IN terms of the Triple J Hottest 100 countdowns, there's never been a bigger upset than in 2006.
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Songs like Augie March's One Crowded Hour aren't supposed to win popular votes. It's seven minutes long, carries along at a waltz and features poetically dense lyrics, which aren't conducive to a mass singalong.
It sounds like nothing that's topped the national poll before, or since, and perhaps that's why 13 years later One Crowded Hour remains an Australian treasure. Despite recording another three records since, the 2006 Australian Music Prize-winning album Moo, You Bloody Choir, which features One Crowded Hour, remains Augie March's best known work.
"I don't have an issue with it obviously," Augie March guitarist Adam Donovan said.
"I get text messages from friends wherever they are in the country at the time.
"Like if it's on the radio in Coffs Harbour or on at Safeway in Perth or if I'm on TV in that film clip."
While Donovan has a positive relationship with One Crowded Hour now, the success of the song led to some difficult times.
After Moo, You Bloody Choir the Victorian band's label BMG Sony expected songwriter and frontman Glenn Richards to produce a new batch of songs comparable to One Crowded Hour.
The 2008 album Watch Me Disappear proved a success, but created strains within the friends who'd first started playing together at school in Shepparton in 1996.
The band split in 2009 and Richards focused on a solo career. However, in 2014 they returned with the album Havens Dumb and last year they released Bootikins.
Augie March haven't played a Hunter show since reforming, with their most recent performance back in July 2009 at the Cambridge Hotel. The five-piece will end that long hiatus when they perform on night two of the expanded Gum Ball music festival at Dashville in Lower Belford.
Donovan said the dynamics haven't changed in the second coming.
"When you spend so much time together playing, it doesn't matter how much time you had off, you just slot into your old ways, whether good ways or bad ways," he said. "You just do it."
Surprisingly for a band renown for dense, rich and poetic indie-rock, Donovan says keeping a sense of humour is responsible for the band's longevity.
"If you're too serious all the time you just go crazy," he said. "You've just got to be light-hearted and light-headed when you're travelling around doing the shows and the recording process as well.
"You always take what you do seriously, but you can't be too stressed out."
Augie March play the Gum Ball with Magic Dirt, Sampa The Great, Tex Perkins and many more on April 25-28.