Following his performance on ABC Melbourne's Jon Faine’s final Conversation Hour show today, Mick Thomas has released the video for his next single from Coldwater DFU, ‘Anything You Recognise’. The video is a fully animated literal interpretation of the song, painstakingly and lovingly drawn by local cartoonist Angelo Madrid. ‘Anything You Recognise’ is a weighty song from a mighty album – recorded on Jim Dickinson’s Zebra Ranch in Memphis with veteran roots producer Kevin Houston, it is an ambitious, sweeping landscape piece, with personal and political in its implication.

In addition to the ‘Anything You Recognise’ video, Angelo Madrid and Mick have produced Coldwater Chronicles, a graphic novel of Coldwater DFU. It’s eighty pages of lovingly drawn cartoons telling various stories of how the songs for his most recent album were written, how the album was made, and how the band got to Memphis. There’s chord charts and first drafts of the songs from Mick’s trusty Spirax notepad, and an extensive written section giving an in depth look into the machinations of such an ambitious project that rendered an album many critics felt to be a career highlight.

Mick is also gearing up to release a brand new bootleg covers CD for Mick’s customary Christmas tour. Bipolar Request is a selection of songs paid for by punters as part of the pre-release crowdfunding campaign for the album. Once Mick had sent the recordings out to the people who had so generously stumped up their money, there was a feeling the wider public and fanbase should hear these versions as well. Prince’s ‘When You Were Mine’ is a lot of fun, Rod Stewart’s ‘You’re In My Heart’ is a winner, and it’s hard to go too wrong with Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Landslide’ or Ewan McColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’. The overriding lesson for the band in all of this is that different people get vastly different things from their music and have correspondingly varied expectations of them as artists. It was recorded in two sessions right at the end of the national tour, and what you can hear in the fourteen tracks is the sound of a happy band that has played a decent amount of shows together.

Mick Thomas’ Roving Commission are now looking forward to hitting the road for their much-loved Christmas jaunt around the nation. The current line-up of the Roving Commission features some new old faces, including alt-country songstress Brooke Russell and bass maestro Ben Franz (on sabbatical from The Waifs), alongside long time cohorts Squeezebox Wally and Dave Folley (Tex Perkins, Archie Roach).