The oldest track on Mick Thomas’ Roving Commission new ‘See You On The Other Side’ is ‘Mint Condition’.
‘Gareth Calverley was a filmmaker who made the short-form drama series ‘Mint Condition’”, Mick tells Noise11.com. “He asked me if I wanted to appear in an episode buying a record and flirting with the woman in the record shop. I said ‘yeah I can do that’”.
Mick immediately liked the plot. “I liked the feel of the whole thing,” he says. “It had local music in it and being a music buff it was all about PBS and Chuck Jenkins playing at a pub. It felt pretty joyous to me. I rode my bike over to a record shop in Fitzroy and started singing ‘Mint Condition’”.
The song ‘Mint Condition’ brought Mick Thomas out of a songwriting dryspell. “It helped me get my mojo back as a writer. It’s a song about writing a song, about looking over your shoulder and thinking ‘does the world need this song’. Writing for a project is really good for me. I need a project or an album to write for otherwise you wonder if it will be good enough. All of a sudden you aren’t looking over your shoulder”.
He says writing for the ‘Mint Condition’ drama was great discipline. “You’ve just got to write the song. That’s when you have to leave it to your instinct. That’s when it gets really good as an artform. When I saw the show being made I got really excited about it. I thought “I’m just going to write a song called ‘Mint Condition’’.
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