Interview: July 10

Guests tonight on Interview are Melbourne Cup winning jockey Michelle Pain and musos Neil & Liam Finn.

Michelle Payne
Michelle Payne’s story is etched in Australian history. She rode into our hearts as the first woman to win the Melbourne Cup, then followed the win with a rousing speech calling out sexism in racing. Now the jockey sits down with Andrew Denton (who treats her to a memorable thoroughbred impression) and reflects on her upbringing as one of ten siblings, a relationship with her tough-love father, leaving for the big city at age 16 and why she describes her family as “a cross between a protective tribe and Lord of the Flies”.

The 32-year-old also describes in excruciating detail the dangers involved in racing, recounting a number of her near-death experiences on the track, falls which left her with bleeding and bruising to her brain, a dislocated ankle, twelve fractured vertebrae and a severed pancreas.

Neil & Liam Finn
It’s a family affair. The former front man of Split Enz and current front man of Crowded House has joined creative forces with his son on a new album, Lightsleeper, to be released in August. The playful duo offers insights on life in the Finn household, including how they came to wrestle in their underpants and which does the better Michael Jackson impersonation.

Neil lets the audience in on his creative process and confirms that great song writing ideas are sometimes devastatingly simple (he wrote Crowded House’s Better Be Home Soon in only 20 minutes) and at other time painfully difficult (Fall At Your Feet took two years and sometimes he feels that “I don’t have a musical bone in my body”).

Neil also gives previously unheard details of his surprise recruitment by Fleetwood Mac, recalling the conversation in which Mick Fleetwood asked him to join the iconic band and his first experiences jamming with them.

8:45pm Tuesday on Seven.