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.