Not a story, but an epic reworking of an Australian folk song, “Moreton Bay”, reimagined by now defunct Melbourne four-piece The Drones. The originating ballad describes the brutal conditions of a New South Wales penal station overseen by a historical figure, the vicious “commandant” Patrick Logan. The Drones extend and expand this into a saga of the terrible bargain struck by the prisoners on the chain gang as they seek to escape their imprisonment by any means possible. Over acoustic guitar and ghostly mouth organ, Gareth Liddiard’s gaunt, swampy croak – right up close to the microphone, intimate and terrible – adds harrowing novelistic detail, such as an aside about the prison camp’s “chief flogger” who rinses “his lash in a bucket / Then drinks the remains”. When the prisoners form a scheme to cut short their sentences, things go from bad to worse: there comes murder, flames, gunfire, death and catastrophe. Lyrically it’s magnificent, sonically it puts my hair on end. It’s so wide-open yet constrictive, so fierce and desolate yet beautiful – so Australian – and it ends on an unforgettable cliffhanger.

From the album Gala Mill, Shock/ATP Recordings, 2006