On the one hand, the new single ‘I Heard Sally Singing’ by Mick Thomas’ Roving Commission is a catchy, swinging roots country tune about watching Melbourne alt-country darling Sal Kimber perform. On the other, it is something much more. Something existential even.
Now, Thomas is premiering a video, specially produced by Gareth Calverly from Boilermaker Productions, for the single.
‘I Heard Sally Singing’ takes listeners back to the night of the final gig before lockdown at Northcote’s Merri Creek Tavern – a venue Mick Thomas co-owns and manages. The song is taken from See You On The Other Side – A Postcard from April 2020, an album Mick and band wrote and recorded in lockdown, and which was released in mid-June. Right now, after a brief conditional reopening in July, the outlook for the Merri Creek Tavern – indeed the entire city of Melbourne – is bleaker than ever, giving the song a new resonance, deeper and perhaps sadder than when people first heard it.
“The song is about what we lose when the lights go down, when the bars are shut. It’s about memory and hindsight. The things we can never quite touch or contain. Trying to capture smoke,” explains Thomas. “Gareth Calverly from Boilermaker Productions was keen to shoot a video for us after we had contributed a song for Mint Condition – the short form web drama they’d released back in Lockdown 1.0. We had the song ‘I Heard Sally Singing’ getting a few spins on some of the more country orientated web stations so that seemed a good choice. As the song is actually about a performance by Sal Kimber at the Merri Creek Tavern that seemed the obvious place to do the filming.
“I figured we were overdue to make a ‘proper’ performance clip – one we actually appeared in – as the past couple of clips had been pretty much animations. Problem was, with the looming stage four clampdown we knew there was no point booking a whole load of people to be in the clip or even at the shoot. Ultimately it was just myself and Brooke Russell on screen, Philip M. Cross working the camera with Gareth directing and Mark Garnett from the pub handling the playback and projections.
“The song itself is about a moment in time. A moment that’s gone – replaced by an uneasy feeling that perhaps we didn’t quite appreciate what we had. So instead of having a stack of people on stage we chose to have occasional flickers of Sal Kimber or Squeezebox Wally projected onto the back curtain, or even over Brooke and I as we played. It looks great to my eye – ghostly, ethereal, enigmatic. It’s about distance and memory. The moment in time when people were forced to think about each other differently.
“All of this in the place where the original performance by Sal Kimber had taken place on the 13th of March. Trying to recapture an idea. A feeling. Trying to capture smoke.”
The song also reflects on the live music experience and reminds us – Melbournians at least – of what we’re currently missing. It speaks of the ability for live music to transport (‘for an hour and quarter then the world was put to right’), and to do that despite its ephemeral nature (‘for we may never meet again – where we are bound it’s hard to say’). It also reflects on the intimacy of a small live venue (‘a solo built for two’ – Sal was heavily pregnant at the time) and the sense of place afforded by the live music experience (‘down on the 86’, which of course refers to the tramline). In so many ways, it is a song for our times.
‘I Heard Sally Singing’ is the third single to be released off the new album. The first single, ‘Mint Condition’, was released while the album was really just an idea – the song was written and recorded a few months previous for a short-form drama series of the same name starring Sibylla Budd, Bernard Curry and Gary Sweet, which was launched via Vimeo by Boilermaker Productions in early May.
The second single, ‘See You When I’m Looking At You’, was the song around which the album was built. Beginning as a verse and chorus by Thomas, it grew to nine minutes in length as numerous old friends including Angie Hart from Frente, Nick Barker, Vikki Thorn from the Waifs and Ron S. Peno from Died Pretty each added verses of their own. Its initial release on Mick’s Bandcamp page was to benefit the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre in Footscray. Adelaide broadcaster Michael Hunter of 3D Radio’s Roots & Branches program has described the song as “one of the most beautiful, bittersweet songs I’ve ever heard – in both form and concept. I don’t think the virus itself deserves a theme song, but the combined humanity and hope it has brought out in most of us certainly do, and this might well be it.”
The release of ‘I Heard Sally Singing’ follows the exciting announcement that Mick and the Roving commission will be playing next year’s Bluesfest, alongside the first performance by Mick’s legendary band Weddings Parties Anything since 2012. It also follows the release of Stuart Coupe’s book Paul Kelly: The Man, The Music and The Life In Between, which includes insight into a musical relationship between Thomas and Kelly that began back in the ’80s.
‘I Heard Sally Singing’ is released via Micks’ Bandcamp and all digital platform’s today. It is available with newly recorded B-side ‘At the Corner’, a song written in honour of another beloved Melbourne music venue, the Corner Hotel. The song was written and recorded for this year’s virtual edition of the City of Yarra’s Leaps & Bounds Festival and first aired on presenter David Heard’s also-loved Acid Country program on Melbourne’s 3PBS-FM.
MICK THOMAS’S ROVING COMMISSION’S NEW SINGLE
“I HEARD SALLY SINGING” / “AT THE CORNER”
IS OUT NOW
https://mickthomas.bandcamp.com
But Wait There’s More! Get Your Own Zoom Concert From Mick Thomas!
Thomas is also offering a special deal for those supporting him by buying multiple copies of his latest album. Musicians just want to play but more than anyone else the people of Melbourne’s vibrant music community realise this just isn’t possible. So sometimes Muhammad just has to come to the mountain! In the face of Melbourne’s continued and increased lockdown Mick Thomas has been taking it to his ever faithful punters and selling Zoom concerts online!
No stranger to going out on tour to sell records this time around when Mick and his Roving Commission decided to release their classic lockdown album See You On the Other Side Mick decided anyone who wanted to stump up for ten records could get a ten song ‘by request’ show via Zoom. There has been a dozen so far and if that’s what it takes to sell records then Mick is all too happy to do it.
Says local screen writer Jaime Browne who attended one of these shows last weekend: We loved it and honestly the new music was the highlight, really hit us all and we ended up talking for hours which was really cool so thankyou. I will remember this Friday night for a long time and tell the grandkids the way mine spoke of listening to Bradman on an old marconi!