Michael O'Shea has been played on NTS over 40 times, featured on 49 episodes and was first played on 2 May 2016.

Michael O’Shea (1947-1991) was an experimental folk musician from Newry, Northern Ireland, who played a unique handmade string instrument he called “Mo Chara” (Irish for “My Friend”), loosely based on the blueprints for a North African zither. After years as an itinerant musician and busker among other odd-jobs, his unique musical style attracted the attentions of fellow musicians, culminating in a 1982 album which was his sole recording as leader. World travel informed his compositional style, particularly his study of the sitar and South Asian music generally in Bangladesh. In the period in which he was most active, O’Shea also collaborated with numerous figures from world, folk, and avant-garde music, including Ravi Shankar, Peggy Seeger, Don Cherry, The The, and Wire.

He was largely inactive musically in the second half of the 1980s, and was killed in a car accident in London in 1991 at the age of 41.