About Thirsty Merc
Thirsty Merc are an Australian pop rock band, formed in 2002 by Rai Thistlethwayte, Phil Stack , Karl Robertson , and Matthew Baker . In 2004, Baker was replaced by Sean Carey, who was, in turn, replaced by Matt Smith in 2010. Thirsty Merc have released one extended play, First Work , and five studio albums: Thirsty Merc , Slideshows , Mousetrap Heart , Shifting Gears , and Celebration . The band have sold over 200,000 albums, toured extensively around Australia, and received national radio airplay for their tracks.
In June 2005, Billboard's Christie Eliezer felt their debut album showed "electric rock-, classical- and jazz-influenced pop appealed to Australian radio programmers". The work reached the top-20 on the ARIA Albums Chart and was certified platinum by ARIA for shipment of 70,000 units by the end of 2005. Slideshows peaked at No. 4 in Australia—their highest position. It reached No. 38 on the New Zealand Albums Chart; however, Thirsty Merc had attained No. 29 in that market. The group were nominated for four ARIA Awards in 2005, and the Thistlethwayte-written track "20 Good Reasons" was nominated for Song of the Year at the APRA Music Awards of 2008. From 2006, their song "In the Summertime" was the opening theme for the Australian TV reality show Bondi Rescue.
Three of the founding members of Thirsty Merc—Matthew Baker, Karl Robertson, and Phil Stack—had played together in various bands in Dubbo, a regional New South Wales city. In 1996, Drown was formed with Baker on guitar, Robertson on drums, Peter Jamieson on vocals, and Stack on bass guitar. By 1998 Baker, Jamieson and Stack had split to form Twenty Two and then moved to Sydney. In 2002, Baker and Stack returned to Dubbo where Rai Thistlethwayte, from Sydney, as lead singer and Stack worked as a live jazz duo and session musicians. They were joined by Baker and Robertson, and formed a pop rock band, initially called Thirsty; soon after they moved to Sydney and were renamed, Thirsty Merc. The band's name came from Thistlethwayte's 1979 Mercedes-Benz 280SEL, which was a gas-guzzler.
In October 2006 Thistlethwayte described his jazz and R&B background to MusicFix and the band's sound as "rock Sinatra" where "he outlook, I guess, is about being a young person in today's society ... being an Australian in an American-ised, Britain-ised kind of world, where you're trying to stay true to yourself". Baker added "We contrived to make it not contrived ... Rai was all for originality in his own vision and so were we".
A car accident on 22 September 2015 at Streatham, Victoria during a Thirsty Merc tour killed the band's stage manager and injured drummer Mick Skelton.
Thirsty Merc's first extended play, First Work, was released on 8 September 2003 by the band's own label, Don't Music and was distributed by Warner Music Australia. The five-track CD was independently recorded during downtime at a studio where Thistlethwayte worked. The EP reached the top 100 on the ARIA Singles Chart; and its lead single, "Wasting Time", achieved radio airplay on national radio stations, Triple J and Nova. The self-funded music video for the single was broadcast on Channel , and became the 'ripe clip of the week'. At the time of recording the EP they were without a label. After extensive gigging around Sydney's pubs, representatives from Warner had signed the band in June 2003, for the release of the EP and the follow-up single, "Emancipate Myself", which was a reworked version of the EP track. It was issued in April 2004 and The Age's Andrew Murfett declared that "this bitter tirade wrapped in melodic hooks has become one of the biggest local radio successes of the year".
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