Still Rockin' It - Cheryl Lee
Join Cheryl Lee That Radio Chick on Still Rockin' It for news, reviews and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians.
What are they up to at the moment? Let's find out .......
Still Rockin' It - Cheryl Lee
What has Mick Thomas of Weddings Parties Anything fame been up lately? OR We're not dropping singles, we're packing the car!!
Join Cheryl Lee - That Radio Chick on STILL ROCKIN' IT for news, reviews, music and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians
A packed car, an early call time, and a map dotted with regional stages—that’s where today’s conversation begins. We catch Mick Thomas on day one of a 22-show run to explore how touring sharpens a band, why small-town rooms can outshine big-city theaters, and what it takes to nurture a local scene until it hums. From renovated halls to backroom listening spaces without a bar, Mick explains how the right people on the ground turn unlikely venues into destinations and why audiences will happily drive to hear a group stretch in a room built for songs.
We dig into legacy without getting stuck in it. Mick looks back at Weddings Parties Anything, the hits that still sing, and the temptation to lean on familiar bangers. Instead, his six-piece lineup rehearsed long-lost cuts and built a set around discovery. That same spirit powers GoComeBack, a vinyl-shaped album designed as a return journey: side one heads out, side two comes home with new eyes. It’s a simple, durable concept that restores what many of us miss—sequencing, cohesion, and an arc you can feel when you flip the record.
Numbers make an appearance, but they don’t get top billing. We talk about the illusion of charts, the mirage of streaming KPIs, and the real-world value of in-store performances where thirty people can create more energy than three thousand passive streams. Record shops, counter chats, and shared favorites remind us music is a community, not a dashboard.
Mick’s advice to younger artists is blunt and hopeful: play, enjoy the work, and choose the path that leaves memories, not just metrics. We close with the new single A Mighty Ride and the promise of a full-band tour that sounds like the record because it is the record—six players, one story, and miles ahead.
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What have Mick Thomas' Roving Commission been up to lately? Let's find out!
Get out when you can, support local music and I'll see you down the front!!
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Welcome to the Still Rocki' It podcast, where we'll have music, news reviews, and interviews with some of our favorite Australian musicians and artists. To catch up on podcasts and other favourite articles, simply go to that radiochick.com. We'd like to welcome into the Zoom room today Mick Thomas. Thanks for joining us, Mick.
Mick Thomas:How's it going?
Cheryl Lee:Good, thanks. These aren't very rock star hours, are they? We're both up bright and early.
Mick Thomas:No, but we we start our tour today and we're up up the bush by about three hours. So I've got to you know pack the car and and get moving, really. So yeah, no, it's good to be up, up and about.
Cheryl Lee:Well, thank you for squeezing us in on such a busy day. That's all right. Yeah, like you said, day one of a 22-day tour.
Mick Thomas:Yeah, and it's it's been a little longer if you take it that for the last four weeks we've been out and about playing in record stores and doing bits and pieces. So yeah, it's a good size tour, which is good. It's what it used to be. And I s I still think yeah, rehearsing is great and I really believe in it, but uh there's nothing like the the way a band plays when they've just been playing for a while, you know. Yeah.
Cheryl Lee:That's right. So you're kicking it off tonight at Shiraz Republic in Victoria.
Mick Thomas:Cornella, yeah. Yep.
Cheryl Lee:Heading our way this time in December, three shows in our town.
Mick Thomas:At this stage is there's two. If if if people get off on their bikes and sort of buy a few more tickets, we can add a third. But there's there's two definites, and then there's we've got the one up at Gulwa.
Cheryl Lee:Have you played at the Murray Delta Juke joint before?
Mick Thomas:I haven't, and I've always liked the look of it, you know. I just uh yeah, I just like yeah, I like the name of it. I think it's sort of funny, and I just sort of see, you know, what they're doing and who's playing there. And I I just kind of think there are people in the regions that want to hear it, you know, want to hear good music and and do stuff, but you know, often it's just having the right people on the ground to facilitate it. You know, look, we've we've seen this amazing change down here in the eastern part of the state, talking like Gippsland, Victoria. All these gigs that are two or three hours from the city have really taken off. And it's only because there's just a bunch of people on the ground who've who've made them happen. So, like there was the Caravan Music Club, which used to be in town, and they moved down to Archie's Creek. Now it's the most unlikely to looking town you could ever imagine, but it just works, you know. And then there's a bunch of people down uh at sale that run this thing called the Bundy Hall, where they've renovated a hall, and you know, people turn out and people want to hear good music. And I I kind of think there's a whole thing that's probably happened in the last say 20 years, and it's you know, pe people call it a sea change or a tree change, but there's also the phenomena of people who maybe grow up in the country and go into the city for a few years to go to uni or whatever, and and and they get used to having good music on tap, you know, and yeah, interesting stuff that's not just you know your top 40 fudder on the radio, and uh they're an educated people and but they and they move back back to the country, and there's just people in the country who've always liked good music. So they you know, add in those two or three phenomena together, and and there is an audience there in these places, but it's just got to be found and and nurtured.
Cheryl Lee:It's a funky little place, and they do get lots of good acts there, and we from the city will even drive down there.
Mick Thomas:Well, that's great, you know. Like like I say with these uh venues I've been talking about in Victoria, some some of those are venues that people will choose to go to rather than the big city show, you know. They know they're gonna see you know the the bands really turning it on in those places where you know where they weren't expecting it to get a crowd. And yeah, I I I I think it's it's great.
Cheryl Lee:What about Wheatsheaf? Have you played there before?
Mick Thomas:Heaps, and it's great, you know. I mean, they just run it so well, and a little thing about The Wheatsheeaf, but the the music room's out the back, and there's no bar in the music room. So it just it means it's a bit more kind of concert. But look, they just run it really well. There's a really great sound system, great, great gear in there, great people to run it, good people to deal with. You know, you if you take the wheat sheaf and then then the the Grace Emily's still kicking goals. We were last time we were in town, we went there to see Dallas Crane, and you go, well, you know, Adelaide's sort of got, you know, it's it's doing all right, you know. Absolutely.
Cheryl Lee:Where can we get the tickets?
Mick Thomas:Go to mickthomas.com, there's tickets are there, yeah.
Cheryl Lee:We've got a new single to talk about. That's why we're here from a new album. But can we go back in time a tiny little bit before we go forward?
Mick Thomas:Sure.
Cheryl Lee:Weddings, parties, anything, 12 years with them.
Mick Thomas:It's 15.
Cheryl Lee:15.
Mick Thomas:Yeah, yeah. It's it's funny, but when you get older, it doesn't sound as long as it did at the time when we were finishing up. Well, I was going 15 years, so you know, I was kind of like 40 years old, and it's like, oh, it's been 15 years of my life. Weddings finished in 98, so it's 27 years ago that that band finished being a a functioning entity, you know. There's been some some reformations, I'll concede, in in that 27 years. But for the most part, you know, we finished the band and we finished it properly because we meant it. What I'm trying to say is 15 years doesn't sound that much to me now. Like I look at the current lineup of the bands just coming up for five years, you know. So weddings had had a lot of people through the band. I think we had 14 or 15 people through the band. So we tended to change line up every year, even though people have got their favorite lineup. If people go, Oh, my favorite lineup is Mick, Wally, and Dave Steele, and you go, All right, you take that that was the front line, but the people behind that changed quite dramatically in that time. So whereas, you know, at the moment we're sitting on five years with pretty much the same lineup, which is really good.
Cheryl Lee:Yeah. You were one of the major songwriters of Wedding's Parties anything.
Mick Thomas:I was, yeah.
Cheryl Lee:You wrote two of the main hits, the main radio hits anyway, Father's Day and Monday's Expert. People will remember you from those songs.
Mick Thomas:Yeah, so you know what? I I still play 'em, you know. I mean, I'm still happy to play 'em. And I I always make the joke that they fit so well alongside the new songs that we we record that you know, we've traveled very little distance thematically or stylistically over the years, you know, could I just it was the music I set out to play and I I never felt restricted by by it stylistically. I felt there was a it was a big wide palette there to work with, you know. Even just for this current tour, we we sat down and while we were rehearsing stuff from the new album, I just said, well, let's rehearse a whole bunch of old songs, really old songs that we haven't been playing, because when you have got this kind of an old yeah, like a large canon of music, you tend to fall into the trap of you you know, of playing the half a dozen ones that you know are gonna work, right? So but but really uh as you said, there was there's a couple of bona fide commercial hits in there, and beyond that, really they're just the songs that we've kept playing, you know, that that have that people think are the you know, they call them the bangers or whatever they call them. Yeah, I don't even care what they call them. But you know, they're songs that uh they win by virtue of their recognition, you know, live. And so I just said, well, let's let's maybe shelve a few of those ones and just get a whole up bunch of of other old ones, you know. And it it's it was kind of a really joyous experience, you know. And I sort of threw it up open to the band because I thought, well, you know, they're gonna be playing them, they've got to enjoy them. And to me, people go, What's your favorite song? And I go, Well, my favorite song is if I'm talking commercially, well, then I'm gonna say Father's Day, Monday's experts, because they were the songs that really got us a long way down the track financially and commercially. But beyond that, they're all my babies, you know what I mean? Like it's a I I kind of wrote 80% of what what the weddings played. There's a lot of songs there. You can draw this this distinct line in my career when I said, well, it's not not going to be called weddings parties anything anymore, even though that band had had a heap of lineup changes. From this point on, it's not called weddings parties anything, it's called Mick Thomas and the whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's so many of the songs that, especially, say, in the 10 years just after the weddings, that could have easily been wedding songs. Yeah, like that they were songs that the weddings, you know, probably did play, you know, and the and the factors that that led to them, you know, going one side of that line, it's like B C and A D, you know, uh, one side of that line or the other side of that line are kind of many and varied, you know. And sometimes we still go and look at a bunch of songs to do an album like the album we've just done, or we did a year ago. And I look at the songs on that album and I go, well, some of those songs are already 10, 15 years old by the time you record them, you know. And so many of the songs that, you know, almost made it onto weddings albums and didn't end up post-weddings albums. What I'm trying to get at in my roundabout waffly way is that distinction about, you know, whether it's weddings parties or anything is very kind of amorphous, you know.
Cheryl Lee:Like it's it's not it's not a it's not a definite line at the moment, it's a definite line, no.
Mick Thomas:Especially in terms of the writing of the songs and and the impetus and the inspiration of the songs. That line is very, very blurred.
Cheryl Lee:Let's talk about the most recent album. It's called GoCome Back. The meaning of that is it's uh pigeon Indonesian turn for a return journey. Simple but effective concept for a song cycle.
Mick Thomas:Yeah, look, I I I just had this bunch of songs that, you know, like about a cash over about 35 songs, which I could offer to the band, and I said, Well, yeah, we could take this 10 or that 10 or yeah. I think I've had about eight songs. I said, Here's eight songs that we could pick, and eight songs sort of take you away, and eight songs bring you home again. And everyone kind of liked the idea, so it became a matter of fitting the last few jigsaw pieces in around that as a concept. I think the kind of resurgence of vinyl as a medium for an album, it sort of means that you know you're gonna have a bunch of songs that go on on side one and a bunch of songs that go on side two. Yeah. It really did lend itself to a concept like this, which is like a two-part concept, and it's pretty simple, but it's a lot that goes in into the thought of it as saying, well, if side one's all about this, the big journeys and the long journeys and and what you see and what you recognise as being valuable, then side two, which brings you home again, is maybe looking at stuff that's a lot closer to home, but with a different eye after you've traveled, you know, maybe you s see them in a in another way. So that's really what the album's about.
Cheryl Lee:I do love that because I do miss the fact, and we seem to have lost that a bit in this digital age, is the storytelling of an album. An album gives you the opportunity, like you have done here, in its entirety, it's a story. Now we just get to hear one hit and then another hit.
Mick Thomas:Oh, yeah, it's it's diabolical. Yeah, I mean, the the way music's sort of created now, it it's it's kind of weird because in one sense, it's closer to the way the album was conceived than it has been, say, for the past 20 years. Whereas initially albums were like an artist would build up a bunch of singles that would been reasonably successful, then they'd collect them all together and call it an album. But then by the end of the 60s, even by early earlier than that, early 60s, the whole idea of getting songs that were cohesive and that sort of belonged in the one place really became a strong concept. Whereas the way people are making music now, it's kind of pretty much heaven forbid that I would ever use this term, dropping singles. I'm gonna drop a single. And I just go, oh, really? It's just such horrible modern speaking, my my opinion, you know. So they click on a mouse and a song goes out to the world, and when they build up enough, then they've got an album. But it's a little bit backwards because it's generally speaking, they've got the album done first up. Look, I was born in 1960, so by the time I was really deeply concerned about and listening to music, it was the 70s, and the album re-rained supreme, you know.
Cheryl Lee:Yeah, that's right.
Mick Thomas:The whole idea of the album. So I'm pretty wedded to that idea, you know. That's my my way of thinking and working.
Cheryl Lee:The first single from the album, the first step in a homeward direction, entered the air chart at number one in June. Congratulations.
Mick Thomas:Yeah, look, it it is just interesting that the way things have gone in terms of independent music. If you'd told me that um a song could enter the charts on that few of sales 20 years ago, I would have laughed at you. But but because sales are so uh so low, like physical sales are record, it's pretty easy to work it that you you can sort of chart a bit. But yeah, it doesn't mean a lot when you know you you chart one week and then you that's it. It's a nice little kind of spring in your step for a day, but you really gotta be try and be careful to not let that and it's like people looking at their Spotify figures and going, Oh, I got this many streams and I in this many countries, amazing. And it just doesn't mean very much at all, you know. They're very misleading KPIs, another modern term I've used today. You've got to be really careful with those things. It was great. Look, all I know is that enough people sort of buy the stuff for me to make another record, you know.
Cheryl Lee:What I really love about after that single came out, you went and did a bit of a tour, then the in-store tour to hang out with your fans, support the retailers, which is really important, and highlight the lack of the human connection in today's music business. I really love that you took the time to do all of that.
Mick Thomas:It was a really interesting exercise, and you know, it it sort of forced me to, you know, to evaluate the worth of it, you know, and it's not just a commercial thing, but I had had to really kind of toss it up. When I kind of think of it, that there just were some great moments. Moments that you don't even get at gigs, you know. So you're standing in a record shop, we did four. We did Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, and Hobart, and you're sort of standing there. I don't reckon there was more than 30 people at any given one. I kind of had it in my head that that they would be a bit more like the ones that the weddings did back in the day where they were really jam-packed and you could sell 30 or 40 albums. They certainly weren't that. There was something really beautiful about them, you know, and really a good sense of connection there. And and the fact is, every interview we did, people wanted to talk about it. Because I think it is hitting home that the way music is being made in in the modern era, it is so impersonal. Impersonal, yeah. And it we get a lot of people who whose kids have sort of grown up with their music who come along, and so you get these 17, 18-year-old, nine-year-old kids coming along with their parents. So they've grown up loving our music, so that's fine. You know they're gonna enjoy it because they're gonna get to hear, you know, a bunch of songs that they they know and really like. But one of the cross-the-board comments that we get off those kids, those that second generation kids, is that this is amazing. Like this is just amazing in a way. They said, our friends don't know how good this is. And I thought, yeah, that's because if you only go and see Taylor Swift or ACDC or Ed Sheran, you're never gonna meet that artist. Whereas, you know, so I be talking to these kids at the merch desk, and there's that sense of like that music is about connection or or it can be. And I think that the the record shop thing really put it back to that. And one thing I can safely say about those four shops is none of those shops really have much of our our music in the racks, you know. They're places that they either have big second-hand sections or they function off people sort of who buy a lot of imports and pay really big money for them. So in every case, we had to sort of bring in our records and say, well, you know, this is how much you'll get, how much we'll get. They'll go through your cash register, blah, blah, blah. And in every case, they bought a few office to sell because they're not in a position to be buying loads of stock in the way it was when say when the weddings were assigned to to Warners. In those days, like a rep would go into those shops and sell them 10 copies or 20 copies. Or sometimes the reps would say, My God, there's one shop, you know, in such and such a suburb of Adelaide or Perth and they're selling a heap of your stuff. And we'd probably go there and do an in-store and find that there was someone who was a real super duper fan who worked in the store. That was kind of how it worked. Weirdly enough, it was all still pretty personal. We played in record shops a lot, but the way music's being made, you know, like with this dropping a single and click a click on a mouse thing, it it it's it's less and less personal. And and I know one band here who just got signed to a major, major deal in the States. And this is really interesting. But the first thing that that label did was they flew that band to the States for three weeks of record stores.
Cheryl Lee:Oh wow.
Mick Thomas:Yeah, and that was I'm talking last month.
Cheryl Lee:Yeah. So I'm making things turning around.
Mick Thomas:I don't think I'm Robinson Caruso in making this observation, you know, that there's still connections there to be made. And my example, I was saying, if playing in a record shop is this really beautiful thing, and and we play like a little set. Most days we play like maybe eight or nine songs. We play, you know, six or seven from from the new album, then a couple of other bits and pieces. And the connection was so great. And you stand there with people and they'd buy the record, then they'll buy some other record or something they'd find in the racks. And yeah, just talking about music. And I know, like in one of them in Egg Records in Sydney, we finished, and the guy put on Teenage Fan Club songs from Northern Britain, and I went, ah! And he went, What's the matter? I said, It's probably about my favorite album, you know. And he had no way of knowing that. And he just sort of thought, he said, Yeah, it's just kind of really digging what you did. And and I sort of thought, music's the winner here in in the all these situations. And it's the antithesis of the exchange where you find yourself in a cafe or a pub and there's some music playing, and you quite like the sound of it, and you say to the to the waiter or the waitress, you say, Excuse me, what are we listening to? And they go, I don't know. It's just Spotify, you know. And you go, That's the worst thing ever. You know, that's the worst exchange about music that I can think of. And this is kind of the best, you know. So I'm not saying it's gonna win me, you know, any any uh great prizes, you know. But I I kind of think that the way the way forward, I I don't know if you're aware of a book called Mood Machine by a woman called Liz Palley, and she she's an American woman. She was just in Australia recently promoting it, and it's about the rise of Spotify. In the end of it, she talks a real lot about what she thinks we can do to be proactive about how music's played, and and uh it's a really scary book to read, but the parallel she draws is with uh literature, and she says, Well, somehow literature's survived, you know, like bookshops have survived where record shops haven't. And she says, Well, what is it? She puts it down to the authors who are a lot bolshier, you know, the the musicians, and they they oppose things like parallel import importing, and you know, they've been much more vociferous in their promotion of or their protection of of their industry. And but she just talks about like book clubs and things like that, and she says, Well, maybe music's got to get back to that. But I mean, it's it's not all doom and gloom. Like, don't forget that books don't sell what records sell. Like, still say bookshops might have survived, but like you know, I look I I don't know where it's going. You'd be foolish to be optimistic. I know, you've just got to try things.
Cheryl Lee:Keep on keeping on.
Mick Thomas:You've got to keep on keeping on, and you've just got to try new things, you know. I mean, I I just said to everyone, well, look, one of my observations of the internet or special social media, I reckon it's made people really fucking lazy. People just think, well, I'll bring it out and I'll, you know, I'll just take out some ads on Facebook, or heaven forbid, I might go to you know, a proper person who who d who does that sort of Facebook advertising and do a proper campaign and pay some money. I look at what I've just done and I go, well, it and I look at what it's cost, and it it wasn't cheap to get you know two or three of us around the country for four weeks. And I go, well, if I'd taken that money and just spent it on online advertising on, you know, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, I might have got a better result, but it would have been a really lazy thing to do.
Cheryl Lee:And you would have missed out on all those wonderful experiences.
Mick Thomas:Exactly, exactly. All those things that that really kind of float your boat and make you.
Cheryl Lee:Like if you're an internet band and you're a real band.
Mick Thomas:Well, that's right. You know, there's there's so yeah. Well, and that's what's happening on sp on Spotify is there's bands that are just kind of being invented on the internet, and you go, Well, I just don't want to be that, you know. And I and I kind of think also, you know, you want to enjoy doing it. I mean, the last interview that that I did, someone said, Well, you know, I've got some kids coming up through a music school. What's your advice? And I said, Well, enjoy doing it. Yeah, enjoy what you do. Like, so therefore, playing for me is really important, you know, like because I I like playing and I like making records. I've managed to make my living playing music for my entire life. It's not always been easy, and sometimes it's been, you know, you you're scratching around and trying to work out where your next dollar's coming from. So, a far more efficient way for me to do things would have been just to keep some weird version of the weddings going and just recycling the old hits and spending all the money and advertising on online. What I'm trying to say is I'm sure I could have done what I've done a lot more financially efficiently.
Cheryl Lee:Would you have enjoyed it as much?
Mick Thomas:I wouldn't have enjoyed it, you know, and I'm not saying every record I make is as good as any other record that I make, but I've got to believe that there's something decent in every record that I make, whether it's a commercial hit or whether it just you know gets someone where they live, you know, like it it hits someone in in a strong emotional way. So if you take that out of it, then I probably should go and get a job, you know.
Cheryl Lee:I feel like maybe in some way, some fans are missing out on that journey, and instead sitting in front of the computer watching the numbers go up at the end of their careers, where's the memories? Where's their footprint that they left here?
Mick Thomas:That's right. Look, look, I couldn't agree with you more. You know, I know there's a little bar in Melbourne that we I run with some friends, it's called the Merry Creek Tavern. It's a really good little venue. I really love working there, and and we employ a lot of musicians, right? And the musicians we tend to employ are are younger because they're the people who want to work behind the bar. They're pretty embryonic in terms of their career. And uh I was talking to one guy and we're just chatting about music, and he said, I've got friends who are in the band Private Function who are just enormous, you know. And I I had no idea about who these guys were. And he said, I'm pretty sure it was private function, and he said, the advice they gave him is said, don't play. And I said, What do you fucking mean, don't play? They said, Don't play. I said, just don't play. Do your stuff online, blah, blah, blah. And then when you come out, you know, and you come and you do this big show. And I just said, I only started in this business to play. So if I don't play, then it's ridiculous, you know. It's it's like telling a football player not to play, you know.
Cheryl Lee:Yeah, but you don't play, you're not alive, right?
Mick Thomas:It's what it is, you know. I just kind of think that in that regard, the the internet just has sort of dominated things in a really weird way, you know. Like you know, I just sort of thought that was the most amazing thing I've ever heard. Bizarre, really bizarre. Yeah.
Cheryl Lee:We need to talk about your new single. You're a busy man, you've got to get packing and get on the road like a real band.
Mick Thomas:Yeah, yeah.
Cheryl Lee:The next single is A Mighty Ride, and we are gonna play that as we leave you. Are you taking the six-piece lineup we've recorded this on? Is everybody coming?
Mick Thomas:Yeah, yeah, all all all six of us. Even got Hunter and Jesse Lee's bad habits opening for us pretty much for the whole tour, taking them around.
Cheryl Lee:So just like the old days.
Mick Thomas:Yeah, I mean, I just again, you know, it'd be it'd be so much easier to to not take everyone, but it's like, you know, we're the six people that we went away to record the album, and you know, I mean, I'm sure there would have been session players in Auckland that could have come and done stuff, but yeah, we've got a pretty good breadth of instrumentation within the six people, and it was really nice just to do an album that was just the six of us. So yeah, it it's great to be going on the road with that lot of people.
Cheryl Lee:Mick Thomas's Roving Commission's new album, Go Come Back, is available on CD, limited edition LP. Yay! Digital download. So we wish you all the best with the tour kicking off tonight, and we shall see you here in Adelaide a couple of times in early December.
Mick Thomas:Yeah, yeah, micthomas.com slash shows is where you can get tickets, and yeah, I'll look forward to to just getting out there and doing it. And and I'm gonna go and load the car now.
Cheryl Lee:I'll see you down the front.
Mick Thomas:Good on you, Cheryl. Thank you. Thanks for your time.
Cheryl Lee:Have a good one, stay safe.
Mick Thomas:Good on you, thank you.
Tommy Kaye:You are listening to Still Rocking It, the podcast with Cheryl Lee.
Cheryl Lee:All going well. I'll be interviewing Mick when he comes to town early next month. So stay tuned to our weekly music show, Rider TV, on Channel 44 Adelaide and Channel 31 Melbourne. Here it is, as promised, the brand new single, A Mighty Ride, from the Go Come Back album from Mick Thomas's Raving Commission.
Cheryl Lee:Thank you so much for joining me on the Still Rockin' It podcast. Hope to catch you again next time. Get out when you can, support Aussie music, and I'll see you down the front.