What happened to notorious Brit band after that final recording session?

We know about the rock undead; the bands that won’t stay buried so long as there’s a man more or less standing. (In related news: Next week, The Eagles release their first new album in 28 years.)

But what about the black holes where stars sink without a trace? To take a particularly macabre example, there’s the strange case of Brit rockers BiFurious, trail blazing, scandal-spattered sex-rockers. Yeah yeah, we know about the sex change, the bad blood, the screwing around, the suicide and all that day –to-day stuff. But what exactly happened when BiFurious recorded their farewell album in an abandoned warehouse – and vanished? You may find the answer this very weekend, at Urban Tales. Yes, Northern Light Theatre has discovered missing footage of that final session. Be warned, says videographer/photographer Ian Jackson. “You’ll be reminded of The Blair Witch Project,” a household name in creepiness.

It is no accident that NLT has turned its gaze on the BiFurious mystery. For a decade now, the theatre company has been fear-mongering, shamelessly, at this time of year. They’ve egged playwrights on to create unease, in short new plays. Last year’s edition, devoted to the creep-out premise of “night nurses in the insane asylum,” cross-cut four plays into one scary whole.

This year NLT has decided to spread the fear around, across the country even. The play BiFurious, an amalgam of four contributions from four playwrights- Jason Chinn, Darrin Hagen, James Hamilton and Rosemary Rowe—opens tonight at The Third Space. And, a first in Canada, Saturday night’s performance is webcast live over the Internet at 8 p.m.

Check out trailers, band bios, discography on YouTube (type in “BiFurious), much of it written by NLT’s Jason Magee, now the citadel communications guy. There you’ll hear a smooth-voiced narrator (Randy Kilburn) record the triumphs and tragedies of BiFurious, “those harbingers of the neo-avant-garde” on and off the stage. From their first big smash Don’t Get Cocky Or You Won’t Get Cocky, which hit 19th spot on the alternative rock charts “then fell ominously,” this was a band with a special gift for dysfunction.

Each playwright was assigned a band member for whom to create 10 or 15 minutes worth of material. Rosemary Rowe, for example, late of Edmonton and now of Vancouver, got lead singer Cody Gold ne’ Hamish Goldstein (Jesse Gervais), a vision in gold lame’ tights. “He’s the biggest diva,” says Rowe. “Good-looking and with possibly the least talent. His sexual exploits are legendary. It was such a pleasure to write someone so self-absorbed, such a cocky jerk.”

Jackson says: “It’s uncanny how playwrights writing separately have come up with something as if they’d been looking over each other’s shoulders....It’s very funny.”

On the YouTube excerpts, you’ll hear of Cody’s troubled relationship with ex-Stick Magazine model Lydia (Linda Grass). You’ll meet guitar wizard Keith Bleak (Dave Clarke) and his keyboardist ex-wife. I can reveal that on the fateful night, the band members have a big blowout, then stalk off separately. Jackson, who has contributed his multiple talents---stills, projections, video live and recorded ---to six of the last 10 editions of Urban Tales, hints at other dark aspects of the BiFurious story. Jackson speaks (in a conspiratorial whisper, natch) of “the drummer they found on a reality TV series.”

The lost BiFurious footage is the first time that Ottawa’s Galbraith Communications, which specializes in the drier realm of government conferences and annual general meetings, has undertaken a live theatre webcast. A live representative, who “can fit everything he needs for the broadcast in one suitcase” as Jackson points out, arrives this afternoon. Jackson himself will be “mixing live video, pre-recorded video, still images and some animation” in the course of this historic event.

As he points out, “If the Met can broadcast (operas) live at Cineplex, why not small theatres? This is the way to reach a larger audience.”