I caught up with Melbourne singer-songwriter Les Thomas, who is back in Australia after a highly successful British tour that took his music from London clubs and Oxford’s Blackwell’s bookshop to the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in Dorset.
Thomas travelled to Britain in July with a collection of songs about memory, working lives, history, love and resistance, unsure how they might connect with audiences on the other side of the world.
He needn't have worried. By the time he returned to Melbourne this month, he had performed across England, sold all of his CDs and found his songs had struck a chord in ways he had not anticipated.
Thomas told Green Left that audience members had approached him after shows to talk about their own lives and histories. “Some were moved to tears by the album’s title track, which travels across centuries of violence, struggle and resistance that underscores working class history,” he said.
One of the tour’s most unusual performances was at Blackwell’s Books in Oxford, where Thomas presented his new album I Remember Everything: Songs, Stories and Social History. The bookshop provided a fitting backdrop for songs about personal experiences woven into the fabric of history.
Then there was the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival — a place where the struggle for workers’ rights changed history.
For Thomas, who has a deep connection with the trade union movement, performing at the festival carried particular significance.
“The Dorset village is synonymous with the six agricultural labourers who were transported to Australia in 1834 after forming a trade union and refusing to accept attempts to cut their wages,” he said.
Thomas performed four times during the festival weekend, from the Radical History school, multiple stages to an impromptu set in the festival bar that scored him an extra festival in North Devon.
The audience response was matched by strong reviews. Americana UK awarded the album four-and-a-half stars, describing it as “an absolute gem which should be studied line by line in schools”. Liverpool Sound and Vision gave it 8.5 out of 10, while Fatea Magazine described the record as “poignantly personal and deeply humanist”.
The album’s appeal is perhaps best explained by the breadth of its historical gaze.
The title song moves through the slave trade, palawa warrior Truganini, the Irish Famine, the Easter Uprising, King Leopold’s Congo, Guernica, Amritsar, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the struggles of Appalachian mine workers. The vast sweep of history then gives way to personal memory within the much longer human story.
“The Last of the Old Holdens” looks at the disappearance of Australian car manufacturing through the eyes of those who lived through it. “The Life of Eloise” addresses violence against women and the responsibility of men to challenge it. “The Firing Line” confronts the destruction of civilian life in war and calls out the complicity of silence.
But I Remember Everything is not simply a political record. Songs about love, ageing, loss, family and the search for peace sit alongside the politics. Thomas’s insistence that individual lives matter — and that remembering them matters too — underpins the entire album.
Thomas wrote and produced the album, recording with Joshua Jones, Trevayne Fernandez, Justin Olsson, Craig Kelly, Ben Franz and Jason Bunn, with harmony vocals from Trudy Fatnowna Edgeley, Mandy Connell, Jacinta Percy, Kyana, Suzie So Blue and Emmy Ryan. Guus Hoevenaars predominantly mixed the album, with Carra mastering.
The album artwork also reflects Thomas’s preoccupation with history and memory.
Its cover features JMW Turner’s The Slave Ship, the 1840 painting created by the abolitionist artist in response to the Zong massacre, when enslaved Africans were thrown overboard from a British slave ship.
After taking these songs through Britain — and to a festival rooted in the history of the labour movement — Thomas is bringing them back to Melbourne, where they were written and recorded.
I Remember Everything will be released through Oily Rag Records on September 14. Thomas will launch the album with a rare full band celebration at the Northcote Social Club on Sunday September 20, joined by special guests Mandy Connell, Emmy Ryan and Suzie So Blue.