Busby Marou Want To Send A Message Of Reconciliation Without Getting Too Political

Have you ever seen those absolutely legendary parents at music festivals? The ones who get down and boogie with their offspring strapped to their chests, wearing oversized steampunk-style headphones and looking completely unperturbed by the crowd (the bubs, not the parents!) Well, Thomas Busby (the Busby half of Busby Marou) is one such dad.  

With the excitement surrounding the release of their third acclaimed LP Postcards From The Shell House and a second supporting tour about to kick off, Busby admits that juggling music and a young family is hard. "Last album I was actually single with no kids; that's how long it's been between drinks. This time 'round I'm married with two children and the youngest, Goldy - Marigold - was born the day the single was released," he gushes. "It was just a tricky time, the album was either going to be released before the baby, or we'd try'n do it after the baby.

"We didn't want to create controversy or issue."

"[The kids] have been to so many live concerts with their headphones, and festivals - Blues, Splendour - you just take the headphones and strap 'em onto the front and make sure that they love their lifestyle as well. I didn't get to see that growing up. My parents were pretty normal, but this is our life, we can't really go changing because of the way we were brought up, so I do love that people aren't afraid to leave the house because they've got kids."

Busby describes himself and bandmate Jeremy Marou as "Rocky boys", both growing up in the Queensland city of Rockhampton in "real big families - Jeremy has about eight in his family and I have about ten in mine," he laughs. "My mother and father have 32 grandchildren. There's been kids around ever since I can remember - I was an uncle at ten - everyone's really in each other's lives and everyone's best mates.

"Being away for quite a while, particularly being a young single fella and coming home at Christmas, it takes two or three days to adjust to the noise! I feel very sorry for any of the in-laws when they first come in - especially my wife, she had to go lay down after the first three hours!"

After Busby returned home from university in the big Sydney smog, he began playing "little love song originals at my mate's pubs", as well as singing in a friend's cover band. It was here that he and Marou crossed paths. "[Marou was] this gun guitarist with all his brothers," Busby remembers. "I always thought, 'Wow, wouldn't it be handy to have someone like him?' In time we ended up being that little duo that played everywhere in Rocky that everyone came to watch who was looking for acoustic music, because before that, it was just a couple of old blokes with drum machines behind them singing Lover Lover and all kinds of weird stuff."

The duo recorded their debut EP The Blue Road with Aussie icon Pete Murray at his home studio in late 2007, and by 2009 became one of five successful applicants for the government's Breakthrough initiative, supporting Indigenous contemporary artists. This helped them to produce their debut self-titled album in August 2010, which hit #4 on the Australian Independent Music Charts by December. They took out the Deadly Award for Most Promising New Talent In Music and a Q Song Award for Paint My Cup that same year. Their version of Crowded House's Better Be Home Soon even featured on He Will Have His Way, the Finn brother's tribute album. By the time they inked a deal with Warner and toured to Nashville to record their second record, Busby realised that despite chasing success, he needed the comforts of home more than ever.

"We were just more comfortable hanging out at home. For the second album we had more expectation, we thought we should go somewhere big and Nashville was it. The record company sent us over and, look, it was an awesome experience... But things happened while we were over there back home and we were home sick and uncomfortable and... when you record an album, it should be fun and you should be comfortable," he muses.

So it's fitting that their first #1 ARIA album Postcards From The Shell House was recorded in Busby and Marou's "favourite place" back on home soil. "Great Keppel Island and The Shell House," Busby says wistfully. "Everyone from central Queensland used to go to Keppel, that was the holiday destination growing up. The Shell House back then was this little museum owned by this old couple - your parents would go for a cup of tea and some scones and look at shells and we'd run around the island until they'd finished. Then the island changed: it went through the resort stage, then the boutique stage; it's gone through all the stages. Now it's run down, the resort is completely fenced off, it looks like a scene from Lost. So spooky, but you're on the most beautiful island in the world."

Befriending the current owners, the two "pretty much just go there and party, sit around a campfire and test our new songs - if the songs weren't written there they were tested out there. We wrote a few songs on a boat, on the island, and recorded in The Shell House."

With ANZAC day just gone, the release of an incredible video clip for Paint This Land couldn't be more pertinent. Co-directed by Wayne Blair (The Sapphires, Redfern Now and Cleverman) and Kate Halpin, as well as Blair's father, Bob Blair, a Vietnam War veteran and the first Aboriginal Regimental Sergeant Major in Australia, it sends a timely and important national message without - as Busby insists - being overtly political or controversial.

"We don't hide from it, and we definitely don't ignore it."

"The song itself, it's really about - I say the Australian spirit - but there's messages in there about closing the gap and reconciliation and little things too: the beauty of the land, how lucky we are growing up travelling. And bringing the ANZAC spirit into it made sense, in particular acknowledging Indigenous ANZAC support was something we really wanted to get across.

"We didn't want to create controversy or issue... For me and Jeremy, [acceptance] is simple, we've never really gone on about it. We're Rocky boys, and people think Rocky can be redneck at times, but in [my] relationships I've never had that. I've had black and white friends my whole life and I think, 'What's the big issue?' is what Jeremy and I have always said. He's black and I'm white. So I suppose that's as far as we go politically, reconciliation I suppose.

"It's not something we do consciously - we don't hide from it, and we definitely don't ignore it, but we've always gone by 'actions are louder than words'... As I said, regional towns can get a bad wrap because of their views... to be totally honest, white and black kids grow up together in those towns, their mates from an early age, and it's kinda hard to accuse them of anything."