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Mick Thomas.
By his own estimation, next year marks Mick Thomas' twentieth year of being a professional musician. Naturally, there have been high and low points in that period, but he is currently enjoying a busy and positive time - a national tour with Elvis Costello (coming here with the Day On The Green tour) and another to promote his current well-received acoustic CD 'Anythings, Sure Things, Other Things.'
As the title does more than suggest, the material comes from all phases of his career; obscure and well-known Weddings Parties Anything songs along with those from his current band The Sure Thing (plus a cover of Australian Crawl's Man Crazy) are reworked to fit the acoustic format of the recording. The result is a collection of familiar songs given new life, and simply a great overview of the man's career to date.
Performers include Jen Anderson (ex-WPA), Stuart Speed and guitarist extraordinaire Jeff Lang. "He was in the States when I emailed him," explains Thomas, "and he said he'd love to do it; he was playing me stuff over the phone that he had ideas on. It's really good to have a combination of characters, I reckon all the best bands are a good combination of people who are laconic and casual and people who are kind of manic and up..."
Is Thomas the laconic one?
"No, I'm a bit more manic! I'm a bit more like "We've only got four more hours to go in this studio!" I'm a bit more pragmatically manic, you know? Stuey's laconic, Jen Anderson's a bit like me, she's an organiser. So it's like a pretty good combination of four characters, really."
Other guests on the CD include Git, who provide strong backing vocals to songs such as Away Away and Rain In My Heart and Kavisha Mazzella, whose vocals on Hard Currency are a definite highlight. The album was recorded in only a few days, with just one rehearsal beforehand. "I recorded all those songs just with me and a guitar, pretty much how they were written. What I wanted to do was go back to the real roots of those songs, how they were written and why they were written, so like I say, I recorded them with just me and a guitar and I gave that to everyone and I said 'Please don't feel bound on any level to play what anyone else played.' Some did get rearranged but there was no sense of 'Let's go in to rearrange,' it just took off. It was pretty organic, is what I'm trying to say."
The CD is released through Liberation, not Thomas' own label Croxton. He is quite pleased to have the option of major distribution, and letting others do the hard work this time. Croxton still continues though, and in fact one of their latest signings, Marcel Borrack, has joined the touring band in place of Jeff Lang. Anderson and Speed complete the line-up which are currently touring Australia and will be in Adelaide for two gigs, the first time Thomas has done back-to-back shows here for many years. Unusually, the performance will be a straight reproduction of the album.
"It's a pretty intimate show, it requires a fair bit of thought. Someone said to me 'why are you trying to do this thing of playing through the album?' I said 'well, a) because I've never really done that in all the years I've been playing, I've never really tried to just recreate an album and b) it's going to be the only way this sort of sound is going to come across, is to be organised and ordered,' you know?"
A bit of good self discipline, too?
"Yeah, for me not to just charge off into something just on a whim - that's been pretty much the last twenty years!"
Michael Hunter
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Mick Thomas plays Eagle On The Hill on Nov 4 and Jive on Nov 5.
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