Mick Thomas Dips His Toe In The Literary World

When Mick Thomas' legendary band Weddings Parties Anything pulled up stumps in 1998 after 15 years and six acclaimed studio albums, he was forced by necessity to start again from scratch, albeit with his former band's sizable legacy behind him to help on the profile front.

Having now spent the best part of two decades curating his solo career - out front of various backing ensembles such as The Sure Thing and The Roving Commission - it's come time to acknowledge that aspect of his career with a new compilation titled These Are The Songs, the companion piece to new book These Are The Days.

"I think I've pretty much set my course and haven't diverted much along the way," Thomas laughs of acknowledging his second career phase. "As a solo body of work I feel pretty good about it, and doing the compilation and the book forced me to look at it in that regard. You constantly are having to do that but this was probably a bit more consciously: every time you write a setlist you have to contemplate what's on offer to play for people, or every time you do a rehearsal, and I guess just rejigging the band recently you're forced to think about what we want to be and how we're regarded. I guess that's the question that anyone with any sort of musical legacy is forced to confront."

"The other night I was sitting down with Billy Bragg and we were laughing about how it's come down to us selling tea towels."

Both the size and strength of Thomas' solo canon caused headaches when it came to picking songs for the compilation, which eventually ended up filling a double-CD (including four new tracks). "The whole thing started with the idea that I just wanted a really good compilation to sell at the merch desk," he tells. "Because a lot of my records have become deleted, and I was really aware of this trend in my supporter base of people returning to me after going away for a few years to have families or for whatever reason. So I was constantly having people saying to me after the set, 'That was great, I haven't seen you for years, what were most of those songs from?', and I guess I wanted something to sell that had ten songs that we'd play on a given night.

"The idea for writing the book came out of the idea that I just wanted to really shore up the package so that it was something that people couldn't just get via streaming. I was still really dedicated to the idea that in a cottage industry you can make money from the merch stand, although that seems to be less and less the reality - you have to diversify. The other night I was sitting down with Billy Bragg and we were laughing about how it's come down to us selling tea towels, and I know that someone like Henry Wagons has these hip flasks you can buy, you just need items that you can sell. Streaming has had a massive effect on that."

The book delivers fascinating insight into not just all of the tracks on These Are The Songs, but also looks at the WPA songs that have survived the journey and still exist in the current live set.

"The initial publisher we spoke to was kinda troubled that there was nothing from the Weddings in there, then later we changed publishers and the guy at Melbourne Books - who's fantastic and has done a lot of music books - he just said to me, 'Look, why don't you just pick the ten songs from the Weddings that you still might do, that still might have some sort of currency, and just write about them?'" Thomas explains. "That seemed like a great idea so I sat down and wrote about those songs, and originally I had them in a separate part of the book, but then the editor came back to me and said, 'You're bitching about people who draw this imaginary line in your career and in your canon of what you've created and now you're doing the same thing yourself.'

"Then he suggested that I place them in a rough chronology that's maybe a bit similar to a live set, just put them where they'd sit so that the book will finish with some gravity because that's how you finish your live set. He said, 'You've got this real culture about what you do, why reject that?' That was really great advice."