“I often sleep at truck stops and talk to truckies on my way to gigs in country towns,” says truckie cap-wearing, singer-songwriter Darren Hanlon.
These chats have inspired songs with lines like, “On footpaths that weren’t built for bikes, let alone people, they’re full of trucks and cars and dotted with topless bars.”
He has spent most of his 35-year career on the road, criss-crossing Australia firstly with the Lismore band ‘The Simpletons,’ then moonlighting with Mick Thomas and Billy Bragg, and now as a solo artist who is sometimes joined on tour by the Queen.
That is, indigenous blues singer Kankawa Nagarra, otherwise known as the ‘Queen of the Bandaral Ngadu Delta.’ He produced her 2024 AMP Australian Music Prize-winning album ‘Wirlmarni’ for which she won $50,000 and Best Album of the Year.
“So Kankawa and I did 35 shows together, and we drove thousands of kilometres. It was amazingly different travelling with her as an indigenous elder, and I just absorbed her knowledge [of country] the whole way. The tour got me playing lead guitar again, as I used to do for the band, ‘Weddings, Parties, Anything.’
Darren and Slim Dusty in the Hamilton Hall, Gympie, in 1980. Image: Darren HanlonDarren, 53, believes in the power of the nomadic life, which has fed his creative energy.
“I go to a country town to write and distance myself from all the distractions of life: pinball, crosswords, friends, the telephone, the internet.
“Broken Hill was wild. I got swept up in the town and its people. A lady was trying to get the Palace Hotel up and running. She’d come and drag me to these parties in my pyjamas,” he grins.
“I used to go to Tamworth every year to see Slim Dusty. One night, looking for a bar to get a takeaway, a guy came up to me and asked if he and his friend could join me. He was flamboyant, and we really hit it off.
“We had the wildest night and tried to climb the Golden Guitar, very drunk. I asked him what he did and he said that he made films; ‘this little film called Strictly Ballroom.’ It was Baz Luhrmann. He was researching crowd scenes for ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and offered me an extra part.”
After years of rambling the length and breadth of Australia, with his partner, folk singer Shelley Short, Darren has put down roots back in his birthplace of Gympie, a former gold mining town once aptly named ‘Nashville.’
His neighbour and friend was the country music legend Chad Morgan, “who built me an amplifier,” Darren says.
Hanlon is now working on his next two albums after 2022’s Life Tax, which features songs like ‘Freight train from Kyogle’ and ‘Christmas beetle,’ which echoes Hanlon’s cult Christmas shows in the city and country that sell out year after year.
When asked if every town a truckie passes through deserves a song, he says, “If you spend long enough in them, they’re just going to come, like my songs about Lismore, Manilla and Gympie.”
Hanlon adds, “And I feel so blessed that music has always given me a living, without planning too much, it kind of bumbles along in its own weird way.”
Watch out for Daz on the road and maybe give him a listen.
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