, the dark and guitar-driven Torino, appeared in 2002, followed in spring 2003 by Cinerama Holiday, which collected the band’s fifth through eighth singles together with several live tracks.
After David Gedge and Sally Murrell concluded both their musical and personal partnership in 2003, Gedge chose to reactivate the Wedding Present rather than continue under the Cinerama name; his next release was therefore the Wedding Present’s Take Fountain in 2005. He has since performed occasional Cinerama songs at Wedding Present concerts and has periodically revived the project for festival dates. In 2014 the Scopitones label issued Seven Wonders of the World, a compilation assembling tracks from Cinerama’s final five singles. Shortly afterward Gedge resurrected the Cinerama moniker to pursue his long-held plan of recording material that merged the stylistic approaches of both bands. Enlisting Spanish indie-pop musician Pedro Vigil, he substantially reimagined the Wedding Present’s 2012 album Valentina and released the new version in May 2015.
