Mick Thomas’ Roving Commission has premiere a video for ‘I Heard Sally Singing’ from the ‘See You On The Other Side’ album, recorded during Isolation.
Mick says, “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.
“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”.
“I Heard Sally Singing” is available via Micks’ Bandcamp and all digital platforms. 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.
https://mickthomas.bandcamp.com
www.mickthomas.com
www.facebook.com/MickThomasMusic
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