Interview With: Mick Thomas

Mick Thomas discusses the impact of the audience on Weddings Parties Anything, the breakup of the band, his new freedom and status in the recording industry, recording 'Dust On My Shoes' and Nick Barker. (Recorded June, 2001) The interview is in RealVideo format. You will need a 56K modem or better, and a RealVideo player - click the icon below if you don't have one.

Below is an excerpt from the interview.

EN. What's the next song you recorded?

MT. 'Hard Currency'. It was the turning point of the whole session because I went back and we'd booked Matt Walker to come in that night to play and someone said "Look, do you want us to cancel Matt? You seem a little stressed". And I said "No, bugger it, this is when I'm going to play good". Matt came in, and it was just basically me and Barclay who were there. I said "I've got this song we've been playing for a year with a double bass and me - but that's not going to happen. Do you want to have a go at it?". And he said "Yeah, sure".

We started jamming at 'Hard Currency' and Michael went in and did this drum thing behind us. I said "It's really good but it makes us sound exactly like Matt Walker and Ashley Davey", when Darren came in and said "Do you want me to play bass?", so I said "yeah" and he grabbed the other electric bass. He started playing and all of a sudden the song had taken an amazing turn. We got it down and wrapped. We did 'As Far As The Eye Can See' with just me and Matt and then we did 'No Picnic'. It was just a fantastic session where these three tracks went down....

When I read that quote from Bob Dylan about recording the stuff as you hear it, it made a lot of sense. I thought back to Dylan doing, say, 'Blonde on Blonde'. He had the band in the studio ready to go and he turned up with a different guitarist. Al Kooper was to have played guitar and he'd turned up with Mike Bloomfield, so Al Kooper jumped on the Hammond. But that was the band he recorded with. Whereas in the modern process we'd say well, he's not really a hammond player so we won't put down the organ now, we'll put it down later. And I realised when Matt came in that day that that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to capture a moment. I'm not trying to have this picture in my mind about the way the track's going to go. I just hate that whole recording process... That's fine for electronic music, because they're capturing something different, but I want to capture a moment. I love the way musicians play together and that's what I want to get down.