It’s 1983.
Mick Thomas and his new rock band Weddings, Parties, Anything hit the stage in Melbourne.
[Crickets]
There’s no crowd.
“When you start a band, you go through so many years of playing gigs to no one” Thomas explains.
“I’d certainly never been in a band that could draw a crowd”
“Back then, you were sort of hoping that a handful of your friends was enough to impress a promoter and get you another gig”
Although, the deflation of playing to an empty hall wasn’t enough to break the spirit of Thomas and his band of brothers.
They pursued their dream.
“There were plenty of times where I had self doubt, plenty of times it could have gone a different way” he told The Street Press Podcast.
“I always felt that I had something to contribute by playing music, I just had to get into the right hands”
And for Thomas and the band, that “something” clicked the following year.
“When Wally joined the band in ’85, that’s when I felt it started to take off”
“We went from playing to 20 people one week to 35 the next, then 60… I remember when we first cracked 100 people, you don’t forget those moments”
“We started making money and we could buy decent gear, all those things, we’d never had before”
Things would only get better, the 4 piece would go from playing to empty halls to accepting an award for Song of the Year at the 1993 ARIA Awards.
That year their smash hit ‘Fathers Day’ beat the likes of ‘Weather With You’ by Crowded House and ‘Tip of My Tongue’ by Diesel.
And what if the song, inspired by the divorced dads of this world, didn’t crack the big time?
“There’s a few teachers in my family so I might have done a bit of extra uni work and become a teacher”
“The other option was to work in the public service, they were really only my two alternatives”
Mick Thomas is playing the Mundi Mundi Bash in Broken Hill this weekend.
