Tim Finn and Neil Finn have worked together in a number of guises over the years: Crowded House, The Finn Brothers, and guesting on each other’s solo projects. But it all began with Split Enz, and there’s something about that music that keeps bringing them back together. Neil and Finn reminisce about their early collaborations, explain how a setlist comes together, and share how The Eagles were a surprising influence on the band. Back in 1948, a major scientific expedition travelled to Arnhem La...
Feb 01, 2026•54 min
Lucy Dacus is now perhaps best known for being one third of boygenius, one of the great sad girl groups of all time. But her latest album, Forever is a Feeling, is bursting with romantic joy. On her way to Australia for a series of shows, she talks to Andy about finding its lush sound, performing it live, and about singing for Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral inauguration in New York City. Útóipe Cheilteach (Celtic Utopia), a film by Dennis Harvey and Lars Lovén, explores what has happened to Irish folk...
Jan 31, 2026•54 min
Singer and actor Ursula Yovich joins Andy to talk about Nina Simone. Yovich has been taking on Simone's music for a show at Sydney Festival and she explores what set Simone apart, what part of her story she wanted to tell, the continuing importance of Simone's politics, and the cost to an artist to perform and share themselves on the stage. And Toshi Maeda, from the Australian punk band Mach Pelican, shares the band's first new music in almost two decades, and explains how he got involved in tou...
Jan 25, 2026•55 min
From a teenage band driving up and down the coast in a station wagon to one of the biggest Australian bands of all time, Midnight Oil survived on the backbone of drummer, founding member, and songwriter Rob Hirst. Hirst, who has died at the age of 70, was a frequent guest on The Music Show, both as an Oil and with his blues band the Backsliders, and we remember him with a selection of appearances, including his demonstration of the musical washboard. And Pinchgut Opera remembers three great oper...
Jan 24, 2026•55 min
The bouzouki has been a feature of Irish folk music since the mid-1960s, and one of the instrument’s finest modern exponents is Daoirí Farrell . He’s also a singer and a song collector, and he's brought his instrument into our studio to demonstrate how the three things fit together. 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 th...
Jan 17, 2026•55 min
In February 1975, Keith Jarrett turned up at the Cologne Opera House to play a solo concert. He was tired, hungry and in pain, and the Bösendorfer piano was falling apart. Technicians worked on the instrument before and after that night’s opera performance, and the 18-year-old promoter talked Jarrett into going on. Still tired, still hungry (dinner arrived too late), still in pain, and very much against his better judgement, Jarrett took the stage at 11.30pm and played what we now know as The Kö...
Jan 16, 2026•55 min
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 ...
Jan 10, 2026•54 min
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...
Jan 09, 2026•55 min
The Glasgow-based singer Quinie travelled across Argyll on her horse Maisie to collect old Scots songs for her new album Forefowk, Mind Me. On this record, Quinie (whose real name is Josie Vallely) pays tribute to her ancestors as well as Scots Traveller singers like Lizzie Higgins, whose deep connection to the land has been expressed beautifully in song for generations. She speaks to Andy about arranging ballad and piping traditions, the melodic influence of the Irish uilleann pipes on this rec...
Jan 03, 2026•55 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 col...
Jan 02, 2026•54 min
Seraphim Trio have been making chamber music together for over twenty years. Pianist Anna Goldsworthy joins Andrew Ford to talk about her relationship with violinist Helen Ayres and cellist Tim Nankervis, as well as the women composers – famous and lesser known – they have recorded as part of their latest album Radiante. Written from the small shed on his allotment in Northern England, the lyrics on Richard Dawson’s album End of the Middle are filled with small observations and rich characters. ...
Dec 27, 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 ...
Dec 26, 2025•55 min
Almost every description of South African singer, cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe starts with a phrase like “genre-defying”, but Abel refers to himself as genre defining. Wherever he tours, he brings with him a lifetime of musical influences ranging from his childhood in Sebokeng, a township outside Johannesburg, to adolescence at Soweto’s African Cultural Organisation of South Africa, to study at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. His classical cello chops, his Xhosa throat s...
Dec 20, 2025•54 min
Ellen Stekert has spent a lifetime in folk music. She got her first guitar at 13 (to assist with her rehab after contracting polio) and soon after high school she became enmeshed in the Greenwich Village folk scene, crossing paths with the likes of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Ellen released four albums of traditional songs in the 1950s and then focused her career on academia, teaching English, American and folklore studies. There’s been a resurgence of interest in Ellen’s life and music, than...
Dec 19, 2025•54 min
Brisbane trad band Amaidí say they perform "doofy folk stuff": accordion, guitar, banjo and fiddle augmented by stomp box and electronics. Amaidí means nonsense in Gaelic but it's more than just silly stuff, with their new album Beyond Cape Capricorn reflecting the broad and often dark influences of Scottish and Irish music in the Australian folk tradition. That being said, there's plenty to dance to, as you'll hear when they join Andy to play some tunes live in the studio. Well before he was Ch...
Dec 13, 2025•55 min
What do an actress mired in scandal, a grieving political dissident, a previously enslaved African celebrity, and a court composer have in common? They’re all integral to the story of Messiah becoming a cornerstone of the musical repertoire. Heard now more often at Christmas, it was premiered at Easter in 1742 after three rapid weeks of writing by Handel, and it suggests, as author Charles King says, the staggering possibility that things might turn out all right. Charles joins Andy to reveal th...
Dec 12, 2025•55 min
Tony Wellington returns to the show to race through the 1980s in a single episode. It's a decade of contradictions, where big hair, commercial pop hits, lip syncing and the music video meet rap, independent rock, and house music. From girls on film to video killing the radio star, from talking about a revolution to being touched for the very first time: how do you sum up the triumphs and tragedies?
Dec 06, 2025•55 min
JJJJJerome Ellis styles their name with five Js because it’s the word they stutter on the most. The artist, writer, composer and multi-instrumentalist has released a new album Vesper Sparrow which layers spoken word, vocals, saxophone, hammered dulcimer, organ, electronics and more. JJJJJerome speaks to Andrew Ford about the musical opportunities that speech disfluency provides, and what we can learn from the spaces and clearings between words. And we get a chromatic harmonica masterclass from m...
Dec 05, 2025•55 min
Reed and Oak - composed and performed by DOBBY, words by Cate Kennedy. One of two winning poems from our Middle of the Air competition, run in collaboration with Red Room Poetry .
Nov 29, 2025
The Arbour - composed and performed by Leah Senior, words by Giles Watson. One of two winning poems from our Middle of the Air competition, run in collaboration with Red Room Poetry .
Nov 29, 2025
In August, ABC Radio National and Red Room Poetry put out the call for Australian poets to submit new poems to be set to music by two great local musicians, DOBBY and Leah Senior. Now, to mark the end of AusMusic Month, the two winning poems, and the songs that they have become, are premiered on The Music Show. Andy talks to DOBBY, Leah, and the two winning poets Cate Kennedy and Giles Watson, as well as David Stavanger and Nicole Smede of Red Room Poetry to celebrate the alchemy of song: how mu...
Nov 29, 2025•55 min
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this program contains the voices of people who have died. As a post-war kid, Leo Sayer first heard rock & roll on Radio Luxembourg on a radio late at night. His career has taken some major swerves: he was an illustrator, a graphic designer (he worked on album covers for Bob Marley), then a blues harmonica player. Most famously though, he's a singer, songwriter, and showman. He sits down with Andrew Ford after a big run of shows...
Nov 28, 2025•55 min
Lolita Emmanuel is a creative researcher. She’s a musician, a storyteller, and an academic (moments away from finishing her Doctor of Musical Arts) and she’s part of this year’s ABC Top Five Arts residency. That's early career researchers in the arts who’ve come to Radio National to make shows about their work. Lolita is Assyrian and Armenian, and her creative practice, which forms the basis of her research, is engaged with the process of creative reassembly: building cultural resilience, streng...
Nov 22, 2025•55 min
Most people would think of Paul Grabowsky as a jazz pianist. And they wouldn't be wrong, except he's much more than that. He's a composer of film scores, orchestra works and operas, a band leader (he founded the Australian Art Orchestra) and an inveterate collaborator. Just this year, he's released three albums: a recording of standards with singer Michelle Nicolle; a duo with guzheng player Mindy Meng Wang; and, with Peter Knight, a remarkable celebration of the manikay of Ngukurr songman Danie...
Nov 21, 2025•55 min
Both Sides Now was written by Joni Mitchell in 1966, when she was just 21 years old. She wasn't the first artist to record it though - in true folk tradition, the covers began before her own version was released in 1969, and they haven't stopped since. Both Sides Now is our most covered Cover Story song so far, with over 1,700 versions in as many styles as you can think of. Including, of course, Joni's return to the song from the other side of her career in 2000 (cue Emma Thompson's single tear ...
Nov 15, 2025•55 min
Senegalese kora master Seckou Keita's relationship with the West African string instrument is delicate, thoughtful, and expansive. Through developing his own tunings, and taking his music further than the traditions of Casamance, the region of southern Senegal he's from, he's connected his instrument with jazz, classical, and other African musical traditions. He's in Australia playing a series of concerts and drops into the Music Show studio to perform live. Rowena Wise and Didirri are both succ...
Nov 14, 2025•55 min
In 1983, the Manly Ferry was making its way to circular quay and James Reyne was laying down Reckless (Don't Be So...) with his band, Australian Crawl, for their EP Semantics. Since then, the song has had a permanent place in lists of great Australian songs, in no small part due to some very different covers. Some by Australian music royalty (from Paul Kelly to John Farnham), and some from further afield (Laura Mvula singing about Aussie landmarks in her Birmingham accent). Andy's guests are Uni...
Nov 08, 2025•54 min
Martin Hayes is one of the world's most celebrated fiddle players, and a very influential figure in Irish traditional music. He draws from the musical tradition of County Clare and interprets it within a wider contemporary context, and has collaborated with an impressive slate of artists from Paul Simon to Yo Yo Ma. A longtime friend of the Music Show, Martin Hayes speaks with Andy ahead of his 2026 Australian tour. Piotr Anderszewski is a famously exacting pianist from Poland who only performs ...
Nov 07, 2025•54 min
Time After Time was a last minute addition to Cyndi Lauper's debut album She's So Unusual in 1983 - a final songwriting session between Lauper and Rob Hyman filling a gap on the tracklist. Since then, it's been through the wringer with not one but two versions recorded for MacDonald's ads, turn-of-the-millennium EDM, and a turn by Miles Davis ("the most honoured I ever felt" - Cyndi Lauper; "he could have farted it and she'd still have loved it" - Andrew Ford). Andy's guests are Iain Grandage an...
Nov 01, 2025•54 min
All kinds of music and all kinds of musicians in conversation with Andrew Ford.
Oct 31, 2025•54 min
