Catherine Zengerer and Sophie Kesteven for LNL – He was a radio producer, an underground political activist, an accused gold-smuggler, a flight instructor and the producer of one of Indonesia's most significant bands.
Mohammad Sidik Tamimi, also known as Dick Tamimi, was one of Indonesia's most colourful characters and his life story was intertwined with much of that country's turbulent past.
Yet many people don't know anything about him. Musician and art producer Julien Poulson wants to fix this.
The ethnomusicologist stumbled upon some of Tamimi's story while he was flicking through a crate of old vinyls at a flea market in Surabaya, Indonesia.
He found a record by Dara Puspita, Indonesia's first all-female rock band, who were popular in the 1960s. Dick Tamimi was their producer during that period.
"What fascinates me about Dara Puspita is that they wrote a flippant song in a recording session called Surabaya, named after their hometown ... and it became a hit," Poulson says.
"If you catch the train into Surabaya today, you'll hear that on the PA system. It's played as the train arrives.
"But show anybody in the streets a picture of the band or one of their records [and] they won't know who it is."
Now Poulson plans to bring the story of the band and their eccentric producer into the spotlight.
He's developing a musical about their extraordinary adventures, and it'll include gold-smuggling, plane crashes, and a Hungarian circus.
Melting down gold jewellery
Before he became a legendary record producer, Dick Tamimi's life revolved around radios.
Born in West Java in 1922, he studied electrical engineering and later he opened a radio repair shop.
But when the Japanese troops invaded Indonesia in 1942 as part of World War II, it transformed his life.
Indonesia had been ruled by the Dutch, until the Japanese invasion and occupation brought this to an end.
The Japanese occupied the country for three and a half years, but surrendered in 1945. The Dutch took control once again but there was a growing Indonesian independence movement.
In the 1940s, Tamimi became a flight lieutenant in the Indonesian air force. He helped topple the Dutch colonial government and aided the emerging independence movement.
These Indonesian rebels formed an alternative government in the jungle, called the Emergency Government of the Republic of Indonesia or PDRI. They moved around the West Sumatran jungles evading the Dutch.
"[Tamimi] was tasked with joining the government in the jungle in Sumatra, with a special mission to acquire a plane for the new [Indonesian] government-in-waiting, and the plane was this beautiful looking 1930s Avro Anson," Poulson explains.
But the fledgling Indonesian government, led by president Sukarno, didn't have the funds to purchase it.
So, in September 1947, vice president Mohammad Hatta called for donors and set up checkpoints across Sumatra for donations of gold jewellery.
In less than two months, local Sumatran women gave nearly 15 kilograms of jewellery for the cause, which was melted down into gold bars.
They planned to purchase the plane for 12 kilograms of gold from a former Australian pilot Paul Keegan, who wanted the transaction to take place in Thailand.
Tamimi was part of the group who went to meet the pilot, but unfortunately, the purchase didn't go to plan.
When the group arrived in Thailand, the Thai military wanted to charge everyone with smuggling gold.
Tamimi escaped over land while two others attempted to escape in the plane. Unfortunately the plane crashed off the coast of Malaysia.
The gold bars were reportedly onboard, but when the plane was recovered, Poulson says there was only one body – and no gold.
Tamimi returned to Indonesia and rejoined the rebels fighting against the Dutch, who were refusing to relinquish their remaining power.
To help them, Tamimi returned to his first love, radio. His skills were invaluable to the revolutionary efforts as he helped broadcast their refusal to accept Dutch rule from the jungle.
Finally sovereignty was formally transferred in 1949, and Tamimi retired from the air force.
He moved to Jakarta and started his own record company in 1956, discovering and producing two of the most seminal groups in Indonesian recording history – Koes Plus and Dara Puspita.
Poulson says Dara Puspita was often described as Indonesia's female version of the Beatles. But the increasingly autocratic Sukarno regime was threatened by their music and their outrageous style on stage.
In 1965 they were arrested for playing outlawed music. They were told that they were "being too Western and too provocative", and they weren't allowed to shake their bodies on stage.
"[Authorities said] 'Don't move like that or go into exile', which is, of course, what happened," Poulson says.
Poulson says the group went into self-exile, travelling to Thailand and then Europe. At one point, they were contracted to a Hungarian circus where they performed five nights a week.
After their stint in Hungary, they moved to the Netherlands in the early 1970s, where their music merged into hard rock, which was on the rise at the time.
"Then they returned triumphantly to Jakarta, to a concert of some 20,000 in a stadium. They returned as heroes," Poulson says.
While the group was in Europe, Tamimi changed careers yet again and became a flight instructor.
But, just like the gold-smuggling incident, this path also ended in tragedy.
Just five years after he retired from the record business, the plane Tamimi was flying crashed in South Sumatra, and he was killed in 1978 at the age of 56.
Yet Tamimi's legacy lives on with Dara Puspita's records, just as many are set to rediscover his extraordinary life when Poulson's musical comes to fruition.