‘Keeping All The Canons Clean,’ written by Charles Jenkins, is the latest single released from City’s Calling Me by Mick Thomas & The Roving Commission. New tour dates are to be announced tomorrow.
A video for the song has just been made available and you can watch it here:
You can buy the track and/or pre-order the new album here: Keeping All The Cannons Clean
City’s Calling Me, released on April 29, is a guided tour through the city of the heart, featuring old favourites reinvented and new gems unearthed; from Mick’s own catalogue, as well as those of friends including Sally Kimber, Van Walker, and Charles Jenkins
Then album started life as a simple covers record, but as Melbourne’s second lockdown of 2020 took hold, it grew into something more substantial.
City’s Calling Me is the second album Mick and band recorded during lockdown – the first See You On The Other Side: A Postcard From April 2020 was very much his ISO special, an album that started as a single and opened up to something much bigger.
The new album’s title is from the Van Walker song “High Street Bridge” and was a lyric Mick had originally sung incorrectly (he erroneously sang ‘Sky is calling me’). Van picked up on this when Mick sent him an early mix for approval. City’s Calling Me seemed an obvious title after that. Never trust internet lyric websites.
“Perhaps 2020 was a year when we were all forced to evaluate what was most important to us, what we could do without and what we missed the most. For me it was an easy answer: I missed playing music with other people – something I was able to approximate in isolation – and I missed being out and about in the city I have spent the last 30 year bumping around. So the city was something I was forced to reimagine as well. But it’s a city that could be anywhere in the world – insert your own place names. Because it’s the city of the heart’.”
City’s Calling Me will be released April 29 on vinyl, CD and download: out on Brickfielders Recordings through Rocket Distribution and on Bandcamp. Go to mickthomas.com