Saxophonist, composer, improviser and master looper, Adam Page , has brought a bunch of looping pedals and instruments into our Adelaide studio to show us how he builds layers of music on the fly. Adam's just finished a run performing a live improvised score for Australian Dance Theatre’s A Quiet Language, which sampled percussive sounds captured by the dancers' bodies in rehearsal. He’s also working on a PhD exploring new techniques for improvisational looping, and occasionally undertakes ‘dura...
Mar 29, 2025•54 min
Allison Russell’s jazz, blues, and folk influences create a sound that seems infinitely adaptable across her many projects. Her collaborators include Joni Mitchell, Annie Lennox, Hozier, Brandi Carlile, and Orville Peck, as well as making music with her husband JT Nero, and with three other banjo players (including Music Show alumni Rhiannon Giddens and Leyla McCalla). She talks to Andy ahead of her Australian tour dates . Please note this interview makes mention of child abuse, support is avail...
Mar 28, 2025•54 min
People talking about the French composer Pierre Boulez tend to wear out the word iconoclast pretty quickly. To celebrate the “High Priest of Modernism” on the occasion of his centenary, The Music Show looks beyond Boulez’s clockwork reputation to the sensuality and emotion of his music and his kind, collegiate relationship with other musicians. Authors Edward Campbell and Caroline Potter, pianist Paavali Jumppanen and archive from the man himself bear witness to Boulez’s complex and beautiful le...
Mar 22, 2025•54 min
Melbourne historian and musician Lisa MacKinney has written the first full-length history of 1960s New York pop group The Shangri-Las. They were responsible for hits like Leader of the Pack and Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand), teenage soap opera songs that sounded like nothing else on radio at the time. MacKinney’s book Dressed In Black: The Shangri-Las and their Recorded Legacy flips a lot of the accepted narrative about the group on its head, and argues that their talent and musicality has been...
Mar 21, 2025•54 min
In the years since it originated in New York City in the late 1970s, hip hop has become a global music phenomenon. Reaching Australian shores in the early 1980s, tensions quickly arose between those looking to emulate their American rap heroes, and those using their own Australian accents. Dr Niall Edwards-FitzSimons takes us on a potted history of Australian hip hop and the 'accent debate' that came to a head in the 2000s. With voices from The Music Show archives like Urthboy, Bliss, L-FRESH Th...
Mar 15, 2025•54 min
For a band that weren't around very long and only really put out one studio album, the cultural and musical impact of the Sex Pistols is staggering. Guitarist Steve Jones opens up to Andrew Ford about starting the group when he was just a kid, how it feels to be considered a guitar hero now, and why he thinks we're still talking about the band fifty years on. Sex Pistols tour Australia next month (with singer Frank Carter replacing Johnny Rotten). When a gunshot rang out in St Paul’s Cathedral b...
Mar 14, 2025•54 min
The Music Show is back on Kaurna Land at Adelaide's Botanic Park for WOMADelaide 2025, a festival celebrating music from all over the world. Named after a group of powerful grandmas in the 1970s and 80s who sold wax print fabrics at the Lomé central market and drove a Mercedes Benz, Nana Benz du Togo are a five-piece band with three female lead vocalists. PVC pipe percussion, a DIY drum kit and Korg synthesizer form their hypnotic rhythm section, and their music is inspired by their shared voodo...
Mar 08, 2025
Alice Keath presents The Music Show for International Women’s Day, with some of the great international and local women on the WOMADelaide line-up. Latin American pop and classical sensibilities meet in the music of Cuban cellist and singer Ana Carla Maza. She joins Alice to explain why producing her own record was an act of power in the male-dominated Latin music industry. Mudburra and Garrawa woman Eleanor Jawurlngali is based in Marlinja, in the remote Northern Territory. Her debut, self-titl...
Mar 07, 2025•54 min
In the final episode, for now, of Cover Story, singer and rapper Ziggy Ramo and musician and broadcaster Alice Keath look at Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ – a political anthem just vague enough to apply to the US civil rights movement, the Velvet Revolution, Perestroika, and in some cases seemingly nothing at all. Music details: The Times They Are A-Changin'Composed by Bob DylanOriginally recorded by Bob Dylan for the album The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964) on Columbia Records Cov...
Mar 01, 2025•54 min
Aspirations of modernity, progress and innovation drove music through the 20th century. For French composer Maurice Ravel, inspiration from (and imitation of) his peers, of the voices and styles around him, made him a true original. He pulled from Spanish music, 18th century music, Viennese waltz and jazz, and yet within seconds it’s always possible to hear Ravel’s own, distinct, voice. To mark the 150th anniversary of Ravel’s birth, director-composer-lyricist-translator and friend of The Music ...
Feb 28, 2025•54 min
In 1987, Steve Kilbey and Karin Jansson were living together, and armed with a joint and a piano, one night they came up with the bones of Under The Milky Way. It became a hit for The Church as part of their fifth studio album, Starfish, and since then it’s featured in almost every list of great Australian rock songs (and a fair few car ads too). On Cover Story, Andy is joined by poet, singer-songwriter and academic Kate Fagan, and Youth Group member, singer-songwriter, academic Toby Martin to a...
Feb 22, 2025•54 min
Sisters Mabel and Ivy Windred-Wornes have been making music as Charm of Finches since they were children. Now seasoned touring artists with four albums under their belts, they swing by The Music Show studio to play live and tell Andy about the joy of singing in unison, and why they’re drawn to really dark stories. Comprised of five female musicians The Cloud Maker transports listeners through song, using cello, drums, clarinet and Taonga Pūoro (Maori Singing Treasures) to channel the power of br...
Feb 21, 2025•54 min
In 1985, Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love album made a moderate showing in the pop charts. In 2022, the single Running Up That Hill burst back into the charts after a particularly impactful needle-drop in the Netflix show Stranger Things. So perhaps it’s no surprise that there are dozens of cover versions from around 2022 - as well as a handful from earlier in the song’s 40 year lifespan. Cover Story this week looks at some of the best, worst and weirdest, with singer and producer June Jones , and ope...
Feb 15, 2025•54 min
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this program contains the name and voice of someone who has died. Written from the small shed on his allotment in Northern England, the lyrics on Richard Dawson’s new album End of the Middle are filled with small observations and rich characters. He's a prolific and verbose songwriter, likening his habit of jamming too many syllables into the end of lines with "putting too many clothes in a suitcase". Rich's record is replete with ...
Feb 14, 2025•54 min
“This song put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch”, said Neil Young about his only major hit, Heart of Gold, from the 1972 album Harvest. Whether or not the dozens of artists who’ve covered it since consider it “middle of the road”, they’ve certainly taken it right off the beaten track. Andy’s guest analysts in this second edition of our new Cover Story series are singer-songwriters and broadcasters Henry Wagons and Georgia Mooney. Music d...
Feb 08, 2025•54 min
Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra has more of an ethos than a sound. A twenty five piece indie band with constantly evolving membership, it began as a solo project by Matt Hsu, whose values and “punk-trained” composition shine through on not one but two new albums released on the same day: Noodle, and Forest Party. Opera for the Dead (祭歌) is a "contemporary Chinese cyber opera" that explores cultural practices around death and grieving. Guzheng player and in-demand collaborator Mindy Meng Wang and so...
Feb 07, 2025•54 min
Metal, marimbas, vampires and EDM: ABBA’s Lay All Your Love On Me as you’ve never heard it before, with producer Paul Mac and composer Alice Chance. This is the first episode of Cover Story, a new series from The Music Show in which Andy and his guests take songs of the popular music canon and examine their cover versions, for better, worse, and weirder. Music details: Lay All Your Love On MeComposed by Benny Andersson & Björn UlvaeusOriginally recorded by ABBA for the album Super Trouper (1...
Feb 02, 2025•54 min
British singer and songwriter Marianne Faithfull has died at the age of 78. In 1996, Andy spoke to her about finding her true voice, why she was drawn to the music of Kurt Weill and the Weimar Republic, and why she was wrong about The Rolling Stones. Armed with homemade instruments and a larrikin spirit, Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band were mainstays of Melbourne's alternative music scene in the 1970s. Brothers and founding members Jim and Mic Conway are the subjects of a new documentary film by F...
Jan 31, 2025•54 min
“Ships become obsolete; fine furs are ravaged by moths, faded by the sun, worn by rubbing against show cases; garments go out of style; the gold watch grandfather handed down is replaced by a thin one. Change and decay is all around—except in violins. Death rarely comes to the violin.” So wrote Arland Weeks in 1929, in The Scientific Monthly. Dr Laura Case gives Andy a potted history of the violin in Australia, from 1788 to 1914 – and beyond. It's a history of class and gender lines in the colon...
Jan 26, 2025•54 min
Country singer songwriter Andy Golledge cut his teeth in Sydney’s Inner West band scene before returning to his hometown of Tamworth a local hero. He and his band have racked up thousands of kilometres of touring, and whether it’s in the back room of a country pub or in the biggest concert hall in town, they put on one hell of a show. Andy is our ears on the ground at Tamworth Country Music Festival which ends this weekend, and he’s up for two Golden Guitar Awards for his latest album Young, Dum...
Jan 24, 2025•54 min
American composer Caroline Shaw’s latest album, a collaboration with Sō Percussion, is called Rectangles and Circumstance . It’s a collection of ten songs run through with words by Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, William Blake and Christina Rossetti, as well as Caroline herself. She joins Andy from her home in the US to talk about her collaborators and her co-poets. When Irish singer songwriter David Keenan came onto the scene he was described as “the sound of Tim Buckley and Brendan Behan arguin...
Jan 19, 2025•54 min
The Music Show explores the legacy of the late Ruby Hunter – short in stature, a giant in music, and a mentor and parental figure to so many First Nations musicians in subsequent generations. We’ll hear Ruby from the archives, and catch up with Emily Wurramara and Dan Sultan, both of whom have sung a tribute to Ruby Hunter alongside their fantastic new albums.
Jan 18, 2025•54 min
Some of the most prominent folk singers of the twentieth century like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan were being surveilled and, in some cases, blacklisted by the FBI due to their political activism and ties to the U.S Communist Party. Writer and historian Aaron J. Leonard has written several books on the subject and is in to reveal why the US Government was so fixated on musicians in the 1940s and 50s, and what he unearthed from the FBI files he gained access to. Aaron J. Leonard's boo...
Jan 12, 2025•54 min
Ziggy Ramo returns to The Music Show with a new album that’s more than just an album. Human? is a new and beautifully contradictory sound for Ziggy. It blends folk (with guest vocals from Vonn) and his signature rap, precipitated by Ziggy picking up the guitar for the first time in the wake of his 2021 single Little Things. Ziggy joins Andy to talk about the project - which spans the album, the book, and a related exhibition. It's an exploration of dark histories and big questions. The book is c...
Jan 11, 2025•54 min
Romano Crevici has been playing violins made by Harry Vatiliotis for decades. Now drawing to the end of their respective careers, Harry has made one final instrument, which will be Romano's last violin too. The process, challenged by sore joints, thin skin, and Harry's caring responsibilities to the love of his life Maria, have been captured in a moving film called The Last Violin by Carla Thackrah. Romano and Carla are in the studio with the titular violin. Arooj Aftab’s album Vulture Prince to...
Jan 05, 2025•54 min
For someone referred to as "the Queen of Jazz" and "First Lady of Song", there's a surprising amount we don't know about legendary jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. She didn't fit the image of a star: she was incredibly polite, avoided drugs and swearing, and kept her private life entirely private. But when she sang, people listened. Her clear diction, perfect intonation and master of scat singing made her one of the greatest vocalists of the 20th century. Music historian and author of Becoming Ella ...
Jan 04, 2025•54 min
Harnessing looping pedals, percussion and vocal manipulation, Tune-Yards make a very big sound for a core membership of two people. It's been ten years since the experimental pop project released their third album Nikki Nack and creepy hit Water Fountain . Songwriter and singer Merrill Garbus is on The Music Show to talk about the duo's complex rhythms, vocal athleticism, and how to play with words. Omar Musa is an author, artist, poet, and woodcutter making music and art from Borneo to Brooklyn...
Dec 29, 2024•54 min
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, rele...
Dec 28, 2024•54 min
In 2024 Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson undertook an international tour that saw him playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations almost a hundred times, including his first ever performances in Australia. He joins Andy in the studio, in front of the piano, to talk about finding infinite variety in those Variations. Angélique Kidjo shares the story behind her 2018 album Remain In Light, a track-for-track re-imagining of the Talking Heads’ classic, highlighting the African influences across the record....
Dec 22, 2024•54 min
Live from WOMADelaide 2024, 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....
Dec 21, 2024•54 min
