Taking a popular radio show and podcast to a television format was never going to be easy, but Zan Rowe and the Take 5 team were up to the challenge.
The result is five episodes featuring famous faces, each sharing soundtracks to their lives based on themes like ‘identity’ and ‘breakthrough’ – and although she has been hosting the series on radio for over 15 years, even Rowe was surprised by some of the results.
“I was really surprised when I was sitting down with Keith Urban,” she tells Variety. “He has done so many interviews where he’s been asked about his addiction, and I didn’t want it to be the same as every other interview, because I thought this is an opportunity to his musicality and his passion and his curiosity, but he took it there, and I was kind of like, ‘Oh, he’s going there,’ so we talked about it.”
The episode featuring Missy Higgins also showed a particularly vulnerable side to the singer, when she was triggered by a Colin Hay song. Rowe says it is those moments that make the crew on set especially important.
“I just think that the energy of the people you work with does inhabit a space,” she says. “Particularly with some of the conversations we were having, that needed to be a really respectful and trusting space as well.”
The crew worked hard to maintain the intimacy and warmth of the program as it transitioned to the screen.
“I really wanted to make sure we honour and stay true to what we’ve been doing on radio and in the podcast for 15 years, where people feel like they’re listening to a conversation between friends and they’re part of that,” Rowe explains. “We worked hard to do that in the way we shot it, close up with moving cameras; in warm rooms and music spaces like the music room at HER bar or Bakehouse in Melbourne, or recording studios in Nashville and Los Angeles and the places we chose.”
The final episode of the first series airs tonight (October 18), and features Tori Amos, who emerged in the ’90s grunge rock era like a breath of fresh air.
Filmed in Los Angeles at the end of her massive North American tour, Amos explores the theme of ‘breakthrough’ through her five chosen songs, sharing her experiences of being a woman in the music industry as well as some brutal personal truths.
“These conversations around what it is to be a woman in music, and a woman who continues to make music into her 50s – that is something that unfortunately is getting rarer and rarer,” Rowe says. “Tori has continued to make music and do things her own way as a really unique and iconic artist, but that’s a feat in itself in the music industry, and in the conversation we have you just see that she’s constantly come up against these barriers in her life – whether they’re ones she’s had herself or that other people have created – and she’s continued to push through them.”