Michael Smith, Journalist

This isn’t a reunion, the guys from Heaven insist, it’s a reformation – and they’re hungry and cocky enough to make it happen, Michael Smith discovers.

Whatever Hansard sings his total commitment to the song is inescapable and thoroughly endearing, deeply human and deeply feeling.

A divine voice and an ability to write great songs without really trying has put Australian in New York Nadia Ackerman in a great place, though it didn’t happen overnight, as Michael Smith discovers.

An unexpected delay in recording the album he’d intended gave Hugo Race the chance to explore his favourite love songs, he tells Michael Smith.

It’s taken a while but Moroccan-born, Melbourne-based jazz guitarist Albert Dadon – who performs as Albare – has finally recorded a truly international album. Michael Smith discovers how it came about.

Two-man guitar and drum attack Jackson Firebird took their sweet time getting there, but as guitarist Brendan Harvey tells Michael Smith, it’s all good.

From bad things, if you’re lucky, come good things. Thankfully for Perth’s Blanche DuBois, it produced a third album that might never have been, as Michael Smith finds out from vocalist Adriana Begovich.

“The Mysterious Lady is fulfilling all those fantasies and desires of many women around the world," says Parvyn Kaur Singh of her role in The Bombay Royale.

Michael Smith catches up with Fiona Horne of Sydney electro-metal masters Def Fx.

It’s all there – death, sex, aliens, a 40-foot rooster, the Apocalypse – what more could you want from a combo like Flap! that draws its inspiration from influences as disparate as the jazz of the 1920s and the calypso of Trinidad, with healthy doses of English folk, gypsy brass and indie pop thrown in? Michael Smith finds out.

Growing up with his parents’ record collection guaranteed the American punk of his teens wouldn’t factor in the music one young New Zealander would make with his eponymous five-piece The Thomas Oliver Band, as Michael Smith discovers from Thomas Oliver.