In remote Australia, a concert becomes something much bigger

Half a dozen kids swarm around the drum kit as Melbourne band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever rips through a set at full tilt.

The kids aren't supposed to be on stage, but they are compelled. Maybe it's the music, maybe it's the excitement of the gig in their small, remote community, maybe they just want to bash things.

As the band hit the outro of their 2017 song French Press, the youngsters grab sticks and start gleefully bashing along.

"They never planned it," fellow performer Stella Donnelly says later.

"They just got up … it was the most hilarious thing I've ever seen."

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever get a little help from the local kids on the Guts tour. (Supplied: Sam Brumby)

At this concert in a remote Arnhem Land community, the kids show us what pure joy looks like all night.

They climb onstage, they breathlessly chase each other around, they grab the microphone when they can get away with it.

Moments like this sit at the heart of Guts, a roaming, solar-powered tour that snakes its way through some of the most remote communities in the Northern Territory, bringing together bands from the city and the bush to hold concerts in areas that don't host a lot of touring musicians.

It sounds straightforward: a string of gigs in parks and community spaces. But it's not really about the shows.

Guts founders Parsons and Jimmy Clark first met at a share house in Brunswick in 2015.

"We were having a VB can on the porch," Clark recalls. "And Jack said, 'I've got this crazy idea…'"

The idea was specifically inspired by the Warumpi Band and Midnight Oil's famous 1986 Blackfella/Whitefella tour, where the bands hauled gear thousands of kilometres to play in places outside typical touring routes.

"Guts was about taking live music to remote parts of the country that are starved of it and starved of opportunities," Clark says.

That framing didn't last. Somewhere between the first few tours and now, 10 years in, the purpose sharpened.

Jack Parsons and Jimmy Clarke, pictured with assistant tour manager Tom Rowsthorn, started Guts Touring a decade ago. (Supplied: Sam Brumby)

"I think we found the special sauce," Clark says. "We found the beauty in playing out in remote communities."

Their initial goal of bringing live music to people in areas that don't get much of it may have been noble, but in hindsight it was maybe slightly off base.

There's a persistent idea, Donnelly says, that remote communities are sparse, silent blank spaces.

"I think there's this idea that we're heading out to communities that have nothing," she says. "And it's just not th