George Palmer

And my mate said, look, you should go to the ABC because in their downtime they let out their recording studios quite cheaply.

That was a good idea, I thought, so we got together some fine musicians and we went into the recording studio at the ABC Studios in Ultimo.

And the sound engineer, ABC sound engineer, who was assigned to this crazy little project, was the chief engineer for the classical department and it's a wonderful man called Yossi Gabbay.

And so Yossi did the recording and so on.

And then, unbeknown to me, he went later and he spoke to some people in the ABC and said, you should listen to this weird guy.

He said, it's not bad.

You should actually listen to this judge who writes music.

And so...

They listened and it came together and the ABC said this would make a good Australian story.

I did think very, very seriously about it because at that stage I was a judge of the court and it's not a good look if, you know, one of the judges has got egg all over his face and people burst out laughing every time they come into his courtroom.

So I went and asked the Chief Justice, James Spiegelman.

And I said, look, this proposal has been put to me.

It's the public profile of judges is a matter of importance to the court.

So what do you think?

He said, go for it.

Absolutely go for it.

So I did.

I took the risk.

I had no idea whether it would be a disaster or a success.

Fortunately, it was the latter.