Since 1991, Jakszyk had been sketching out plans for an autobiographical radio piece called "The Road to Ballina", a mixed music-and-spoken word project exploring his own family history and his bittersweet search for his birth mother. In 1995 this went into production. In addition to Jakszyk's own account of growing up as an adoptee, the work included extensive contributions from both of his adoptive parents relating to their often harrowing wartime experience in Europe as refugees and conscripts and as people under occupation. Several of the recordings were conceptually arranged (including specially made recordings of Norbert Jakszyk recorded in Auschwitz-Birkenau) while the music tracks featured Gavin Harrison and two of Jakszyk's former Level 42 colleagues, Mark King and Gary Barnacle.