So what was it that attracted you to music?

I don’t come from a very musical family but my mum played piano a little bit and she definitely encouraged me. We had a piano in the house, and me and my sister would toy around on it. I remember she would play the left hand of pieces and I would play the right. I think I was quite a lonely kid, and the piano was just another universe. I see kids nowadays on the internet, and I wonder if that’s the same impulse.

Do you remember when you first heard a harpsichord?

It was in my early teens. At the stage I was a voracious consumer of ABC Classic FM who had a programme listing called 24 Hours which I subscribed to. I had this tape recorder that I could programme, so often late at night I’d record these amazing works. I had all these curated cassettes of this weird repertoire because I was fascinated by the 18th century. I don’t know exactly when that started, but it may have come from my thing for Australian history and the first fleet. Around eight or nine I discovered that the piano wasn’t around...