The Music Show

ABC Australia•www.abc.net.au

Music

Music Interviews

All kinds of music and all kinds of musicians in conversation with Andrew Ford.

Last refreshed: May 17th, 2026 at 4:09 AM ⓘ

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Episodes

Eddie Perfect gets candid about Candide and Forest Collective enter the Labyrinth

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 count...

Feb 04, 2024•54 min

Rivers with Richard Tognetti, oceans with Iran Sanadzadeh, and remembering Chita Rivera

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 of Ad...

Feb 03, 2024•54 min

Cigány Weaver live in studio & Lotte Betts-Dean's distinctly medieval collaboration with Stuart MacRae

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 heard A...

Jan 28, 2024•54 min

David Keenan's Irish Songs & remembering David Lumsdaine

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 spent m...

Jan 27, 2024•54 min

From Little Things Big Things Grow on RN Summer

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 Off...

Jan 21, 2024•54 min

Electric Fields & Stiff Gins on RN Summer

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 into wha...

Jan 20, 2024•54 min

The Lives of Noël Coward on RN Summer

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.

Jan 14, 2024•54 min

Fred Leone & Marcia Hines on RN Summer

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 acro...

Jan 13, 2024•54 min

James Gavin's Ravaged Voices on RN Summer

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 drama t...

Jan 07, 2024•54 min

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