Looking back, David Gedge admits he was glad when December 1992 rolled around.

The year had been insanely busy for The Wedding Present, the band he founded seven years before – after they decided to release a single a month throughout the whole year.

For this year’s At The Edge Of The Sea, the annual seafront music festival he curates at Concorde 2, Gedge and his band are performing the full 12 singles as collected on The Hit Parade album – which included The Wedding Present’s only top ten hit Come Play With Me.

“It was a totally different way of writing,” he admits today. “When you record an album you write until you have a reasonable number of songs – normally about 18. “For this project we were writing throughout the year, as well as arranging cover versions for the B-sides, making videos and designing T-shirts. Each single was like a separate project really. There was a bit of stress involved.”

The band had put in a failsafe should it all get too much.

“There was a rule that if the project ever became too difficult to maintain, and the music was suffering, we would stop,” says Gedge.

“Looking back some of the songs are the best we have done. It’s a project I’m proud of, even though it was quite hard at the time.”

The B-sides also had a positive effect on the band’s writing, with Gedge saying the results could be seen on their eclectic next album Watusi.

“When you do cover versions and start to arrange someone else’s songs you start to think about how other people write songs,” he says.

“When we started doing the singles we picked our favourite songs. We realised they would all be rock/indie music – and we didn’t want to do all 12 like that. We started to try going in different directions, and started to think about the songs we shouldn’t do.”

The resulting collection moved from The Go Betweens’ Cattle And Cane and Neil Young’s Don’t Cry No Tears to include versions of Julee Cruise’s Twin Peaks theme Falling and Isaac Hayes’ Theme From Shaft which have to be heard to be believed.

The Hit Parade A-sides – which will form part of the band’s tour this year – continues a run of nostalgic shows the band has performed since 2007. It started when they marked the 20th anniversary of debut album George Best.

“When Sanctuary Records asked if we’d fancy doing a tour playing the album, I was initially, ‘Naw, I don’t think so’,” remembers Gedge.

“As an artist you want to be looking forward to new songs, not returning to something from 20 years ago. I thought about it, and spoke to a few people who all said we should definitely do it.”

Eventually Gedge “begrudgingly gave it a go”, and was pleasantly surprised at the results.

“I did get something out of it,” he says. “It was an interesting process to go back to something we had done so long ago – it was like reading an old diary.

“It takes on a different form when you’re reinterpreting it with a new line-up and making it work today – you’ve changed as a person too. The past is just as valid for a group as the future.”

The Wedding Present has since toured their second and third albums Bizarro and Seamonsters across the world, as well as their debut. This weekend’s festival sees the band return to George Best tomorrow, before playing The Hit Parade A-sides on Sunday.

And to add to the stress, over the next week or so Gedge is also recreating the debut album by his other band Cinerama. Va Va Voom will be played in two halves across the weekend, with original bassist Terry De Castro joining Gedge, current Wedding Present drummer Charles Layton and guitarist Patrick Alexander and an extra guitarist and keyboard player drawn from the Sussex music scene.

“Doing two concerts this year means we are doing twice the material,” says Gedge as he stares down the barrel of an intensive week of rehearsal. “With the Cinerama tracks it’s like four sets for me – but that’s all part of the fun!”

Festival favourites

The rest of the festival line-up sees Gedge welcome former bandmates, including the aforementioned de Castro, Flying Wing featuring former Weddoes Paul Dorrington and Darren Belk, former drummer Shaun Charman behind the decks on Saturday, and current Present members side projects The Fireworks and Marlin. Also on the bill tomorrow are The Twilight Sad, The Missing Season, Tensheds, and Brighton’s own Dog In The Snow, while Sunday features Miles Hunt and Erica Nockalls of The Wonder Stuff, The Flatmates, Pete Fij and Terry Bickers of Adorable and House Of Love, Sivu, No Middle Name and Monster Bobby, with Rocker of Dandelion Radio playing between sets.

“I’m being self-indulgent, picking bands I want to see or bands that have supported us,” says Gedge. “Hopefully it’s more of an enigmatic line-up – I didn’t want lots of bands similar to The Wedding Present. Not everyone is going to like all of it, but you might see a band you’ve never heard of before and really like it.”

Gedge spends his time split between his homes in Hove and Santa Monica, in the studio or on tour, having played shows in North America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan this year, as well as the festival circuit.

“The best thing to be honest is the three parts to my life – I get to write songs, which is satisfying; get into the studio and record them, which is a great process; and once the studio gets boring I can go out on tour. Those three disciplines are so markedly different, you don’t get a chance to be bored. There’s always a new challenge on the horizon.”