Episodes
Published 03/24/24
From the rattling charge of The Lone Ranger to the slick, warbling vocals of White Lotus, music for television has been beckoning us to the couch for the best part of a century. In Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring, Jon Burlingame has charted the history of music for telly in the form of an elegiac sort of look back at the medium as streaming overtook network TV and the 2007 writers’ strike looked to have changed the medium forever. Now a new edition,...
Published 03/24/24
Peter Garrett has still got a fire in his belly at 70. The True North, his new solo album, tackles similar ground to an Oils record—the climate crisis, politics and addiction to technology, but it's his own songwriting voice out front. The songs contain messages of hope and anger in equal measure. The music is provided by The Alter Egos (which includes Midnight Oil alumnus Martin Rotsey and The Jezabels' Heather Shannon) as well as his daughters Grace and May on backing vocals. Opera...
Published 03/23/24
It was hard to miss Corinne Bailey Rae’s ubiquitous track from 2006 'Put Your Records On'. And it’s still heard in coffee shops the world over. The English singer songwriter released her fourth studio album late last year and it represented a complete left turn in both sound and subject. Black Rainbows is her first album not on a major label and spans genres like rock, jazz and punk. It's a celebration of Black history and resilience, with each track inspired by books, photographs and objects...
Published 03/17/24
Simone Young, who has just renewed her contract with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for another two years, talks about conducting Gurrelieder for the first time. Schoenberg's late-Romantic extravagance is one of the most sumptuous works of the twentieth century, and one of the biggest - such a concert hall rarity that Simone herself has never heard it live. We also talk about her forthcoming cycles of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung at the theatre Wagner himself built in Bayreuth,...
Published 03/16/24
An hour with two Irish living legends, singer songwriter Lisa O’Neill and concertina master Cormac Begley. Both stalwarts of the Irish traditional music scene, they united for an intense, wailing version of All the Tired Horses which was used in the final moment of Peaky Blinders. They play live and talk to Andy about what tradition means, how new writing can sing alongside the old songs, and the highs (piccolo) and lows (bass) of having a concertina collection. Including live performances...
Published 03/10/24
The Music Show is back on Kaurna Land at Adelaide's Botanic Park for WOMADelaide 2024, a festival celebrating music from all over the world. Marta Pereira da Costa was the first woman to make a career as a Fado guitarist. From Lisbon, Portugal, she gave up a career as a civil engineer to pursue the music full time and keep Portugal’s major musical tradition alive. The Good Ones formed in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as a way of processing, healing and finding hope. There is...
Published 03/09/24
Windborne are a vocal quartet from New England in the US. Their tagline is 'old songs, bold harmonies' and their varied repertoire puts Corsican polyphony next to 17th Century English protest songs. They’ve found a huge following online in recent years, thanks in part to a performance outside of Trump Tower. They’re in the country for a string of local shows and festival appearances and they perform live in our music studio. Yorta Yorta musician and storyteller Allara is also in our studio...
Published 03/03/24
With sixteen albums and five Grammys under her belt, Angélique Kidjo doesn’t need much of an introduction. She’s back in Australia to perform songs from her 2021 album Mother Nature as well as gems from her catalogue that highlight her infectious energy, dazzling array of influences and multi-language pop music. Supporting most of her tour is Maatakitj (the stage name of Noongar song-maker, composer, and academic Clint Bracknell). In this special double-header interview Angélique and Clint...
Published 03/02/24
The Music Show is about the creation and enjoyment of music.
Published 02/25/24
Joseph Keckler creates operatic monologues that cover subjects such as psychedelic mushroom trips, haunted houses, and buying a jacket. He also does Schubert lieder. He’s about to tour to Australia with no-wave legend Lydia Lunch and joins Andy to unpack his unique sound and influences. Mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis makes her Australian debut with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and conductor Jaime Martín for Mahler’s 3rd Symphony. She’s a booked and busy opera performer too, with...
Published 02/24/24
Arooj Aftab’s 2021 album Vulture Prince took her ten years to write, and for the final two she had to shut all other music out of her life. “I just was trying to make a thing that didn't have a blueprint" she says, of an opus that combines jazz, experimental electronica and Sufi devotional music with her own unique voice. She's about to tour the album here and looks back at over a decade of work with Andy before she hits Australian stages. When Notre-Dame caught fire in 2019, playwright...
Published 02/18/24
Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson on the band's latest and fifth album V, which combines reggae with Hawaiian music and psychedelic rock. But rather than being a deliberate fusion, V is instead a reflection of Nielson's roots, ranging from a family legacy of Hawaiian reggae, Māori and Hawaiian heritage, and Auckland's punk scene's DIY ethics. Soprano Katharine Dain's album Forget This Night takes Lili Boulanger's sensual song cycle Clairières dans le ciel as a springboard for a...
Published 02/17/24
Lonnie Holley has dedicated his life to art, but his music career – as a recording artist at least – only started at the age of 62, decades after he became a sculptor displayed at the White House and collected by The Met, The Smithsonian, and the Art Gallery of NSW. He grew up in Jim Crow era Alabama and suffered a huge amount of abuse at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, which has always informed his art and his music.  His first album came out in 2012 and his most recent, Oh...
Published 02/11/24
Embarking on a nautical adventure this week, Andy is welcomed onboard the ‘floating cultural platform’ known as the Arka Kinari, sailed by musical duo Grey Filastine and Nova Ruth. Made of steel intended for a Nazi U-Boat, this seventy-tonne schooner has been fitted out as an eco-touring venue, and after leaving home waters in Indonesia last month is currently visiting Australia for a run of shows. Pitjantjatjara singer and songwriter Frank Yamma was born into music, and has since had a long...
Published 02/10/24
Eddie Perfect has been to Broadway and back with music theatre composer credits including Beetlejuice and King Kong, not to mention home-grown hit Shane Warne: The Musical. Now he’s set to play as Dr Pangloss and Voltaire in Leonard Bernstein’s exquisitely convoluted opera Candide with Victorian Opera, and he talks to Andy about how a work written during McCarthyism, based on a novel written during the 7 Years War, finds new resonance now. While the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur has had...
Published 02/04/24
Richard Tognetti, artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, returns to The Music Show to catch up with Andy about River, the latest in the ACO’s series of cinematic collaborations, and looks back at the way the pandemic has shaped the ensemble and the classical music scene more widely. In the 1970s, trailblazing Australian dancer Phillippa Cullen developed a set of ‘pressure-sensitive floors’, but after her tragic early death they sat unused in a dusty corner of the University...
Published 02/03/24
Formed out of a love for Django Reinhardt and excellent band-name puns, Cigány Weaver play in a style reminiscent of jazz Manouche, traditional swing and Romani music. We hosted the full six-piece band in The Music Show studio where they delivered a performance rich in energetic fiddling, gentle strumming and soaring vocals, playing two songs drawn from their new album Episode II: Still Water. Scottish composer Stuart MacRae had set medieval poetry to music before, but it wasn’t until he...
Published 01/28/24
When Irish singer songwriter David Keenan came onto the scene he was described as “the sound of Tim Buckley and Brendan Behan arguing over a few jars, while Kavanagh deals Dylan a suspicious hand of cards, and Anthony Cronin and Jack Kerouac furiously try to scribble it all down” – so no pressure there. He talks about wearing those comparisons, writing songs about Ireland, and the story behind his guitar as well as performing new music live. David Lumsdaine was an Australian composer who...
Published 01/27/24
This is the story a song written by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly around a campfire in 1988. What started off as a casually recorded folk number has become what Carmody calls “a kind of cultural love song”: a foundational entry in the Australian songbook. 2023’s NAIDOC Week theme was “For Our Elders”, so RN’s Rudi Bremer went to speak with Kev Carmody at his studio on Kambuwal Country to gather his recollections of From Little Things Big Things Grow as it started, the story of the Gurindji Walk...
Published 01/21/24
Robbie speaks to Electric Fields -  Zaachariaha Fielding and Michael Ross about the perspectives that have been infused into the music through collaborative songwriting and Zaachariaha's upbringing in Mimili (APY Lands). After noticing their undeniable creative spark back in 2015, they have been making music together that hark back to the days watching Rage on the weekends, while adding their own individual sounds and stories to the mix. And Andy talks to the Stiff Gins, who are 24 years...
Published 01/20/24
Author Oliver Soden tackles the public and private personas of Noël Coward in his biography Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward. He joins Andy on to unpack the way that life yielded one of the most productive artistic careers of the 20th century. Including scenes from Private Lives, performed by Geraldine Turner, Dennis Olsen, and Guy Noble from The Music Show archives. 
Published 01/14/24
Marcia Hines marks fifty years since her debut recording, but her life in music started long before that. Raised with gospel in Boston, she was at Woodstock when she was 16 and then shortly after on her way to Australia to star in the local production of Hair. And then she stayed. After Hair came touring in a jazz band with B.B. King, then Jesus Christ Superstar, before being crowned Queen of Pop. A huge career across pop, jazz, disco and more followed and is still going with Marcia touring...
Published 01/13/24
An hour in the company of music writer James Gavin whose biographies include George Michael, Chet Baker and Peggy Lee. Gavin discusses ‘ravaged’ voices;  singers whose voices became utterly wrecked in old age like Billie Holiday and Alessandro Moreschi. Or in the case of Marianne Faithful where age wearied the voice in a new and haunting way. We hear high voices that never dropped like Jimmy Scott and Peter Pears and Joan Baez whose technique only improved with age. And not forgetting the...
Published 01/07/24
ANOHNI & the Johnsons return with My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, and Robbie visits the ACO studios to chat with Will Gregory and his Moog Ensemble.
Published 01/06/24