Listen to the music

This will probably come as a surprise to her, but my mother has made an indelible mark on my music taste.

I love the crooners she favoured during my childhood: Elvis Presley, Rod Stewart (the early years) and Neil Diamond.

I grew up watching trashy Elvis movies on Saturday afternoons. I cried when he died on 16 August 1977 and cried again when I went to see “Elvis the Movie” with my mum two years later, at the little cinema that was once next to David Jones in the city. Was it the Roma, Kensington or the Lyric? I can’t remember.

When I was heavily pregnant with the eldest, I would hold my giant belly and bop around the lounge room to the remix of “A little less conversation”

Dutch DJ-producer-musician Tom Holkenborg (who records as Junkie XL), released it in 2002, taking Elvis’ little-known 1968 song and turning it into a global smash hit that reached No. 1 in more than 20 countries. 

It’s so infectiously good.

Rod Stewart was on high rotation on the tape player at our place and my dad nicknamed him “Gravel Gurdy” because of his raspy voice. “Maggie May” is still one of my all-time favourite songs.

I was a little late to the party with my affection for Neil Diamond, but his greatest hits get a regular run on my CD player these days. “Sweet Caroline” is such a fun song. And I loved seeing Hugh Jackman impersonate Neil in “Song Sung Blue”.

That said, my dad’s musical taste gets a bit of a look in too. He had a small record collection when I was growing up that featured this famed double album …

I spent many an hour staring at the Fab Four as both clean cut pop stars and shaggy ones.

And I feel incredibly fortunate to have seen Paul McCartney sing “Can’t buy me love” in 2023 at the Allianz Stadium. I saw an actual Beatle perform live!

Fast forward to 2026 and I’m beside myself to see the new Baz Luhrmann movie, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. I keep blathering excitedly to people about it and they look at me like I’m slightly insane.

But I see the shorts for it and I just melt at the sight of him – he was so charismatic.

The idea for the film was born while Baz was making the 2022 movie Elvis starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks.

He went in search of unseen footage from Elvis’s 1970s Las Vegas concert films and found it stored in an underground salt mine in Kansas.

I know that sounds like a tall tale, but it’s true.

There were 69 boxes filled with film negatives containing 59 hours worth of footage that had never been seen, plus audio recordings of Elvis talking about his creative process. Academy Award-winning director Peter Jackson brought the original footage up to quality and I am so excited to see the results.

Baz is one of the world’s most dazzling filmmakers – the “Entertain us” scene in Moulin Rouge is my all-time favourite cinematic moment.

In his director’s note, Baz describes his latest creation as not quite a documentary and not quite a concert film.

“What if Elvis came to you in a dreamscape, almost like a cinematic poem, and sang to you and told you his story in a way in which you haven’t experienced before?” he wrote.

The Hollywood Reporter says the result is “a transcendent theatrical experience, an exhilarating party, a giddying visual and sonic blitz that will be an elixir to the Elvis faithful and an unparalleled primer for those who have never quite grasped what all the hysteria was about.” 

I’m in! And I’ve talked my sister into coming along for the nostalgia ride (she watched all those Saturday arvo Elvis movies alongside me).

I’ll report back once I’ve witnessed the cinematic magic.

Which singers did your mum love when you were a kid?

Song of the day: Elvis Presley “A little less conversation”