Throw Away Cabaret: Songs about haunted hard rubbish

Do you have boxes of stuff you don’t quite know what to do with, or how to feel about? Or worse, do your parents have stuff waiting for you to make decisions about? Does this heavy stuff give you heavy feelings? And is there a song for that?

Throw Away Cabaret: Songs About Haunted Hard Rubbish is an enthusiastically nerdy cabaret debuting at the 2026 Melbourne Fringe Festival. In this weirdly wonderful one-hour show, folk musicians and urban researchers Liz and Sarah Taylor combine detailed research, podcast‑style humour, and original music to investigate the stories behind everyday objects that people throw out - or can’t.

Musical ghostbuster twins Liz and Sarah are songwriters and live performers in long-running Melbourne folk band The Taylor Project. They also both have PhDs and are not afraid to use them off-label for entertainment purposes, bringing absorbing research together with music, humour, storytelling, popular culture and personal reflection.

Throwaway Cabaret was inspired by finding interesting discarded objects, hearing common threads in conversations, and wondering about the hard rubbish and anonymous storage businesses proliferating in the background of daily life. It includes original songs based on real-life found objects like a post-divorce guitar, a 1980 station wagon, and a mysterious box of safety pins. And it makes much-needed space to delve into the social, historical, and emotional context – not to mention the class politics - of all that clutter.

Throwaway Cabaret is the debut Fringe Show for Liz and Sarah and builds on the research-podcast-musical format developed for their 2025 show, Midland Highway Revisited.

Please note that while our fabulous show is not strictly Audio Described, due to the constant podcast-style talking and music we are confident that the style of show welcomes blind and low vision audiences.