Taste Test Peter Combe

THE FIRST ALBUM I BOUGHT
WITH MY OWN MONEY
It was probably a Peter, Paul & Mary album. I adored it. It was when I really fell in love with Peter, Paul & Mary as a folk group. But my parents bought me two albums when I was about 11 or 12 by a group called The Springfields, and they were famous for producing Dusty Springfield, but also Tom Springfield, who was a very good songwriter.

THE ALBUM I'M LOVING RIGHT NOW
I'm loving [Katie Noonan's band] Elixir. I heard Katie at the National Folk Festival in Canberra back in April, and I hadn't done the folk festival before, so I thought she was just extraordinarily brilliant. Her voice is like an angel.

MY FAVOURITE COMEDOWN ALBUM
I love Bob Dylan's Time And Theft, which came out about six years ago, but I haven't heard the new one, Tempest, yet. I'm a bit of a Bob Dylan fan. He's had the weird kind of voice his whole life; it's now a bit weirder and lower, but in his own funny way he still sings quite well. I actually like him as a singer. Traditional wisdom is that Bob Dylan can't sing and Bob Dylan always sings out of tune… there's no logic to this, but for some reason I quite like them. I think he's a good singer.

THE MOST SURPRISING RECORD
IN MY COLLECTION
There's one by the Comedian Harmonists. They were a group of singers who became really famous in Germany in the Second World War; my parents introduced me to them. They raved about them! Two of the group were Jews, and they left Germany because they had a premonition of what was going on… and they just sang these gorgeous harmonies. There's a film about them, called Comedian Harmonists. It's a really interesting film. Now, probably almost no one would probably even know who they are but they had this guy who played an almost Chico Marx piano style; it's quite unique, but very light touch, but he also had this amazingly light tenor voice, it was just gorgeous. Together they sang these light, fluffy four-part harmony songs and they were gorgeous. I think they were quite uplifting to the war effort. I think people would be very surprised to find that one.

THE FIRST GIG I EVER ATTENDED
I would have been 11 or 12 years old. It might have been a Roy Orbison concert, and it was actually quite good! I've got a lot of respect for him. He's got an amazing voice. It's utterly unique. That's the one that springs to mind… I would have been about 12, and I think I went by myself. And it's quite funny actually, the lady who's my wife, Carol, she went with my best friend. And that was before we became boyfriend and girlfriend. I think he thought he was on to a good thing there, but I knew it was never going to happen between him and her.

THE COOLEST PERSON I'VE EVER MET
That's dead easy: Sir George Martin, the Beatles producer. It is one of the greatest moments of my life. Well, in 1989, I won an ARIA for Newspaper Mama – it was my second ARIA – and it was the year that Kylie Minogue broke as a major Australian phenomenon. And there was a winners' room, so everyone went back there and Kylie hadn't won anything, but was standing around. The journalists were like bees to honey, going to her and talking to her. But the same evening George Martin had been the keynote speaker – and this is the guy who wrote the string arrangement for Yesterday, discovered The Beatles, who produced all their albums… a fairly significant figure, you'd have to say. And I was sitting in this winners' room talking to no one in particular while everyone was swanning around Kylie, with George Martin about two metres away just having a cup of tea by himself! So I went over and had this long conversation with him where we spoke about how he arranged the song A Day In The Life, which is the last song on Sgt Pepper's… He explained how he did it, this ascension through all the scales with all the instruments. It was marvellous. He is a charming man. This is the guy known as the fifth Beatle.

THE BIGGEST CELEBRITY
CRUSH I'VE EVER HAD
There'd be lots of them! Lots of gorgeous girls… I used to love a young Alison Steadman. She's not a household name, but she was in the BBC's production of Pride And Prejudice, she was the lovely Mrs Bennet. I had a crush on her about 20 years before that. But what I can say categorically is that I find British girls much sexier than American girls, generally.

IF I COULD HANG OUT IN ANY TIME
AND PLACE IN HISTORY
I might have hung out in Dublin in 1442, to hear the inaugural performance of Handel's Messiah; that would have been pretty special I think. And to see the King rise to his feet and start that great tradition of rising for the chorus. I'm also really interested in the Second World War period. It would have been interesting to hang out, well, maybe not hang out but to be in Berlin to witness the rise of Nazism, and see how that happened. How an incredibly civilised country could become uncivilised in a relatively short period of time.

IF I WASN'T MAKING MUSIC
I wouldn't have minded being the world's next Roger Federer! I'm a huge fan of tennis, and growing up as a young boy you just didn't get coached the way people do now. I ended up being quite good in an amateur sense, but I would have liked to have real coaching and become really good at it. I'm a huge Roger Federer fan though. To me, he's the closest thing to a tennis artist we've ever seen.