Busby Marou span The Great Divide with fourth album

Two songwriters acknowledge their diverse backstories on a new album.

Singer-songwriters Jeremy Marou and Thomas Busby. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

On a clear winter’s night in far western Queensland, Thomas Busby and Jeremy Marou were feeling unusually nervous.

Midway through its headline set at the Big Red Bash music festival, Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett invited the pair to lend their voices to one of the most potent songs in Australian music history before a 9000-strong crowd gathered at the base of a giant sand dune on the edge of the Simpson Desert.

Far from their onstage comfort zone of shouldering acoustic guitars while singing sweet, earnest pop melodies, on this night in July they were tasked with joining the band’s rocking cover of Treaty, the landmark 1991 protest song by Yothu Yindi.

“Words are easy, words are cheap / Much cheaper than our priceless land,” the pair sang. “But promises can disappear / Just like writing in the sand …”

Since the two friends began performing together at a Rockhampton pub in 2007, they have been a visually striking pair, with Busby the youngest of eight children from a Catholic family of Scottish descent and Marou a Torres Strait Islander whose great uncle was land rights activist Eddie Mabo.

“There’s two things that people don’t see colour in: music and sport,” Marou tells The Australian. “When we play, people are looking at a blackfella and a whitefella: that speaks louder than for us to have a rant about racism or reconciliation, or where this country’s at. We’re very positive about it all, and we’re starting to get a bit of a voice — but it’s not at the top of our (priorities). Music is.”

Although the duo have preferred to let their art speak for itself, those few minutes on stage with Midnight Oil in the desert was their first venture into taking an explicit political stance. As they later wrote in a post on social media: “Nothing like singing the most important song, with the most influential band, at the most powerful location. This moment will be hard to trump!”

Jeremy Marou, middle, and Thomas Busby, right, sing Treaty with Peter Garrett in July. Picture: Dean Podlich

In mid-September, the two singer-songwriters visit the Queensland capital ahead of the release of The Great Divide, their fourth album and the first since Postcards From the Shell House, which debuted at No 1 on the ARIA chart in 2017. On a Friday afternoon at a music venue named The Tivoli, they reflect on their career to date while sharing a lounge on the same stage on which they’ll perform in late October.

Their story so far has been framed in terms of two good mates from north Queensland whose facility for melody and harmony accompanied by strummed guitars has won them many admirers across the country. Album No 4, however, sees them reaching beyond that narrative, both in their songwriting and matters beyond the music.

If Garrett had asked them to sing Treaty a few years ago, they might have shied away from stepping on to that stage; words are easy, words are cheap. This year, though, it felt right.

“We’re older, and we’re more grown up,” says Busby.

“There’s nothing worse than a young person with an agenda that they don’t quite know, but they feel like they’ve got to because everyone else in the industry is talking about something. That annoys me.”

Marou lives in Rockhampton and Busby is based at Currumbin on the Gold Coast, and as they’ve become more established as songwriters, their artistry has evolved toward more serious and personal subjects.

Busby wrote Gone about the acute pain of watching his father’s decline into dementia, while the new album’s title track was inspired by the tragic story of Anthony Lycenko, who produced both their 2007 debut EP and 2010 debut album at Rocking horse Studios in Byron Bay. He died by suicide in August 2017.

This touching song was captured in one take, and appears at the end of the album, which was also recorded at Rocking horse Studios. It sees the pair returning to their roots as an acoustic duo, accompanied by the sound of cicadas and a few overdubs.

“Answer your phone, I’m gonna lose control,” sings Busby in its chorus. “I’ve had enough of talking to the sky / I’m on the wrong side of the great divide / Answer your phone, I’m going to lose.”

Beyond missing their friend and producer, though, there’s another meaning at play.

“We’ve come from two different walks of life, with totally different cultures,” says Busby. “The Great Divide is not about division; not about black and white; it’s not about any of that. It’s just about, for us, recognising that we’ve got these two unique, opposite backstories — but the beautiful thing about that is the colourful story that we create on our own, as Busby Marou. ”

The pair are well aware that their music — which, despite the two aforementioned examples, is largely composed of sunny, upbeat pop songs — offers an ideal soundtrack for fans to throw back a few drinks and let loose. The album opens with a reference to alcohol — “Last week I started jogging / Instead of scotch on Monday nights …” sings Busby on Breathing Space — while the lead single is an earworm about over-consumption.

In the chorus of Over Drinking Over You, whose music video was filmed in Birdsville around their Big Red Bash commitments, the pair sing: “Lately whiskey’s going down faster than it used to do / So give me one more round and one for the road / Someone cut me off / I’m over drinking over you.”

When asked how their relationships with alcohol have changed since the days when they felt compelled to drink every backstage rider, Busby replies, “Ultimately, it’s always our decision when to say no. But particularly when you’re first getting into the scene, it’s such a big part of it: the mingling, the connections, the labels. But man, it can definitely creep up on you in this industry.

“When I hear that older bands don’t drink on the road, as a young fella, I remember thinking, ‘how boring’,” he says. “Now, I totally respect it, and I get it — because if you want to be really successful, you can’t let it overtake your life. We’re guilty of it taking over ours, from time to time. Big time.”

As well, there’s the matter of Marou suffering a heart attack two years ago while playing touch football with his kids at home in Rockhampton. Coincidentally, it was the very same sports field where his father — a fit non-smoker and non-drinker — had died 15 years earlier, when Marou was 19.

“We had a huge weekend of bingeing, and then I went and played footy and nearly died — so that slowed me up a little,” he says, perhaps understating the gravity of the situation, which required a stent to be placed in his heart to open a blocked artery.

The pair will soon begin a national tour in support of album No 4 in the Queensland capital, followed by a dozen more shows throughout the country. “We’ll have a bender,” says Marou, rolling his eyes and smiling.

The Great Divide is out now via Warner Music. Busby Marou performs in Rockhampton on Thursday, followed by a national tour that begins in Brisbane (October 25) and ends in Armatree, NSW (November 30).