Better Live: Mick Thomas of Weddings, Parties, Anything
The Dwarf caught up with Mick Thomas of Weddings, Parties, Anything to discuss the iRevolution, crowds and new records.
A lot has been going on for Weddings, Parties, Anything this year, the Ten Year Reunion tour is in full swing and Mick only has gratifying words on it; “It’s been really, really good. It’s been everything we dared to hope it might be”. The Australia wide tour has resulted in the Weddings beating the Hilltop Hoods 2004 record for most consecutive shows at The Corner Hotel, a band that Thomas sees parallel with “big bands with big crowds that get big support without major radio. From what I’ve heard of them they don’t play to inner city people, they play to suburban people. It’s the same thing that worked for the Weddings, our crowd wasn’t a hip inner city crowd, they were just a bunch of people that got something from our music”.
And what a bunch of people they are. “It’s an older audience but at the same time there’s a lot of people that come up and say “I never got to see you, you split up when I was 17”, you know because the majority of our success wasn’t generated by the charts or the radio a lot of our stuff was handed down person to person. Whether that was brothers and sisters, or fathers and mothers, a lot of people got it in that way. Some of the shows have been quite remarkable in that regard, and in terms of the demographic.”
So after 10 years, what bought them back together?
“It seemed like a dignified thing to go out on tour after 10 years and just do 15 or 20 dates around the place. It just seemed like a good amount of time. We’re all still friends and after 10 years. Madman approached us about doing the DVD in 2006 and we had the opportunity to headline the Queenscliff Festival [at the same time], so we sort of said “alright”. We were pretty happy to have a DVD that was a record of the band, and a record of the last line up that really did a lot to cement the band in terms of the historical status that we might or might not have in the industry.”
Weddos are the latest in a spate of bands reforming to play shows, and Thomas thinks that really it was just “a matter of time”. Although having said that they could just be reforming because they “haven’t found anything better to do, maybe they’ve got a tax bill to pay, fix their kitchen, something like that – for us it was just important that it felt right, that there was a reasonable amount of time left”.
In regards to the iRevolution, Thomas has found that “it’s probably less relevant to me than a lot of people because the sorts of people that buy my music are older and they don’t tend to download music. They’re people that have grown up with the concept of buying records and buying records really regularly, so the people that buy my music are people that respect that idea and don’t want to steal music”. MySpace is particularly integral in this conversation as it is being credited with starting careers, but Thomas is quick to ask “Has MySpace created a single bit of success that wouldn’t have been created anyway? Do you honestly believe the hype about Sandi Thom or Lily Allen or the Arctic Monkeys for a moment? All those acts are signed to major labels, Lily Allen’s parents are bloody vaudeville singers, and they all would’ve been successful anyway. I think it’s helping the bands that are probably pretty much self starters; I don’t think it has by and large made that many careers that weren’t going to happen”.
Don’t let this sway you into thinking that Thomas is a techno-phobe, “I think the internet is a fantastic tool, I lament the fact that it wasn’t there when the Weddings were fully functioning as a band because I think we would have been really suited to marketing ourselves on the internet. I mean look at Wilco and how efficient they are with their mail outs and their website”.
The industry in general is changing though and Thomas doesn’t “think it’s just downloading of music that’s changing this, I think peoples lives have changed. Kids have got a range of things available to them now in terms of popular culture and popular multimedia, music is just one of those things”.
“For the bands that make it [these days] it seems too easy, but I kind of figure it’s more like the whole concept of educational streaming, you know if you take kids that have a bit of potential at a young age and separate them, everything goes on to those kids. As opposed to the educational model where you’re looking at all kids getting a decent education and working out later on who’s going to do well and do badly. The bands that are getting through are getting hand picked from pretty early days. I think the hard road is less and less valued these days.”
“It sort of makes me sad that the Weddings can go out and advertise a bunch of dates around the country, and we’ll probably have played to 20000 people by the end of this tour right, [but] people aren’t buying records these days, they aren’t going to the shops and finding the new Gin Club album or the new Tim Rogers album.” With that being said that Thomas is quick to name some new bands that we should all check out; “Kill Devil Hills are really good, they’re from Perth, [and] they’re doing quite well, The Gin Club are good too. It’s hard because a lot of the people I talk about are contemporaries or people that I’m working with, be it releasing their records on Croxton or working in the studio. If I say I like The Go Set or Dan Warner or Marcel Borrack it sort of feels like I’ve got a bit much of a vested interest in those bands, but they are the sort of bands I like”.
As for the future, well Thomas says that he has “just got to come to grips with the fact that anything which has the words Weddings Parties Anything stamped on it is going to be more successful than anything that’s got the words Mick Thomas stamped on it. Which sounds like a pretty glib thing to say but you know I’ve pretty much spent 10 years bashing my way around the country subsequent to the Weddings finishing up with varying degrees of success, then you come out and put out the Weddings posters and people pretty much fall all over themselves to get there. I’m not knocking it for a moment. It’s a legacy and it’s sort of nice that 10 years down the track something that I was involved in is considered worthy of peoples attention. But at the same time, I guess in all honesty, the reason that people turn out for the Weddings and not so much Mick Thomas is that they like my old stuff better than my new stuff. I guess I have to sit down for a month or two afterwards and figure out what I want to do”.
