not The Sopranos<\/a>) and singing karaoke in Japan, and why Camille was the perfect soundtrack to a jog through Nice.<\/p>\nA Mongolian revelation<\/p>\n
One unexpected story came from her time in Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar. Not the first place you’d imagine a young Aussie woman moving to.<\/p>\n
“I was working in Brisbane at an accounting firm as a bid and tender writer,” she explains.<\/p>\n
“It is probably one of the most boring jobs you can ever do in your life. I was so bored that I applied for this job at work to go to Mongolia.<\/p>\n
She applied for a role as a journalist trainer as part of the Australian Volunteers for International Development.<\/p>\n
“I got the job, I think because nobody else was applying for these jobs in Mongolia, and it turned out to be one of the best years of my life,” she says.<\/p>\n
“Did I know anything about Mongolia? Not at all. I had to look up the weather, what language they spoke, and where it was,” she laughs.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t without its challenges \u2014 “there were blocks of the year where we didn’t have hot water” \u2014 but for a woman who loves an escapade, it was perfect.<\/p>\n
“Every weekend we were on an adventure,” she says.<\/p>\n
“We were going horse riding. We’d go out to a family that someone knew, you’d get a driver and they’d drive you out there. You might have to stop halfway to get a sheep out of the boot or something like that.<\/p>\n
Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n
“It was stunning. It was flat with very beautiful rivers, streams, snow-capped mountains. Cold, cold, cold: like, minus 40 in the winter.<\/p>\n
“Didn’t stop us going out, though. A lot of vodka was drunk. Everyone drinks vodka there, but it is kind of a survival thing when you’re that cold.”<\/p>\n
And it had excellent music, beyond the droning Tuvan throat singing that it’s most known for.<\/p>\n
While not a huge amount of Mongolian pop music makes its way to Australia, that doesn’t mean it’s not out there.<\/p>\n
“Mongolian music history is really interesting,” Hoo says.<\/p>\n
“Of course, you’ve got the throat singing and the traditional music, but you’ve also got this modern era.<\/p>\n
“They were cut off from the world for so long and then opened up to the world in the 90s. So their modern music has a real 90s vibe. It’s real grungy. It’s very familiar, but with Mongolian language.<\/p>\n
“They’re big rappers. An Aussie made this [film] called Mongolian Bling, it’s a documentary about the Mongolian rap scene.<\/p>\n
“It’s such a guttural language. Like, it comes from the throat. It was very hard to learn, but it really sounds good in rap.”<\/p>\n
But it wasn’t a rapper that Hoo fell in love with in Mongolia. Instead, there was a rock band that she’d grown so fond of that she was happy to ditch an indie rock legend to go and see them play.<\/p>\n
“They have this music festival called Playtime, it’s kind of on the river. It was one of the best festivals,” she says.<\/p>\n
“Peter Hook was headlining, but we didn’t see him, because our favourite Mongolian band was playing.”<\/p>\n
![\"Four](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/c1cb4c256bd388f2e05186fbcb2e1be8.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
The Lemons are one of Mongolia’s most revered indie rock bands. (Soundcloud)<\/p>\n
That band was The Lemons, an indie rock band that formed in the early 2000s and are still going strong today. In her Take 5, Lizzy chose their song Monad<\/a>, from their third album.<\/p>\n“The Lemons soundtracked our time there, because you get into the local music and everything,” she says.<\/p>\n
“I chose this particular song because it’s like so spacious and it’s big and that is what Mongolia is.<\/p>\n
“I want you to imagine yourself riding a horse along the steppe. There’s a few eagles flying above you. There’s streams nearby. Just think of the spaciousness of the wide-open country.<\/p>\n
“I just really love their music. I don’t know what they’re saying. I really love it.”<\/p>\n
Catch Take 5 on ABC listen, or wherever you get your podcasts.<\/p>\n
Lizzy Hoo’s new show Says Hoo? is touring now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australian comedian Lizzy Hoo loves an adventure, a trait she reckons she inherited from her mum, who left…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,23322,134,272172,272173,272174,272175,272176,130240],"class_list":{"0":"post-550119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-djfrontpage","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-lizzy-hoo","13":"tag-lizzy-hoo-comedian","14":"tag-lizzy-hoo-comedy-festival","15":"tag-lizzy-hoo-parents","16":"tag-lizzy-hoo-take-5","17":"tag-zan-rowe-take-5"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}