'He's cancelled': radio host unloads on Russell Crowe

Russell Crowe

Russell Crowe took a surprising swipe at a pair of radio hosts on a rival station yesterday, prompting the target of his ire to reveal that there was even more drama happening behind the scenes.

The Kiwi actor was doing the publicity rounds in Australia yesterday to promote his new miniseries The Loudest Voice, and was due to appear on Jonesy and Amanda's WSFM show to discuss the series.

"He's cancelled. I'll tell you why — he'd only come on to talk about (The Loudest Voice) if we'd play his song," Amanda Keller revealed today.

"When's this become a thing? Is that a thing now? I didn't even know he had a new song," said Jonesy.

"He wanted us to play it — I didn't want to play it," said Keller, before playing a brief snippet of the track by Crowe's band Indoor Garden Party.

"We said we wouldn't be blackmailed this way. (The songs are) fine, but we didn't want to be blackmailed this way. He went on [rivals] Fitzy and Wippa — they agreed to play his song! Why would you?" she asked.

"No wonder they rate less than us," Jonesy quipped.

The pair also played listeners an excerpt from Crowe's interview with Fitzy and Wippa, in which an alarm at the actor's hotel had momentarily interrupted the discussion.

"This is Amanda and Jonesy trying to screw with you guys! I cancelled on them because they've got really bad taste in music, so they're just trying to get you back …" Crowe had joked.

Keller didn't mince words about the A-list actor.

"What has annoyed me about this is that this is a fantastic piece of television that he promoted. I read a really interesting Hollywood Reporter interview about it. THREE TIMES in that interview he says, 'I'm an actor, OK?'. So today, he wants to be a musician. If we want to talk about this, we have to play his music — and that's really annoyed me," she said.

"You can't say 'I'm coming on to do this' and then shoehorn the other one in. He's not on."