Two decades is long enough for a record to drift from the present tense into mythology. Long enough for a band to scatter into side projects and new lives, for listeners to age alongside the songs that once defined them, and for younger audiences to discover an album that arrived before they were old enough to hear it the first time around.
When Augie March released Moo, You Bloody Choir in 2006, the band were already a quietly revered presence in Australian music: literary where others were blunt, ambitious where others kept things simple, and stubbornly resistant to fitting into any tidy scene. The album changed the scale of everything. Suddenly the band who had spent years climbing through the country’s pub circuit found themselves with a national anthem on their hands.
Now, almost twenty years later, Augie March are preparing to revisit that record in full for the first time, marking the anniversary with a national tour that will see Moo, You Bloody Choir performed from beginning to end.
For frontman Glenn Richards, the milestone is both surreal and slightly unnerving.
“[It’s] kind of horrifying,” he laughs when the anniversary comes up. “But I guess we all say that. Many years goes quick, doesn’t it?”
It’s an understatement. Moo, You Bloody Choir didn’t just mark another chapter in the band’s discography; it transformed the reach of Augie March entirely. At the centre of the record sat “One Crowded Hour”, a luminous meditation on fleeting connection that would eventually take out the No. 1 spot in triple j’s Hottest 100 and push the band into the wider public consciousness.
Yet even at the height of that success, Augie March never behaved like a band chasing a single hit.
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Richards still sounds slightly bemused by how the moment unfolded.
“A blessing,” he says of the attention the song brought. “It was all really lovely. But we’d been playing for so long and building and building. We always had this pretty basic philosophy: get a residency at a dive bar, play as many shows as we can, build an audience, and eventually you might get to the next place up.”
It was a slow climb rather than a sudden breakthrough, the kind of steady, organic rise that used to be common in Australian music before algorithms and viral moments took over.
“It just kept going like that,” Richards recalls. “And I think we were probably pretty lucky that taste cycles swung our way. We made a record that had a catchy song on it at around about the time people were receptive to that sort of music.”
If “One Crowded Hour” served as the entry point for many listeners, the album revealed something much richer. Moo, You Bloody Choir is a sprawling, restless record that drifts through indie rock, folk, country, and orchestral flourishes without ever sounding unfocused. It feels less like a neatly packaged collection of songs than a carefully sequenced landscape — one that rewards listeners who are willing to wander through it.
That stylistic breadth was intentional, even if the band never set out with a rigid sonic blueprint.
“I don’t think we ever had an idea from the first EP onwards what it was supposed to be,” Richards says of the band’s identity. “That was probably down to me coming late to music and performance and never settling on what I’m meant to be about as a songwriter.”
Instead of chasing a particular genre, Richards was more interested in the kind of records that shift shape as they unfold.
“My deal was always to make a record that has so much variation stylistically and thematically, but in a way that it all hangs together,” he explains. “My favourite records are the ones where I don’t care that the song that follows doesn’t sound like the one before it.”
The circumstances surrounding the making of Moo, You Bloody Choir were often as unpredictable as the music itself. The band were navigating label changes, industry turbulence and the usual personal complications that tend to follow a touring group for long enough.
Some of the recording sessions themselves bordered on surreal.
While working in Chicago’s Tenderloin district — in a studio associated with Creedence Clearwater Revival — band members encountered the kind of scenes that leave an imprint on the memory.
“You’re walking over someone who’s expired during the night,” Richards says, recalling the experience with matter-of-fact disbelief. “But there was also this euphoria of being in that place.”
The band had found themselves recording with Eric Drew Feldman, a collaborator of Captain Beefheart, during a brief window between tour dates.
“We were on tour, had a few days off, and suddenly we were recording,” Richards says. “And that’s the awesome way to do it. The engine is hot. You know your way around the songs. Those sessions probably gave a couple of the tracks a bit of extra juice.”
Despite the chaos surrounding the project, Richards never doubted the album would eventually emerge.
“I never had any doubts about it getting out there,” he says. “Labels merge and things change — that’s a story a lot of bands can tell — but once they’ve invested in a band they’re going to try to get their return.”
When the record finally arrived, the response confirmed what many fans had already sensed: Augie March had made something that would last. Moo, You Bloody Choir went on to win the Australian Music Prize, achieve platinum status and transform the band’s cult following into a broader national audience.
Success, however, didn’t fundamentally change the band’s instincts.
“We’ve definitely got our own thing,” Richards says when asked about Augie March’s legacy. “Anyone who follows us knows that.”
Part of that individuality comes from the band’s refusal to treat their own catalogue as sacred relics. Which is why revisiting Moo, You Bloody Choir two decades later isn’t about reproducing the past exactly as it was.
“We’ll treat the songs with respect and disdain simultaneously,” Richards says wryly.
The phrase captures something essential about Augie March: reverence tempered by a refusal to become curators of their own museum.
“If you don’t go out there with some sense of abandon,” he says, “then you can do a good show, but you can’t do a transcendent show.”
In other words, the band intend to let the songs breathe, even if that means letting them drift slightly off the rails.
“Just because you recorded them once doesn’t mean that’s the way they always have to be.”
Time has also changed Richards’ relationship with the material itself. Songs written in his twenties now feel slightly distant — less like autobiographical confessions, and more like characters he can step into.
“It’s harder to relate to some of those songs now,” he admits. “But I can get inside them and inhabit them more as a character. That can actually invigorate them.”
One track that may feel particularly strange to revisit is “Mount Wellington Reverie”, written during an early trip to Hobart long before Richards eventually relocated there permanently.
“That one’s going to be strange,” he says. “I wrote it when I stayed here for a week after a run of shows. I was still living in Melbourne but starting to get the sense that this was a place I wanted to be.”
Playing it now, from a life fully established in Tasmania, adds an unexpected layer of perspective.
For all the introspection that comes with revisiting an old record, Richards approaches the exercise with his characteristic dry humour. When asked whether performing the album feels like opening an old diary, he laughs.
“Probably more like cracking open a book of poems I probably shouldn’t have written,” he says. “Which is more fun than a diary. The diary is going to be a hundred percent cringe. Whereas a book of interesting poems that maybe succeed occasionally — now that’s a fun afternoon.”
That mixture of self-awareness and irreverence has long been central to Augie March’s appeal. Their songs often feel intensely personal to listeners — quoted, dissected, even tattooed — while Richards himself maintains a certain distance from the mythology.
“I don’t tend to think about it too much until I’m out there talking to people again,” he says. “But we do have some real nutters following us… the loveliest kind. Intelligent nutters.”
Living in Tasmania helps keep that mythology at arm’s length. Away from the touring cycle and the noise of the industry, Richards often returns to a quieter life that feels far removed from the idea of being part of an iconic Australian band.
“It’s easy to fall back into feeling like it’s a hobby or something,” he admits. “Even though I know it isn’t.”
The anniversary tour serves as a reminder, both to the band and their audience, that the connection forged around Moo, You Bloody Choir is still very much alive.
What Richards hopes people take away from the shows is simple.
“I’d love it if they walked away feeling justified in their patience with us and their love of us,” he says. “That it’s been worthwhile and reciprocated.”
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It’s a modest hope, but one that feels perfectly suited to a band that has always preferred quiet conviction to grand statements.
For Richards himself, revisiting the record may be as illuminating as it is nostalgic.
“Half the time I’ll be thinking, ‘how did you write that?’” he says with a laugh. “And the other half I’ll be thinking, ‘I know how you wrote that — and you shouldn’t have.’”
Either way, returning to Moo, You Bloody Choir offers the rare opportunity to step back inside a moment that changed everything and see what still resonates two decades later.
Find out more about Augie March’s Australian tour here.
