Australian indie-pop artist Bertie Blackman spent three days in the city filming bull riding and ringers ahead of her album launch in October. 

Visions of the rodeo and landscapes around Mount Isa will feature in the artist’s latest single, Kingdom of Alone, to be released nationally through Triple J within the week. 

Ms Blackman said pop songs and rodeo culture were unlikely bedfellows but admitted the mash-up led to an uncanny connection between the lyrics she penned and the scenes captured through the lens of director Nick Waterman.  

“Being a touring musician and artist you spend a lot of time surrounded by people but I’ve always had this intrinsic kind of feeling that I’m always just a little bit alone, I guess because you live a bit of an outsider’s life,” she said. 

“I don’t have a notified job, I kind of coast in and out of different towns and so I really liked when Nick Waterman, who is directing the video, pitched to me the idea of it being a rodeo.”

Ms Blackman said she felt a similarity between the focus of a cowboy before he mounts his competition bull and the solitude she enters into before taking the stage for a show. 

“You watch all the cowboys prepping to go on the bulls and the horses and they’re kind of like in their own head and prepping the ropes and the saddles, it’s kind of like what I do in my own way when we get out on stage and perform and do your thing,” she said. 

“You pull into yourself at moments like that to perform your best and I’m honoured that they let us shoot those moments and share those moments with us.”

Although the musician, clad in black skinny jeans, a band T-shirt and a black porkpie hat, said she felt very much like an “outsider” over the weekend she admitted the rodeo world was a fascinating thing to experience. 

“For me the most interesting part is watching the people,” she said. 

“Mostly music videos these days are really bright, grotesque, highly sexualised things and it’s nice to tell a human story about people,” she said. 

Ms Blackman stopped short of getting on the back of a horse or a poddy calf at the weekend but said she had fond memories of riding a wild goat in the Northern Territory at the Katherine Rodeo as a kid.