Cover Story: (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
All kinds of music and all kinds of musicians in conversation with Andrew Ford.
Oct 25, 2025•54 min
The Music Show
All kinds of music and all kinds of musicians in conversation with Andrew Ford.
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Episodes
Sorrow and songwriting: Irish musician Inni-K, and Joe Camilleri's The Black Sorrows
Inni-K , the alias of singer songwriter Eithne Ní Chatháin, blends Ireland's rich music traditions with her own playful compositional voice. Her new album Still A Day deviates from the traditional material she's focused on in the past, and these original songs are sung in English and Gaelic, with her voice and fiddle at the centre. Touring relentlessly and releasing music since the early 1980s, Joe Camilleri and The Black Sorrows are taking stock with a new album of ‘quintessential songs’ that c...
Oct 24, 2025•54 min
Cover Story: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was made famous by the version Roberta Flack recorded for her 1969 album First Take, which was then used in Clint Eastwood's 1971 film Play Misty for Me. But it started life as a relatively simple folksong British folk singer Ewan MacColl wrote for and delivered to American folk singer Peggy Seeger down a phone line at the start of the 1960s. From folksong to torch song to torture device (sorry, Barbra Streisand), it's a song that has robustly weathered many i...
Oct 18, 2025•54 min
From Mao's Last Dancer to Master and Commander: Christopher Gordon on his film music and beyond, and The Apartments' Peter Milton Walsh
Composer Christopher Gordon is being handed the Distinguished Services to the Australian Screen award at this year's Screen Music Awards. Responsible for big scores to films like Mao’s Last Dancer, Ladies In Black, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Christopher has also written for television, ballet and the concert hall. He tells Andrew about catching his first big break (a score for miniseries Moby Dick) and how he’s kept up such a varied composing and conducting career. Form...
Oct 17, 2025•54 min
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Ahead of new episodes of Cover Story (dropping very soon!) we bring you one of our favourites from season one. 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.
Oct 11, 2025•54 min
Inside a showtunes sing-along bar, and composer Fritz Hart's unsung career
When was the last time you gathered around a piano to belt out showtunes with friends or strangers? Marie's Crisis Cafe is a beloved New York City sing-along piano bar that's been bringing musical theatre lovers together for decades. The bar is popping up in Melbourne and Sydney and we'll meet resident pianists Kenney Green-Tilford and Adam Michael Tilford who'll perform a couple of showtunes live. Fritz Hart (1874 - 1949) was an English composer, conductor and teacher (and critic, poet, novelis...
Oct 10, 2025•54 min
Shellie Morris sings for our little ones and Tim Brady composes for 100 electric guitars
Wardaman and Yanyuwa woman Dr Shellie Morris AO grew up speaking English in her adopted family, but has since gone on to learn over 20 First Nations languages. Her new album Singing For Our Little Ones is in Warumungu, and it's a collaboration with Elders in Tennant Creek as well as the local recording studio and a whole bunch of musicians. Shellie's cultural advocacy and leadership recently earned her a Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement, and she's back on The Music Show to talk about why...
Oct 05, 2025•54 min
Meow Meow's The Red Shoes and saxophonist Tessie Overmyer's Tidelands
Post-post-modern chanteuse Meow Meow returns to The Music Show to talk about The Red Shoes, the third show in her series of Hans Christian Anderson adaptations. She goes into both the music and the research behind the show, including the revelation of a Danish ballet dancer whose "feet ran away with her", that may have inspired the tale. Alto saxophonist and composer Tessie Overmyer has released her debut album as bandleader, Tidelands. She explains to Andrew Ford why she composes music on guita...
Oct 04, 2025•54 min
Red Headed Stranger: how Willie Nelson's obsession spawned a classic country album
Willie Nelson first encountered the song Red Headed Stranger in the 1950s, working as a DJ at radio station KCNC in Fort Worth TX. It was a jaunty number, sung by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith and His Cracker-Jacks, about a less-than-jaunty subject. The stranger of the title rides into town on “a raging black stallion” leading a second horse, a bay, that had belonged to his dead wife. He meets a woman who tries to steal the bay and shoots her. Willie not only played the song on his radio show but...
Sep 28, 2025•54 min
Stormy skies, Bulgarian voices, and Mervyn Peake with Neko Case and remembering legendary bassist Danny Thompson
Neko Case's dazzling voice and kaleidoscopic band sound have developed slowly and assuredly over her 30 year recording career in what she calls "country noir", and her latest album Neon Grey Midnight Green is the latest instalment. She joins Andy to talk about the way her voice has changed over the years, her adoration of unconventional guitars, and the surprising literary inspirations behind her songwriting. The legendary upright bass player Danny Thompson has died at the age of 86. His music s...
Sep 27, 2025•54 min
Modern monodramas: deconstructing Pierrot Lunaire and unravelling The Big Idea
Laura Bowler is often described as a "composer, performer, and prevocatrice". That may be the perfect combination for "deconstructing" Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which she's done and is getting its Australian premiere for Ensemble Offspring's 30th birthday concert. She joins Andy to talk about her relationship to Schoenberg's original work, the "extractive" process of wrapping your identity up in your art, and what live electronics bring to her music. The Big Idea is a monodrama - a sort of m...
Sep 21, 2025•54 min
Recovering and uncovering: early Black music from America and the Persian music of Afghanistan
Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo is a new book, a collaboration between Carolina Chocolate Drops founder Rhiannon Giddens and music writer Kristina Gaddy. They both join Andy to talk about what they've uncovered. Ensemble Kaboul is an Afghan ensemble based in Europe, and they're headed to Australia to collaborate with Van Diemen's Band on Where Everything Is Music: the Persian music of Afghanistan meeting the baroque. Rubab player Khaled Arm...
Sep 20, 2025•54 min
Bleak Squad: a supergroup with DNA from Magic Dirt, the Bad Seeds and Dirty Three; and a striking conversation with percussionist Steven Schick
Adalita and Marty Brown join Andy to talk about their new supergroup with Mick Harvey and Mick Taylor - they're called Bleak Squad and with a history of playing with Magic Dirt, the Bad Seeds, Dirty Three as well as with artists like PJ Harvey and Clare Bowditch, it's a quartet with some serious power. A moody, charismatic guitar band - the likes of which you don't hear that much these days - Adalita and Marty join Andy to report that the kids are, in fact, listening to guitars, and explain how ...
Sep 14, 2025•54 min
Irish trad-punk for the 21st century with the Mary Wallopers, and music for dark times with Deborah Cheetham-Fraillon
The Mary Wallopers are in Australia, far from their hometown of Dundalk in Ireland's County Louth. They're a raucous, political band with a folk/punk inheritance from bands like The Dubliners and the Pogues. Charles Hendy, who formed the band alongside his brother Andrew, is Andy's guest. We welcome Yorta Yorta/Yuin composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham Fraillon back to the music show to discuss the release of Eumeralla, A War Requiem for Peace on ABC Classic. This powerful requiem, sung in Gund...
Sep 13, 2025•54 min
Bold performances in music new and old: Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Havlat
Carolyn Sampson is an English soprano who began her career in early music (Bach and before), working with some of the world's best-known specialists in historically informed performance. These days, she is just as likely to be heard singing Mahler. She talks about her developing career in a conversation recorded at this year's Australian Festival of Chamber Music. Also from the Festival, the fearless Australian-born, London-based pianist Joseph Havlat. He enjoys the challenge of new music and th...
Sep 07, 2025•54 min
Music teachers on screen, and how to score a film
Was your music teacher anything like the ones in the movies? Three academics - Hugh Gundlach and Rhiannon Simpson from Melbourne University and Katrina Rivera from ANU - join Andy to interrogate cinematic depictions of music teachers. From the dictators (Whiplash) to the heroes (Mr Holland's Opus) and the chaos engines in between (School of Rock), what do our fictional music teachers tell us about music education in the real world? And Freya Berkhout is an Australian film composer who made a lea...
Sep 06, 2025•54 min
80 years since the end of WWII: the Music of Remembrance with Jeremy Eichler
Four pieces of music written in the years after World War II – Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, and Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, ‘Babi Yar’ – paint a complicated picture of how European composers memorialised war in Jeremy Eichler’s new book Time’s Echo. Jeremy joins Andy on the show to trace the connections and conflicts in the ways that a German, a Jewish Austrian in exile, an Englishman, and a Russian looked back at the war(s) and the Holoc...
Aug 31, 2025•54 min
A musical portrait of Guinea-Bissau, and pianist Ana-Maria Vera on surviving as a child prodigy
As a child prodigy, pianist Ana-Maria Vera made her concerto debut when she was nine, going on to record and perform with some of the world’s great orchestras (Philadelphia, Cleveland, London Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony). In a conversation recorded at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, Ana-Maria tells Andrew Ford about spending her formative years on the stage, her significant musical relationships with violinist Ivry Gitlis and teacher Leon Fleisher, and how her organisation Bolivia...
Aug 30, 2025•54 min
"I have seen rock and roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen": Born To Run at 50
On the 25th of August, 1975, Bruce Springsteen released Born to Run, the "dividing line" of his career. Starting with the title track, written on the edge of his bed in a rented cottage in New Jersey, Born to Run signalled the arrival of Springsteen, and the E Street Band. A child of the Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X assassinations, Springsteen transformed classic rock and roll images - the road, the car, the girl - into something potent and virile that reflected the sense of dread in the air. Mu...
Aug 24, 2025•54 min
Beyond bluegrass with Molly Tuttle, and harpist Marshall McGuire on bravery and leadership
The harpist Marshall McGuire is Chair of the Australian Music Centre. He made his name playing impossibly virtuosic music by modern composers, often pieces written specifically for him. He has worked with the ELISION Ensemble for 38 of the ensemble’s 39 years, and for most of the last decade was Director of Programming at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Marshall joins Andy in the studio to talk about the harp, working with composers and the future of artistic leadership. For a long time, Molly Tut...
Aug 23, 2025•54 min
Liz Pelly on the Spotify machine, and remembering jazz greats Judy Bailey and Sheila Jordan
Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist has been received as an evisceration of the streaming platform and the way it has fundamentally changed the business model of music (to its own advantage) over the past fifteen years. Liz joins Andy to talk through her investigation and look at the future of music listening. And we remember American jazz singer Sheila Jordan who died this week at 96, and Australian jazz pianist and composer Judy Bailey who d...
Aug 17, 2025•54 min
Leading an orchestra with Jaime Martín and putting words to music with DOBBY and Leah Senior
It's Poetry Month and our Middle of the Air competition (run in collaboration with Red Room Poetry) is in full swing. Two of our listeners who submit the winning poems will have their words turned into songs and recorded by rapper/composer DOBBY and singer songwriter Leah Senior. Both musicians are on The Music Show to talk about their different approaches to word setting, their favourite lyricists, and how poetry has influenced their songwriting. And The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's Jaime Mar...
Aug 16, 2025•54 min
Gregory Porter on his jazz foundations and Michael Collins on the clarinettist-composer relationship
Gregory Porter is becoming a harder and harder singer to pigeonhole. His voice is at home in gospel, blues, soul, and R&B, but the foundation of it all, he tells Andrew Ford, is jazz. Gregory and his band are returning to Australia soon and he joins The Music Show (from vacation in Mexico!) to talk about bringing strings and a choir into his music, maintaining optimism, and his tribute album to musical hero Nat King Cole. Andy finds a moment at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music to spe...
Aug 10, 2025•54 min
Jerrah Patston's world in songs, and the music of outback fences and pied butcherbirds
Jerrah Patston is a singer and songwriter who’s part of Club Weld —a Parramatta-based studio for neurodiverse musicians run by the Arts & Cultural Exchange. Jerrah’s music contains observations about his everyday life - from local construction sites, events being cancelled due to weather, and the time he went to a Paul McCartney concert and didn't hear Mull of Kintyre. Jerrah’s just released his third full-length album Abandoned Cricket Games and we’ll meet him, as well as one of his Club We...
Aug 09, 2025•54 min
Legacies and laughs: Tom Lehrer and Dame Cleo Laine
Two legendary singers and favourite guests of The Music Show passed away this week at 97 years old: Tom Lehrer and Dame Cleo Laine. Dame Cleo Laine was one of England’s most acclaimed jazz singers, with a distinctive smoky contralto voice and four octave vocal range. She was also an actor, initially confined to Caribbean characters and expanding to major roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Into the Woods, and even as the voice of God in Noye’s Fludde. In this candid 2004 interview, Andrew Ford s...
Aug 03, 2025•54 min
Storytelling, beats and soundscapes on Warlpiri Country, and Gordon Kerry's new Requiem
Lajamanu is one of the most remote places in Central Australia, and it’s where we meet Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu, his father Jerry Jangala Patrick OAM, and the music producer Marc ‘Monkey’ Peckham. Crown & Country is a new album and film that’s come out of more than a decade of friendship and collaboration between Wanta, Jerry and Monkey. Blending Warlpiri Jukurrpa (Dreaming) songs, cultural stories, soundscapes from the desert, and electronic beats, it’s a compelling and immersive ...
Aug 02, 2025•54 min
Ozzy Osbourne - the melodic voice of Black Sabbath, and announcing poetry and lyric competition Middle of the Air
Nicole Smede is a proud Warrimay woman with Irish ancestry, whose bio includes poet, musician, singer and composer. She’s on The Music Show to talk about how all of these things have come to intersect in her work, and about the joy and strength she's found in writing across forms and languages. Nicole is a current participant of the Ngarra Burria First Peoples Composers Program, and is also the First Nations Artistic Director at Red Room Poetry. As part of this interview we announce an exciting ...
Jul 27, 2025•54 min
Michael Atherton: A lifetime student of music from ancient Egypt, medieval Europe and beyond
Michael Atherton has had his fingers in so many musical pies it's hard to know how to sum him up. He is a composer, a music therapist, an educator, a writer of books and a multi-instrumentalist. Indeed, with the Renaissance Players, Sirocco, The Atherton Table Band and Southern Crossings, he has played so many instruments he must have lost count. Just turned 75, he can add memoirist to his list of achievements, and that was our cue to get him into the studio for a long chat and attempt to make s...
Jul 26, 2025•54 min
Together Alone with Crowded House and talking About Ghosts with Mary Halvorson
Brooklyn-based jazz guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson has released a new album About Ghosts . Featuring her long-time improvisatory band Amaryllis, this time she’s also added two saxophonists into the mix. Mary speaks to Andrew Ford about what adding more horns allows her music to do, how an increased focus on composition has changed the way she improvises, and about some of her more surprising musical influences (people like Elliott Smith and Robert Wyatt). Together Alone is not Crowded Hou...
Jul 20, 2025•54 min
Ben Lee on mistakes, longevity and the power of pop music
Ben Lee is responsible for some of the most ubiquitous Australian songs of the last two decades (‘Catch My Disease’, ‘We’re All In This Together’, and ‘Cigarettes Will Kill You’). His breakthrough fifth album Awake Is The New Sleep turns 20 this year, and he’s on The Music Show to reflect on career longevity (forming his first band at 14), what he’s learned from joining (and leaving) cults, and why he spends so much time playing gigs in regional Australia these days. 2022 Classical Freedman Fell...
Jul 19, 2025•54 min
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