Wet Wet Wet reveal they’ve replaced Marti Pellow with former Liberty X star Kevin Simm
The Voice winner will perform with the band next month after original singer Marti quit in 1999
WET Wet Wet have announced that Liberty X singer Kevin Simm will be replacing Marti Pellow after he quit the band.
The Voice winner Kevin will front the band when they play two gigs later this year – singing all the band’s original hits.
In the announcement today, Wet Wet Wet’s bass player bass player Graeme Clark said the band knew Kevin was the man for the job straight away.
“From the first song we played together, Julia Says, we knew instantly, I knew pretty much in the first 30 seconds,” he says.
“He puts me back in touch with that soul feeling we had when we first started”. Keyboard player Neil Mitchell agrees, “It just worked, it just seems natural to me”.
Kevin adds: “I was really taken aback, the opportunity to join a band with such amazing songs and great guys and a great fanbase really excites me.
“When I first started gigging around the pubs and clubs up North two songs that were always in my set were Goodnight Girl and Love Is All Around”.
Marti originally quit the band in 1999, but remained on good terms with his ex bandmates, and they even attended his mother’s funeral in 2003.
The band reformed in 2004, with Pellow saying: “I'd never closed the chapter on the band; I'd always left the door open.”
He went on to have a successful solo career – but never topped Wet Wet Wet’s success.
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Their 1994 cover of The Troggs hit Love Is All Around was number one for 15 weeks, and featured on the soundtrack for Four Weddings And A Funeral.
Kevin, on the other hand, joined Liberty X after the band formed on Popstars: The Rivals in 2001.
They split and reformed in various combinations over the next ten years – reuniting on The Big Reunion in 2008 before disbanding again.
Kevin went on to win The Voice in 2016 under the mentorship of Ricky Wilson. He released album Recover, which got to number 114 in the charts.
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