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 partnership between ABC Radio National and Red Room Poetry. It's a poetry competition called Middle of the Air, where two lucky poets will have their winning poems set to music and recorded by DOBBY and Leah Senior. Entries open 1 August. Find more details here. You can register for a free lyric writing workshop with Leah Senior and DOBBY on 6 August here.And we remember Black Sabbath's enigmatic frontman Ozzy Osbourne, who died this week at the age of 76. Joel Silbersher is our guide - he’s a Melbourne-based guitarist and a songwriter, playing across a bunch of different bands since the 1980s including GOD, Hoss and with Tex Perkins. Joel explains, while not a great lyric writer, Ozzy was a "genius melodist", and Black Sabbath's influence on rock, metal and alternative music cannot be overstated.
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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 sense of his varied career.Michael's memoir Never Miss A Beat is out now via Ashwood Publishing.
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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 House's most famous album, but for Barnaby Smith, it's their best. Recorded in the wild reaches of Karekare Beach in Aotearoa New Zealand, its sound and stories emerge directly from that place. Barnaby, who is the writer of 33 1/3: Together Alone, travelled to Karekare to absorb the atmosphere that precipitated the album joins Andy to make the case for this album in the output of one of Australasia's most successful bands.
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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 Fellow Katie Yap's prize project Multitudes has seen Katie improvising, composing and performing with four unique collaborators. Ahead of its latest performances in Brisbane, a chance to hear this conversation with Katie about how birds, poetry and collaboration have informed her work.
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Midge Ure on punk, pop and Ultravox and Nina Korbe on opera and advocacy
Midge Ure is a musical chameleon, his career having taken him from boy band, Slik (stable mates of the Bay City Rollers), to punk band, Rich Kids (with ex-Sex Pistol, Glen Matlock), to singer, guitarist and keyboard player with Ultravox, penning one of the great New Romantic anthems, “Vienna”. For the past thirty years he’s been a solo artist with an ever-evolving songbook and later this year he’s bringing it to Australia. He talks to Andy about his varied career and why Ultravox was never really synth pop – not when their biggest hit contained a viola solo.Nina Korbe is Koa, Kuku Yalanji, and Wakka Wakka singer and broadcaster. She joins Andy to talk about her operatic and music theatre career on the rise, and her advocacy work introducing kids from her family's traditional lands to orchestral performance.
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