Off the beaten track
Friday, 2nd April, 2021
By Neil Pigot
What would happen if you stuck
10 artists on a rock and roll tour bus
during a pandemic and drove them in
to the middle of the desert?
That’s exactly what writer producer Julien
Poulson wondered while he was sitting out
last year’s lockdown. And so he decided to
find out.
“We were offered a bus, the luxurious
type Stevie Nicks might travel in and the
plan sort of evolved to head inland and see
what happened.
“So in September last year that’s what we
did.”
The passengers included visual artists,
writers, performance artists and photographers
along with Australian musician and
songwriter Steve Kilbey, front man of
the seminal Australian alt rock band The
Church.
But getting Kilbey along for the ride
wasn’t easy.
He initially didn’t want to go. “The desert?
Why would I want to go out there?”
But Poulson convinced him that it would
be an opportunity for renewal, a chance
to go out into the emptiness of outback
Australia following the great legends of
Australia’s mythical inland sea. And luckily,
“something clicked.”
What has emerged is “The Road To
Tibooburra”, a brand new Australian rock
and roll musical featuring 12 songs by the
same man that gave us “Under The Milky
Way Tonight” and “Unguarded Moment”,
two tunes that have, over time, become
iconic parts of the Australian rock music
soundtrack.
The play, also written by Kilbey, takes
its inspiration from the strange and still
unsolved disappearance of musician James
Jaeger near Rockhampton in 1999. It’s a
play Poulson likens to “a cross somewhere
between Priscilla and Wake in Fright”.
“It’s a rock concert with a story to tell.
A broken family drama playing out in the
Australian desert in the time of COVID-19.”
And it was Jaeger’s story that brought the
creative odyssey to Broken Hill as part of
the journey.
The only child to parents James and
Elizabeth Jaeger who migrated to Australia
from England shortly after World War II,
Jaeger was born in Broken Hill in 1960.
A gifted pianist, he was sent to Sydney
Grammar in his high school years, discovered
the guitar and started playing in the
band The Disciples shortly after.
Aka Laud Jim, Jaeger transformed himself
into an enigmatic psych-blues minstrel
who in recent times has been positively
compared to the equally enigmatic English
singer songwriter Nick Drake.
Having started a road trip from Sydney to
Townsville in March 1999, he was last seen
in Rockhampton before his abandoned car
was found parked at an isolated beach later
that month, complete with his much loved
12 string guitar.
Questions about his disappearance still
plague his family and in February, American
independent record label “Light in the Attic”
reissued Jaegers self-titled album “Laud
Jim”, along with a collection of previously
unreleased demos, titled “The Morning of
The Night Before,” to critical acclaim. All of
which serves to deepen what Poulson calls
Jaegers “eerie, essential strangeness.”
The play which features, amongst other
things, an appearance by the ghost of Stevie
Wright, the now departed lead singer of the
Easybeats, had its first public airing with a
series of ‘proof of concept’ performances in
Newcastle last week and the response was
overwhelmingly positive.
Meanwhile, the show’s house band, The
Broken Hillbillies, are stepping into the
recording studio to lay down the 12-song
soundtrack.
And Poulson is keen to continue developing
the work with a series workshops and
shows in Broken Hill later this year as part
of the Mundi Mundi bash. Of course, a few
gigs from the Broken Hillbillies will be part
of the deal.
“It’s one hot band.” he said.