The Music Show

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 available. 

Lucy Sante has worked with Bob Dylan for over 25 years, but she’s never met him. Despite being a go-to writer for liner notes, speeches, press kits and prefaces, she doesn’t consider herself a dylanologist. She joins Andy to talk about the sermons she wrote to be delivered by an actor in a film project based on Dylan’s ‘Gospel Years’, which have now been published as Six Sermons for Bob Dylan, a set of ‘rollicking and clarifying exhortations’ that draw on the tradition of recorded sermons in 1920s and 30s Black churches.  

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 legacy.

Caroline Potter is the author of Pierre Boulez: Organised Delirium, published by Boydell.

Edward Campbell is the editor of the forthcoming Boulez in Context and several other Boulez books published by Cambridge University Press.

Paavali Jumppanen performs as part of ANAM’s Boulez Rules! at Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne on Friday 11 April. 

Technical production by Simon Branthwaite

The Music Show is made on Gadigal and Gundungurra Country

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 overlooked due to their age and gender, and that the emotional impact of their (relatively small) collection of songs is of lasting importance.

47SOUL are a band with members scattered between Jordan, London and the US, all sharing roots in Palestine. Responsible for pioneering the genre 'Shamstep', their music blends Dabke (Levantine folk dance) traditions with electronica, R&B and hip hop. Synthesiser player Ramzy Suleiman sat down with producer Ce Benedict to talk about how his synth can emulate the sounds of traditional instruments like the mijwiz (pipe), mijwad (bagpipes) and rebab (a bowed string instrument). He also reveals what it's like taking his group's music to the other side of the world, and why he wants people to listen, and to dance. 

47SOUL's new EP Dualism Pt. 1 is due 2 May.

Lisa MacKinney launches her book Dressed In Black: The Shangri-Las and their recorded legacy at Readings in Carlton, Melbourne on Friday 28 March.

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 The LION, Omar Musa, Barkaa, Mau Power, Wire MC, Elsy Wameyo and MC Trey, we learn about the evolution of Australian hip hop and what it tells us about class, racism and the music industry.

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 back in 1951, it wasn’t the start of a classic British criminal mystery, but rather a scientific experiment. The understanding of acoustics -- from a scientific, architectural, and musicological perspective -- accelerated throughout the 1900s, as Dr Fiona Smyth describes in her book Pistols in St. Paul’s: Science, music, and architecture in the 20th Century. She joins Andy to tell tales of the science’s development and the ‘consulting detectives’ of acoustics who drove it.

And we remember the Soviet-born composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died at the age of 93.  

Sex Pistols (with Frank Carter) are touring Australia in April playing Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Fremantle.

Dr. Fiona Smyth’s Pistols in St Paul’s: Science, music and architecture in the twentieth century is published by Manchester University Press. 

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 voodoo beliefs.

From the Paiwan tribe of southern Taiwan, Sauljaljui (戴曉君) is a songwriter and musician who plays the two-stringed yueqin (moon lute). Blending traditional folk song with contemporary sounds from around the world, her music seeks to strengthen Indigenous language, culture and the natural world.

Forming by accident when they were all early for choir practice and started jamming, five piece South African group The Joy are bringing the Zulu traditions of a cappella singing to the attention of the next generation. 

Performed live by Nana Benz du Togo:

Liberty

Tite

Performed live by Sauljaljui:

Cemavulid (Battle Song)

Dipin Kari Tang

Performed live by The Joy:

Amaqatha Amancane

Mathandana Wami

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-titled album has an incredible, totally unexpected sound that comes out of a new collaboration with Mick Turner from Dirty Three and award-winning cellist Stephanie Arnold.

Duo Ruut are two distinct voices, and four hands on one instrument. They are Ann-Lisett Rebane and Katariina Kivi, two Estonian women who play one kannel (Estonian zither) together.

Plus music from Inuk singer Elisapie and the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir.

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

Covers by:

The Byrds (1965)Billy Joel (1987)Frazey Ford (2021)Burl Ives (1968)Golden Kids - Marta Kubišová, Helena Vondráčková and Václav Neckář (1994)Bettye LaVette (2018)Timothée Chalamet (2024)Nina Simone (1969)Bob Dylan - Live at Budokan Hall, Tokyo (1979)

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 Show Jeremy Sams is Andy’s guest, to explore not only where Ravel’s music came from, but where it led. 

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 analyse the song’s wide – and wild – range of versions.

Music details:

Under the Milky WayComposed by Steve Kilbey and Karin JanssonOriginally recorded by The Church for the album Starfish (1988) on Mushroom Records

Covers by:

Emily Barker, Lukas Drinkwater, Fanny Lumdsen - Room 822 (2022)The James Valentine Quartet- The Power and the Passion (2011)George - Special Ones (2001)The Cherry Pickers - Hand Picked (2016) John Kane & Ian Simpson - Banjo Australis (2013)Strawpeople - Broadcast (1994)Jimmy Little - Messenger (1999)The Church and the George Ellis Orchestra - Live at the Sydney Opera House (2014)

Kate Fagan's latest book is Song in the Grass (Giramondo 2024), and she's doing an author event talk at Megalong Books in Leura on 5 March. 

Toby Martin's latest album is Dang Lan and Toby Martin, 'Song Khúc Lượn Bay (Two Sounds Gliding) (ABC Music). 

The Music Show is made on Gadigal and Gundungurra Country. Technical Production by Hamish Camilleri and Bethany Stewart