THE name Deborah Conway sounds quintessentially Irish, so you’d think the dark-eyed, dramatic good looks of the famous rock singer, ARIA-winning songwriter, festival director and actor are very much a case of “when Irish eyes are smiling”.

But there’s not a drop of Hibernian blood running in her veins. Her mother is of mixed Sephardi-Ashkenazi-Portuguese extraction and her dad is descended from Russian Jews.

“My father changed his Jewish name from ‘Cohen’ when he was in a Melbourne law practice during the 1950s and found racism everywhere,” Conway tells “CityNews”.

“I wanted to change my name a long time ago but my agent wasn’t happy,” she adds.

Conway has, since the ’80s, become known as a pop and rock singer with a social, feminist  conscience, performing everything from her own work to the songs of Patsy Cline, but recent years have seen a change in direction.

This change began after she and her partner Willy Zygier found themselves performing at a Jewish music festival in 2012. Afterwards, when laying down their 2013 album “Stories of Ghosts”, they added Jewish elements, including lines taken from the Haggadah, recited at the Jewish Passover.

“This music meant something to us, it was really cathartic, and we had lost a lot of people close to us at that time and felt we needed to work through that with something deep,” she says.

Their new album is “Everybody’s Begging”, which is “a little bit more toe-tapping and more accessible”. In it they “comment” on other singers such as Joni Mitchell, Paul Kelly, Leonard Cohen, Louis Armstrong, Nick Cave and David Bowie.

Canberra audiences will soon have the chance to enjoy a concert, backed by a full band, comprising Niko Schauble, Clio Renner and Simon Starr, to help launch the new album.

Conway and Zygier plan to perform all the songs from “Everybody’s Begging” and her seminal 1991 album “String of Pearls”.

They used always to perform at Tilley’s, “but now that they don’t do musical shows, we looked around and the Film and Sound Archive leapt at it.”

You can bet many Canberrans will do the same.

“Conway and Zygier: the Beginning and the Begging”, Arc Cinema, National Film and Sound Archive, 7pm, September 16, bookings to nfsa.gov.au