As Weddings Parties Anything makes its last tour of the country, Michael Thomas tells Larry Schwartz why it’s time to say goodbye
TWELVE years had passed since the Thomases moved on, first to Colac, then Horsham and Geelong. Michael was in his late teens, his brother Steve his early 20s, when they made a detour on a camping trip to revisit the old company town of Yallourn. “Now Old King Coal was a Merry Old Soul” – Michael would pen a song about it. “And a merry old soul was he;/ Cause he fed my dad and he fed my mum/ Kept us children three.”
He sings it in that wondrously corrosive voice he has thought clumsy and mawkish since he first heard it in the ’60s on a cousin’s reel-to-reel. He’s written some of the finest Australian songs in recent years. But who knows it? Too many associate them with his band. He is not nearly as celebrated as he ought to be.
He may yet get his due. As Weddings Parties Anything tours the country to farewell its fans, Michael Thomas is thinking ahead to a solo career. As Weddings singer and principal songwriter, he can draw on an extraordinary repertoire. Scorn of Women, Roaring Days, Under the Clocks, Hungry Years, Father’s Day, Monday’s Experts. And on.
One of his earliest and best known was about Yallourn, where his father, an SEC engineer, once worked. It was home to several thousand in nearly identical three-bedroom, weatherboard houses, three-quarter-acre blocks, streets set out as spokes around a hub. Steve Thomas – now based in Hobart, where he’s involved in film-making and advertising – remembers that everything seemed smaller on the day of the visit that inspired Industrial Town.
One hundred and forty kilometres south-east of Melbourne, their birthplace was a ghost town when they went back. The brothers found their old home and recognised their father’s design for a rowing boat was still tacked up in the old shed.The SEC town was cleared to mine brown coal for a nearby power station. Demolition had begun in the early ’70s. The Thomas’s old home was among the few still standing.
“Down in the valley the valley so low/
Lay the town over, hear the winds blow/
Lay the town over, dig it all in/
For what we once had will not come again.”
The last line might seem apt for Weddings. But the band’s end promises a new beginning for Michael.
News that the Weddoes, as fans know them, would disband after a farewell Lap of Honor tour, provoked a flurry of letters to the EG section of this newspaper. There was some lamentation, some nostalgia for the good old days, some stoic speculation that Michael would re-emerge as a solo performer or with “whatever vehicle” he next forms.
Any talk about Michael’s achievement will invariably turn to comparison with that other great singer-songwriter, Paul Kelly.
Weddings manager Peter Hayes believes Michael has nowhere near the recognition he might have gained had he asserted his identity as Kelly had done, by using his own name along with his bands’. “That was the way they chose to operate,” Hayes says. “That was the guiding rule for the whole band. It was always the band. It wasn’t somebody and the band.”
Michael has been impressed by Kelly’s career moves since the demise of his band, The Messengers. “He went out and played on his own for a while. He played with a few people. Then, as he had success, his band has become more stabilised and more established. He’s avoided that thing of having a band on a payroll . . . It’s going to be a long time before I sign up with another band.”
He sits with his back against the wall in a cafe in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, spooning from a thick bowl of vegetable soup, dunking bits of white bread. He looks up from a book he’s been reading and notes in greeting that it’s a while since we last met.
He has about him the weariness of one who has had to turn back before the summit but will try again. He epitomises a dilemma for critically acclaimed Australian musicians who are frustrated by the inevitably limited domestic sales dictated by population size and failure to make a significant impact overseas.
“I’m happy with what the music industry has given me in terms of accolades, in terms of travel and people I’ve met,” he’d told me two years ago after the band signed with Mushroom. “. . . I just think it’s not paid that well.” He had high hopes then for the last album, River’esque, recorded in Tasmania.
The Weddings had come to Mushroom after frustrations at Warners and RooArt and failure of the hit, Father’s Day, to take them over the edge. They’d signed despite some success in selling the EP Donkey Serenade by mail order. Michael says River’esque never received the attention it deserved.
“That was a bit of a body blow to the band,” he says. “. . . It didn’t get released in New Zealand. It didn’t get released anywhere overseas. It didn’t get us anywhere new. It didn’t get us to a new part of Australia.”
You might see Michael walking around his inner-suburban neighborhood with his blue-heeler, Belle. There’s no sense of false celebrity about him. He conducts himself with the modesty of just another bloke.
The house he share with stage and tour manager Stan Armstrong has an old wood stove. The fake brick has been removed to reveal the weatherboard. Empty bottles of brandy and cigarette packs are “memorabilia” from the previous owner. Armstrong says he’ll come upon the singer-songwriter “thrashing around, doing his own stuff”, working in his home studio, brewing his own beer, strumming at his guitar.
Michael returned to Melbourne from touring overseas on the Saturday his beloved St Kilda’s advance in this season’s final series ended in dismal defeat by the Demons. Both parents were from families that barracked for the Saints. He, Steve and their sister, Christine, have shared the passion.
“I came back on that day,” he says. “I couldn’t get a flight earlier. It was always my plan to come back for the finals and then (the) Edinburgh (festival) came up and we wanted to do that. It was bad timing.”
Though they didn’t own many records, his parents would listen to Roy Rogers, the Andrews Sisters, the Seekers, Slim Dusty. Steve’s musical interests were a big influence on Michael’s first songs in his mid-teens. He drew inspiration from his brother’s Bob Dylan albums and an old record he still plays late at night, Moreton Bay and Other Songs Mainly of Convict Origin. “I still own that record. It’s still one of my favorites. It’s really cracked. I have this fantasy of rerecording the whole album. I’ve got about half way through it.”
Steve remembers that his brother took guitar lessons from the age of 12 or so. Within a few years, they’d go to the Geelong Folk Club where Michael would play a mix of traditional songs and his own material.
“I remember a number of conversations about whether or not he should sing with an Australian accent or adopt an American pronunciation,” Steve says. “One of the first songs he learnt was The Lion Sleeps Tonight. He’d sing, ‘In the jerngle the mahty jerngle . . .’ I used to tease him about it. I think one of the great qualities is that, at some point, he made a decision not to adopt an American pronunciation. Sadly, it’s probably counted against him on many occasions.”
Steve considers the mixed fortunes of Weddings Parties Anything. “I think, in some ways, it’s about luck and about breaks and being in the right place at the right time,” he says. “There was a lot of hype in the late ’80s about the band. Things were looking strong. But, for various reasons, radio never got behind them. They’ve always had a fantastically loyal and almost rabid following around the country. I’ve been to shows where every song was sung by the audience. And yet they’ve never been able to push to a wider audience . . . I put it down largely to radio and a certain cringe people get at his not singing with an American accent.”
In the past year, Michael’s played in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Germany, Holland, France, Austria, Italy, England and Scotland. “I guess it was something that I knew quantifiably, but it was just a slap in the face to realise how little inroads 14 years of being in the band had had in other countries,” he says. “I mean, I know that we’ve never had a record released in (the former) Czechoslovakia . . .”
“Should you?” I wonder for a moment what Europeans might make of songs sung in a English about Flinders Street clocks and other antipodean landmarks and preoccupations. “That’s a good question. I’m not saying world domination is what the band is on about. But you always try to get your music out to as many people as you can.”
Michael has seen the letters to EG. “It’s hard not to be touched,” he says. “It’s hard not to be chuffed by the whole thing. But, at the same time, without trying to denigrate anything that anyone’s written, what the Weddings had was a small vociferous group of people who believed really strongly and passionately. I’m pleased that people believe that I should have had more success than I had. But, at the same time, that’s a group of a few hundred who really believe in us enough to write in letters, but it’s not enough to sway a decision.”
The end had not come as abruptly as some might assume. Michael recalls bassist Stephen O’Prey’s concern that Weddings ceased to be a band when its players agreed a few years back to play together only towards the end of each year. O’Prey argued that it was as though they were breaking up only to reform for Christmas tours. There was no longer a special unity necessary to continue to create something special.
“I guess that was a significant point,” Michael says. “When Peter Lawler, the previous bass player, left, I said to the band at the time, ‘Give me a reason to keep it going’. And I guess as soon as he (O’Prey) mentioned the words ‘breaking up’, it started to become a reality . . . They’re all emotional steps. And I guess the time had come.”
With everyone off pursuing separate musical interests, he found it difficult to organise a meeting. “Everyone had something that was more important than talking about the band,” he says, “and, afterwards, people said, ‘If we’d known it was such a momentous meeting then maybe we would have put the other stuff aside’.”
The musicians finally met in the offices in Fitzroy from which WPA runs its own website, compiles a publication, The Wed Cry, and sells its own CDs, along with such items as boardshorts, beanies and songbooks.
Michael told his bandmates he was not convinced there was any point in continuing. “I know a couple of members of the band really don’t agree with it. What I’ve said to them is the band works for you as it stands a lot better than it works for me.
“To put together a 10-week tour at Christmas takes months. It means I’m taking three or four months out of every year out of my calendar. It works for the band because they’ve been able to do other things.”
The Age, 28-Nov-1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 