During a 20-year career in pop music, the 45-year-old front man for The Wedding Present has populated his wildly divergent albums with everything from wiry guitar pop to Ukrainian folk songs to vast cinematic collage.

Working with a revolving cast of characters has made side-stepping monotony easy for Gedge, who has released 11 albums, under two group names, since the 1985 formation of The Wedding Present in Leeds, England.

"It can be upsetting when people leave a band, and adding new people can be quite dramatic, too," Gedge says from home, where he is prepping for a tour that will bring the British songwriter and his four piece The Wedding Present to the Cat's Cradle on Saturday.

"Having said all that, one of the strengths of having a revolving cast is that it's a new band each time. Having new people come into the group, having new ideas, new inspirations -- suddenly, it's like you're in a different band."

With the Weddoes (as their their fans dubbed them), a 25-year-old Gedge was able to bang out simple, exuberant songs, winning the adoration of British musical icons like John Peel in the process.

But brash and brusque only worked so long for the Brit, and his band slowly pushed into experimental territory in the early '90s, recording a masterwork titled "Seamonsters" with clinically quirky rock producer Steve Albini, and releasing "Ukrainski Vistupi V Johna Peela," a curious record of Ukrainian folk music that would perplex the same British rock critics the band charmed in the late '80s.

With age came an intense desire to work outside the lexicon of rock. Gedge's solution: He changed the name of his band and shuffled the artistic deck.

Enter Cinerama, a lush side project for Gedge, a film buff whose love for scores and composers such as Ennio Morricone drove him away from standard rock instrumentation and into the open arms of flutes, strings and orchestral garnish.

"I've never been that interested in books and literature and plays," Gedge says. "I've always been more interested in modern culture -- radio, comics and the like. I think film, in a way, is the ultimate of those mediums. It brings them all together. I've always been inspired by film. That's why I started Cinerama: I felt as though I couldn't really explore it with The Wedding Present."

Today, several years and four Cinerama albums later, Gedge has returned to the original name.

"It's funny," he says with a chuckle. "We were doing a Cinerama radio session for the BBC, and the engineers were saying, 'David, this is a Wedding Present record. You come here and you call yourself Cinerama?' We would always take in strings and flute players, but this material wasn't like that at all."

That material later became The Wedding Present's 2005 record "Take Fountain." The album, like all of Gedge's work, deals with the most elemental and simple aspects of life. Gedge is as direct and conversational a writer as they come. His sharp tongue manages to wrap itself around human relationships in the most brilliantly unpretentious of ways.

The title phrase was nicked from a bit of advice Mae West used to give to young Hollywood starlets. Fountain Avenue, Gedge says, was apparently traffic-free, and the easiest route to get anywhere in Hollywood.

It's tempting to extend the phrase as a metaphor for the record, as Gedge returns to a more direct and simple rock format with its 10 songs.

But Gedge balks at the idea: "I just liked the sound of the words. It didn't mean much."

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