MONDAY June 18 marks 20 years since the release of Buses and Trains by Bachelor Girl.

Last year, when the most played songs on Australian radio in the last 25 years were released Buses and Trains was No. 12, ahead of Green Day’s Time of Your Life and Ronan Keating’s When You Say Nothing At All.
However unlike the No. 1 most played on local radio, Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, Buses and Trains was actually an Australian composition, written by James Roche and sung by Tania Doko.

The only other Australian composition in the Top 20 was Alex Lloyd’s Amazing.

Bachelor Girl are reforming to mark the 20th anniversary, with a brand new single, Speak, out on Monday.

However here’s the full story of their most popular song.

1997: Musician James Roche has met singer Tania Doko and formed a band called TEF and produced a five track demo CD looking for a record deal

Ross Fraser, working at BMG Records at the time, had a major profile after producing John Farnham’s albums from Whispering Jack onwards.

Fraser: James I knew from playing keyboards on a Farnham tour. He came into my office in Abbotsford one day and said “I’ve been doing some work with this girl’ and played me some tracks, that was TEF. I thought it was pretty good.

Roche: We booked this showcase at the Continental Cafe in Greville Street. We needed more material, there was an urgency to write more songs before this showcase. I was in the shower and I heard in my head — like it was playing on the radio — the line ‘I walked under a bus, I got hit by a train’. That was all I heard. I thought that was weird, I couldn’t make anything of it. Later that day the next bit came ‘Keep falling in love, which is kind of the same’. And I had the song, I knew I had it, it was an analogy of life’s crises. That is life, it’s the passionate bits we remember, all the boring bits are wasting our time while we get to the intensity.

Roche fleshes the song out, rehearses it with their band and debuts it at the Continental.

Fraser: The gig was full, word had got around, I was standing next to Randy Jackson, who’d later work with Mariah Carey and be on American Idol. They played this song I hadn’t heard and it just stuck out. I made sure I was backstage before anyone and said ‘That song about the buses and trains, it’s f---ing great, you just have to fix the verses.’

Roche: Ross said the verses weren’t right and he was right. The verse wasn’t like it was on the finished version. The melody was the same, but it had sad chords but it was also funky. It was sad and funky and trying to be something it wasn’t. So I changed the chords, it made all the difference and the song was finished.

Bachelor Girl signed to BMG offshoot Gotham Records, run by Fraser and flush from the success of Melbourne act Merril Bainbridge whose song Mouth went to No. 1 in Australia and No. 4 in the US. Roche was allowed to self-produce the album, which was made in his living room in Melbourne.

Roche: It was a gamble for the record company to record it at home but it paid off, we got an ARIA for producer of the year. It was a good risk.

Buses and Trains was one of many songs Roche wrote with Doko as his muse on tap.

Roche: I had just come out of a marriage very heartbroken. I had all this dedication and commitment with nowhere to put it just at the time I met Tania. So I threw all of myself into this project. At the same time I was trying to figure out how to avoid that heartbreak again. What I ended up doing was doing a lot of listening. Which was lucky, as Tania does a lot of talking! We developed this relationship where she’d download to me, and I’d just be going ‘Mmm hmm’ so I’d get more than fully informed about everything she was feeling and experiencing as a late teenager, early 20s. The source material I had was complete and unabridged so I could write songs from it, it was great. I’m a different gender and ten years her senior so I was having a completely different life. But Buses and Trains was a strange song. It starts strange and gets stranger. I was nervous to play it to Tania.

Doko: When I heard it it was so lyrically different it just stood out. It was special. I was a 22 year old girl telling him all these dramatic stories about guys, and he turned them into songs. He is such a great listener. At the time it did feel like I was being hit by a train. I was his muse. I wasn’t in the shower with him though!

The song raised eyebrows at the time — and since — for the line ‘A man can kill and still be the sweetest thing’

Roche: That was a time constraint. I didn’t have enough words to say what I really wanted to, which was a man can be a whole lot of trouble and a pain but can still be a lot of fun. So I ended up with ‘a man can kill and still be the sweetest thing’. Kill wasn’t the ideal word but it had to be short.

Doko: Now it’s super modern, if you kill something you crush it. If we’d put ‘a man can slay’ it would have been really ahead of its time!

1998. The video was filmed in St Kilda, with Fraser and Greg Harrington tapping into the song’s lyrics being written as a letter to Doko’s mother. The clip is Doko filming a message to send to her mother.

Doko: I remember it was our first big video and it was a 42 degree day and I had a massive cold sore on my lip which kept bleeding. It was cheap as, I think it cost $10,000. That was the catering budget for most videos in those days; people were spending $1 million on a video back then.

Fraser: It was actually even less. I reckon we probably spent $2000 on it. But it looked great.

The song was released on June 18, 1998. Slowly gaining support on commercial radio, it entered the Australian chart at No. 49 on July 5 and took nine weeks to reach its peak of No.4. It’d spend six weeks in the Top 10 and nearly five months on the chart, going platinum and setting up their debut album Waiting For The Day.

Doko: Radio wouldn’t stop playing Buses and Trains but we had Treat Me Good lined up ready to go as the follow up. They were the days unlike now with Ed Sheeran where you couldn’t have two singles out at once. The record company had to ask them to stop playing it. Radio loved it. We had to think more about what we said no to rather than what we said yes to. When a hit song is a hit song it’s everywhere, you don’t want people to get sick of you. It’s a very good problem to have.”

Roche: It was lucrative because it got played on radio so much. It let me live without doing too much for a few years, which was nice, but it didn’t turn me into a millionaire. You need to be having No. 1 hits around the world to not work again.

The Australian success did open doors internationally. Buses and Trains went Top 10 in New Zealand, and was a Top 30 hit in Sweden (where Doko would later relocate and work as a songwriter) and No. 65 in the UK.

Fraser: It wasn’t easy to get Australian music out internationally back then but it did break into a few markets.

Fraser soon got a call from US music industry legend Clive Davis, who launched the career of Whitney Houston, whose label Arista wanted to release Buses and Trains in America.

Fraser: I was flown to New York. Clive was saying ‘This is such a great track, we’re going to release this song’ which was very exciting. James and Tania did a show in the boardroom for the American company. Later Clive opened a drawer for me and pulled out a cassette and said ‘I’ve got a hit here, I need them to record this song’ and it was Permission to Shine. They recorded it, even though they wrote their own songs, and it became a hit.

Arista even went with the original Australian video for Buses and Trains. However there was one major glitch looming for their American roll out.

Fraser: Literally the day Buses and Trains was serviced to radio in America Clive Davis got sacked from Arista and all his team walked out. So we lost all the promotions people who were working on the song, all gone. It had started getting playing in LA on a few stations but then nothing more happened because there was no team pushing it. It was such a shame. People still talk about that song to me 20 years later, what a one off it is. It had Clive’s backing, he loved them, the whole album, and then he was gone just like that.

Doko: “I was in a band called She Said Yes and we toured with Darren Hayes, who had been in Savage Garden. He would say ‘I can’t believe that song didn’t smash America’. But Clive was fired just as we were about to be launched. That would have set James and me up. But we’ve gone on and done other things in different countries, now we’ve got the hunger again.”

Darren Hayes still insists it’s a lost global hit.

Hayes:Buses and Trains is literally one of my favourite songs of all time. I wish I’d written it, that’s how good it is. That period of Australian music was so exciting because there was a resurgence of ambitious and confident Australian artists who propelled these kinds of solid pop songs into the international market that was just recovering from grunge. There hadn’t been a band since INXS who’d ever really tried to break the USA but all of a sudden in 1998 there was this window — this space between Backstreet Boys and Goo Goo Dolls — where the concept of ‘the melodic pop song’ could exist. That space is how Savage Garden had a career. I don’t know if there had been songs like this since the 1970s and I don’t think we saw the likes of again until Adele. It’s such a classic record and Tania’s voice is divine.

The duo scored more hits with Treat Me Good, Permission to Shine, Lucky Me, Blown Away and I’m Just a Girl. A second album, Dysfunctional, was released in 2002. However when BMG was sold to Sony the band was dropped and their third album scrapped — they split in 2004. The missing album could come out eventually in 2011 as part of a compilation Loved and Lost.

As well as working on her own music Doko moved to Sweden in 2012 and wrote hits for European acts as well as Australia’s Samantha Jade (the No. 1 What You’ve Done To Me) and Jessica Mauboy (Risk It). Roche has continued production work, including a No. 1 album for Anthony Callea.

The pair reformed in 2016 for an Australia Day Concert, which led to Roche heading to Sweden to work with Doko again as Bachelor Girl and remain immensely proud of their first impression turning 20.

Roche: To have a huge first single is the best start you could ever wish for. We’re still extremely fond of that song, we’re grateful for it, we love it, we’re happy to play it at the drop of a hat because we owe it so much.

Speak is released on Monday