Wooed off grunge by Maurizio Pollini, now the Adelaide Festival chief loves all sorts of music, preferably unfiltered by labels.

There’s a song by The Lemonheads that makes me laugh. It’s called I Lied About Being the Outdoor Type:

I can’t go away with you on a rock climbing weekend
What if something’s on TV and it’s never shown again
It’s just as well I’m not invited I’m afraid of heights
I lied about being the outdoor type.

I thought about it the other day when my partner, composer Alan John, reminded me how I professed a deep affection for the music of Handel when we were dating. To be fair, I had recently enjoyed OA’s Giulio Cesare, but works of the Baroque master didn’t feature prominently in my CD collection. The Pixies, Hole and grunge faves from my early 20s nestled up against ‘80s kitsch while a few classics (budget issues of the Goldberg Variations and Rach 3) were wedged uncomfortably in there like pensioners inadvertently stuck on a crowded train to the Big Day Out.

I confessed to the lie eventually of course. It was sometime around the birth of the first of our three children and he received...