MORE than two decades after Thirsty Merc first hit the road, frontman Rai Thistlethwayte still has one word for the feeling of walking onto a stage – elation.
It is a simple answer that perhaps explains better than anything why the Australian favourites are still here more than 20 years after Someday, Someday, Emancipate Myself and In The Summertime first became part of the soundtrack of a generation.
“It brings us back to this almost teenage, early-20s feeling,” he said.
“There are these long-term threads that I guess become a sense of achievement, just in the fact that I haven’t given up on my mates and they haven’t given up on me.
“I saw something in them, they saw something in me.”
Thirsty Merc formed in 2002 and quickly became one of the defining Australian pop-rock acts of the following decade.
“We stand on stage and we’re great friends and we love playing the music primarily,” he said.
“The fans keep coming back to see us, so we’re very grateful.”
Thistlethwayte admits the band had no idea their songs would endure as they have.
“I found out later on, almost more when the audience helped confirm it for us, that we all go through the same stuff,” he said.
“We all get our hearts broken. We all have a love that’s unrequited. We all have a time in our life where we’re coming of age and there’s an unknown there.”
Perhaps one of the greatest demonstrations of that connection is Tommy and Krista, while never pushed through the same traditional machinery as some of Thirsty Merc’s biggest radio singles, it has developed into one of the band’s most cherished songs.
“Tommy and Krista is a fan favourite actually,” Thistlethwayte said. “It’s become one of those things that the fans decided that that’s a favourite song.”
Keeping a band together long enough to enjoy that resurgence is another challenge entirely, for Thirsty Merc, longevity has required understanding that the four people who climb onto a stage are also people whose lives continue when they walk off it.
Thistlethwayte describes the band with characteristic humour as something resembling a “weird mobile musical men’s shed, part workplace, part friendship group and part support network”.
“It’s important, like anything when you get a bit older, to know to take some good-quality strategic breaks from oversaturating it,” he said. “It’s better to have that long-term approach than burn the project out.”
He said there is another essential ingredient – the audience.
“If it wasn’t for the fans out there that have enjoyed Aussie original live music and our stuff on the airwaves, we probably would have had to knock it [Thirsty Merc] on the head in one way or another.”
Thirsty Merc bring their 20 Good Regions tour to Cleveland Sands Hotel on Friday, November 13 with tickets available at bandsintown.
