31-05-2025
Bush Gothic on the fine line between pleasure and pain, and director Netia Jones on Purcell's wild semi-opera The Fairy Queen
Bush Gothic are 'unafraid of Australian songs'. From colonial-era folk songs to the Divinyls, their latest album What Pop People Folk This Popular is a showcase of what the band does best: dreamy, detailed, genre-bending music in conversation with Australian musical history. Jenny M Thomas and Dan Witton join Andy.
Netia Jones is an English opera director and she's in Sydney to take on Henry Purcell's odd but beautiful 'Restoration Spectacular' The Fairy Queen for Pinchgut Opera. Under rain on a tin roof of the rehearsal room, she and Andy sit to talk about the peculiarities of the piece, and of English language opera.
Bush Gothic are on tour:
7 – 8 June National Celtic Festival, Portarlington
13 June Ararat Town Hall, Ararat
14 June Wheatsheaf Hotel, Adelaide
21 June Fitzroy Town Hall, Naarm/Melbourne
22 June Northern Arts Hotel, Castlemaine
27 – 29 June Festival of Voices, nipaluna/Hobart
Pinchgut Opera presents The Fairy Queen:
7 – 14 June at the Roslyn Packer Theatre in Sydney.
Music heard in the interview with Bush Gothic:
Title: Girls in Our Town
Artist: Margret RoadKnight
Composer: Bob Hudson
Album: Margaret RoadKnight
Label: Infinity
Title: Girls in Our Town
Artist: Bush Gothic
Composer: Bob Hudson
Album: What Pop People Folk This Popular
Label: Fydle Records
Title: Adeline
Artist: Bush Gothic
Composer: Gus Unger-Hamilton, Hans Zimmer, Joe Newman, Thom Green
Album: What Pop People Folk This Popular
Label: Fydle Records
Title: Wreck of the Dandenong
Artist: Bush Gothic
Composer: trad.
Album: What Pop People Folk This Popular
Label: Fydle Records
Title: Pleasure and Pain
Artist: Bush Gothic
Composer: Holly Knight, Mike Chapman
Album: What Pop People Folk This Popular
Label: Fydle Records
Title: Freedom on the Wallaby
Artist: Bush Gothic
Composer: trad. after the poem by Henry Lawson
Album: What Pop People Folk This Popular
Label: Fydle Records
In the interview with Netia Jones:
Title: 'O Let Me Weep' (The Plaint), from The Fairy Queen
Artist: Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Gabrieli Consort/Paul McCreesh
Composer: Henry Purcell
Album: The Fairy Queen 1692
Label: Signum Classics
Title: I know a bank… from A Midsummer Night's Dream
Artist: Alfred Deller (Oberon), London Symphony Orchestra/Benjamin Britten
Composer: Benjamin Britten, libretto Peter Pears after Shakespeare
Album: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Label: Decca
The Music Show was made on Gadigal, Gundungurra and Turrbal Yuggera Country
Technical production by Dylan Prins
