Jeremy Marou and Thomas Busby are knockabout Queenslanders fronting a major new tourism campaign
THEIR song was chosen as the theme tune for Commonwealth Games mascot Borobi, and will feature heavily in the opening ceremony. They’re behind the state’s new tourism campaign. Meet quintessential Queenslanders Busby Marou.
Confidential
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If you scoured the length and breadth of the state, you’d be hard-pressed to find two people who better typify what it means to be a Queenslander than Thomas Busby and Jeremy Marou.
Better known as acoustic folk-pop duo Busby Marou, the pair’s 2008 song Blue Road, which features the refrain “Will you follow me to a place I’ve been before, but only in my thoughts/ There’s a blue road I can see where my footsteps soon can be”, has just been hand-picked by Tourism and Events Queensland to accompany its new tourism campaign, which includes the return of the once-ubiquitous “Beautiful one day, perfect the next” slogan.
Busby was working for his brother’s construction company on-site in the mines at Moura, about 170km southwest of Rockhampton, when he wrote Blue Road “on the back of a ute after work one day”.
“It was all about that longing of, ‘OK, we’re putting in the hard yards but let’s close our eyes and imagine being back down the beach and being at all our favourite spots’,” Busby, 37, says. “It’s amazing how it’s come full circle, really.”
Since the Rockhampton born-and-bred duo started playing together as Busby Marou in 2006, they have slowly but surely, through a combination of raw talent, determination, camaraderie and hard-slog touring, cultivated a loyal and devoted fan base throughout the state and, indeed, the country.
After self-releasing their debut EP The Blue Road in 2008, they signed with Warner Music Australia’s indie imprint Footstomp before putting out their self-titled album in 2011, which included the song Biding My Time, which won the 2012 APRA Award for Blues & Roots Work of the Year.
In 2013, they signed to Warner and released their follow-up Farewell Fitzroy, which reached No.5 on the ARIA charts, and the EP Days of Gold the following year.
Their third album, Postcards From the Shell House, debuted at the top of the ARIA charts when it was released in February last year, but despite their success they remain the same down-to-earth Rocky boys.
They’re the guys who were stoked to be nominated for an ARIA Award last year, but equally quick to admit they’re more comfortable sitting at the beach with a rod in their hands, waiting to see if they can catch a flathead, than suiting up and sitting at a table at Sydney’s Star Event Centre.
They love their rugby league – so much so that they missed out on the chance to meet Elton John when they supported him at BB Print Stadium in Mackay in September because they had already ducked out after their set to catch the Melbourne Storm and Brisbane Broncos game before Sir Elton dropped by their dressing room.
“Our roadies got to meet him, that’s the main thing,” Busby says.
They share a love of the great outdoors and have a particular affinity for Great Keppel Island, 15km off the coast of Yeppoon in Central Queensland, where they wrote and recorded much of Postcards from the Shell House. They returned to the island last week for the TEQ campaign and for a photo shoot with U on Sunday.
Ahead of the release of Postcards from the Shell House, I visited Busby and Marou for a listening party on the island. As the boat pulled in to shore on Great Keppel, the pair waded out into the knee-deep water with an Esky full of beer and welcomed everyone like old friends.
Their excitement at being able to show off the former resort island’s charm to fresh eyes was palpable, and as we bundled into a tinnie off the island’s west coast as the sun set over the horizon in all its postcard-perfect splendour, the pair told me this was where they wrote Got Your Back, a tender ode to mateship that’s one of the album’s standout tracks.
“We were kind of lazing around in the boat, a bit hungover and just jumping in the water and really appreciating how beautiful it was and (producer Jon Hume) was like, ‘boys, you should write a song’,” Busby says.
“So we just jumped up and got our guitars and the three of us sat there and wrote this song.”
The Shell House of the album’s title is a former souvenir shop now owned by Margaret Gearin and her partner Robert Zerner, who Busby and Marou have known for more than a decade, and the couple kindly opened the house to visitors for a barbecue before Busby and Marou treated us to some campfire renditions of the album’s songs.
Since Postcards from the Shell House’s release, Busby Marou have toured almost non-stop, with appearances at festivals including Gympie Muster, Mount Isa Rodeo and Chinchilla Melon Festival, and headline shows in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Toowoomba, Airlie Beach, Mackay, Cairns, Townsville, Hervey Bay, Rainbow Beach and Proserpine. They also recently undertook their “Tiny Towns Tour”, which included stops at Childers, Biloela, Mundubbera, Warwick, Roma and Goondiwindi.
“We just love regional touring,” Marou, 35, says. “Maybe because we grew up based regionally but we fit these places, and it just so happened that these places love us as well.”
Put simply, Busby and Marou both live and breathe Queensland, and know the state better than almost anyone, so it makes sense they’ve been chosen as the face of TEQ’s new campaign.
“It’s peculiar because it was over a decade ago that I wrote (Blue Road) as a young fella, and we hadn’t recorded a thing yet,” Busby says. “I was writing it from a real perspective. I don’t think I could even write a synch for a tourism ad if someone briefed me for that; it’s such a coincidence that the lyrics are so fitting.”
Marou says he was equally surprised when he learnt the tourism body was keen to use the 10-year-old song for the campaign.
“When Tom said they want to use Blue Road it was like, ‘oh, that’s weird’,” Marou says. “Out of all the music we’ve done in our career, that’s the only music we’ve never released properly. It was well before we were signed to Warner and before we even thought about doing music full-time.
“It was the first thing we ever did, really, and we don’t know how they found it because even up until a month ago it wasn’t on Spotify and you can’t buy it anywhere, but yeah, it’s good how things work out.”
TEQ chief executive Leanne Coddington says the pair’s “authenticity” is one of the key reasons they were chosen for the campaign.
“Thomas Busby and Jeremy Marou are two of the most talented musicians in Australia and
more than that, they are genuine Queenslanders,” she says.
“The authenticity they bring to the campaign, through their personalities and their song Blue Road, perfectly symbolises our way of life.
“The lyrics of Blue Road play in perfectly with what we are trying to achieve with this campaign and will hopefully inspire travellers to come to Queensland, whether it is to enjoy our pristine coastline, which the song is about, attend one of our world-class events or immerse themselves in an experience you can only find in Queensland.”
Busby admits to being “a bit gobsmacked” when he discovered the pair would also be the face of the campaign. “I thought, ‘that’s a bit weird, we’re not very clean looking, we’re grubby, we’re a bit hairy’. It’s quite funny,” he laughs.
“We rocked up to the first shoot for the campaign and we had wardrobe, so we thought ‘OK, they’re going to dress us, we’re going to look cleaner than what we were’ and they dressed us in so many different outfits and the director has just pointed down and gone ‘what are they?’
“He was pointing at our bags with our ripped boardshorts and our grubby T-shirts hanging out and he was like ‘that is what I want them to wear’. So we’re wearing all our own clothes; it’s as real and as natural as possible.”
Busby’s similarly laid-back approach to corporate attire is partly what led to the realisation that perhaps a career in law wasn’t for him. He had completed his Bachelor of Laws at QUT and was working as a criminal lawyer for the state government just before forging his musical partnership with Marou.
“I did enjoy my job, it was fun,” Busby says. “But I was coming to work wearing the clothes I’m wearing now – ripped jeans, Converse shoes – and I’d leave my suit hanging up.”
One Friday he was called to stand in for another lawyer, to represent a client. He had no suit, or even a jacket, at the office.
“Here I was in ripped jeans and Converse, so we had to get approval from the magistrate to see if it was OK if I stood in for another lawyer to run a committal hearing in Converse and ripped jeans – and someone else’s jacket, who was twice the size of me. To the magistrate’s credit, he let me do it; I got the file on the way in and I went OK. It was a bit of a straightforward matter that one – he went fine.”
Soon after, when Busby returned to Rockhampton, he reacquainted with Marou, who had previously played covers with their mutual friend Brett “Gibbo” Gibson at pubs around Rocky. Marou was working for the Department of Communities at the time, as a member of the policy advisory team for indigenous affairs.
“It was great, I really loved my job and loved my work,” Marou says. “I guess if it wasn’t for Tom’s motivation I’d still be a public servant and playing music on the weekend. I’m pretty lucky we do what we do though.”
The TEQ campaign is being rolled out to coincide with the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, which kicks off with the Opening Ceremony at Carrara Stadium on Wednesday.
Busby Marou’s song Days of Gold will also feature heavily during the event – it was chosen as the theme song for Commonwealth Games mascot Borobi.
“When we wrote it we were laughing, going ‘wow, we’re going there, this is like an Olympics song or a song for the World Cup for cricket or footy’, and fast forward a couple of years and yeah, it’s being used for the Commonwealth Games, which is awesome. Hopefully it gets a bit of love,” Busby says.
“It’s so quick. We had to speed it up for Borobi – we were like ‘are you sure about this?’ but it worked.”
Busby Marou also will be playing two concerts – in Cairns and Surfers Paradise – as part of Festival 2018, the cultural and arts program running in tandem with the Games.
“It’s a good festival, good line-up, well curated. We’ve got some friends playing and we’re headlining. And the Gold Coast is my hometown at the moment, so I’m stoked I don’t have to fly five hours to get to a gig, just jump in a cab and I’m there. I’m home,” says Busby, who now lives at Currumbin with his wife, Huma, and two daughters, Winifred, 2, and Marigold, 1.
Marou still lives in Rockhampton with his family, wife Kim and their four children.
“Yeah, Rocky’s still home for me. I have my young family here, and because I travel so much I have a lot of family support there. Dallyn’s the oldest, he’s 13; Zahirah, she’s 11; Pere is 10 and then Ziggy is nearly six months – that little surprise that popped up at the end.”
As soon as they are finished with their Festival 2018 shows, Busby Marou will kick off another extensive tour, which starts at Winton’s Way Out West Festival on April 19 and finishes at Toowoomba on June 2. Somehow among all this madness, the pair have also been writing some new music – and Busby is quick to point out they’re in no rush this time around.
“We’ve been sneaking off – I’ve got a little caravan down near where I am. We’re so busy, but we’re making time to not have to be forced into writing but to just come and hang out and work on some melodies and tunes, because you don’t really feel like it on the road – we don’t anyway. It’s feeling good, I’m pretty excited, there are going to be some big tunes, I think.” ■
Busby Marou play Festival 2018, Surfers Paradise, April 7; and Cairns, April 13 (both free), gc2018.com
B usby Marou also play Way Out West, April 19, and Mackay, Townsville, Cairns, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Eumundi and Toowoomba until June 2. busbymarou.com
Originally published as Jeremy Marou and Thomas Busby are knockabout Queenslanders fronting a major new tourism campaign
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