The Whitlams frontman went to Sydney's Shore School with some farmers' sons from in and around Tamworth in the early 1980s.

Decades later, those mates will be in the audience on Saturday, with their wives, and will catch up with Freedman after his show.

"That's something I'm looking really forward to," Freedman said.

He's also stoked his alt-country album Kookaburra, recorded with his latest band The Whitlams Black Stump, will have its debut in Tamworth.

Kookaburra is released on Friday, March 8, with the band playing at Blazes on March 9.

"I'm delighted we're playing in the capital of country music on the day the album comes out," Freedman, 59, said.

"I'm just starting off on my country music journey, playing at country festivals, working hard and doing what I can to be accepted in the scene."

In recent years stars such as Beyonce and Taylor Swift have helped revive country music and its various genres.

It was in March, 2021 Freedman hitched his wagon to the country star.

"I set off on a solo regional tour to promote The Whitlams' single Man About a Dog, a song about driving through the country after heavy rains have broken the drought," Freedman said.

"In the first week of the tour, I was buoyed by the enthusiasm of rural audiences in Tamworth, Gunnedah, Mudgee and Orange, and driving between towns I noticed the band was being played on country radio stations."

Nursing a beer on the Sunday night after a particularly good-natured show in Mudgee he formed a plan.

Freedman reached out to his old friend Matt Fell, who had just notched a run of ARIA and Golden Guitar wins, asking whether he wanted to put his dream band together and have some fun in the studio.

The Whitlams Black Stump five piece band was born, featuring Fell and Rod McCormack, both Country Music Association of Australia Producers of the Year.

Ollie Thorpe joined the band on electric and pedal steel guitar, along with The Whitlams' longtime drummer Terepai Richmond.

Tamworth audiences will already be familiar with The Whitlams Black Stump after their 2021 tour, when they played at the country music festival, as well as at Deni Ute Muster, Adelaide Fringe Festival and Darwin Festival. In 2024, they're set to appear at Bluesfest, Gympie Music Muster and Savannah in the Round.

Among songs they will perform at Blazes on Saturday is a spaghetti western version of Freedman's You Sound Like Louis Burdett.

The boneyard Tex-Mex palette perfectly underpins the craziness of this tale of wide-eyed twenty-somethings in a share house under the flight path in Sydney.

"All my friends are fuck ups, but they're fun to have around" is a well-known lyric in Australian indie music and remembered by adults as the first time they as kids were allowed to swear in front of their parents, when the song played in the car on road trips in the late '90s.

A reboot of the song got country halls and city theatres jumping, so the band recorded it in the final sessions for Kookaburra.

Another old fave to make Kookaburra is "No Aphrodisiac", which originally came out in 1997.

"We recorded this during our second Black Stump tour in 2023 at Rancom St Studios, Botany," Freedman said.

"I enjoy singing old Whitlams tunes a bit lower now. This is three minutes of sitting next to a banjo player, singing that Whitlams song that everyone knows.

"I like the restraint of this recording, and Matt's production really jumps out of the radio."

Freedman says his country music reflects Australia through its lyrics.

"My form of country music is quite jazzy, and the stories are all Australian," he says.

A final question for Freedman was the origin of the band's name.

"It was humorous and I was a big fan of [Gough] Whitlam," Freedman says.

They met later in life and in his 80s, Whitlam even dropped into a live performance of the band at a Sydney inner city pub.

For tickets, visit https://thewhitlams.com/tour/