Waters brings British Pop Invasion to Bendigo

STAR of screen and stage, John Waters has said he’s having the musical time of his life, with his new show Radio Luxembourg that’s headed to Ulumbarra Theatre.

Starring Waters with Stewart D’Arrietta and six-piece outfit, The Chartbusters, Radio Luxembourg celebrates songs of the British pop invasion that changed the world of modern music forever.

Touring through multiple states, it’s coming to Bendigo on Friday 8 August.

Born in London, Waters resides in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales.

But he was in his teens and early twenties in Britain during the 1960s and considers himself one of the luckiest music lovers going, largely due to Radio Luxembourg.

“At a time when commercial radio licenses were not available in the UK, pop and rock music of the day was broadcast from continental Europe,” Waters said.

This access was courtesy of the independent principality of Luxembourg, a clever move by the British record industry to circumnavigate the laws of the day.

“The great boom in pop music, which started in the US with Elvis Presley and his contemporaries, took a quantum leap with the arrival of the British-led revolution and was opened up to me and a whole generation by that great invention, the transistor radio,” Waters said.

“We could hide under the bedclothes to muffle the sound from our parents ears, tune in to 208 on the medium waveband, and listen to Roy Orbison and Frankie Avalon, Motown and the Four Seasons and Dion.

“The list was long beyond our wildest dreams. When we no longer had to hide, The Beatles exploded onto the scene followed by so many others, and the British Invasion really began including bands like The Moody Blues, the Kinks, The Who and scores of others. This was our identity.”

The music he was absorbing influenced Waters’ own hunger to get himself a guitar and he joined a successful London-based blues band, dispensing both blues and top pop covers, before he left for Australia.

Radio Luxembourg features many still-loved hits from that ’60s era.

“It’s kind of like an FM radio playlist in many ways. I’m having the best time of my musical life at the moment because this is my music,” Waters said.

“I really hope that people come along and have the time of their life listing to a great band of musicians playing live some favourite music of the past 60 years.

“We’re playing music that goes down through the generations so we’re getting a good reaction wherever we go.

“Just about everyone in the band sings apart from the drummer, who started out as drummer for Jesus Christ Superstar in the 70s. These players are all really excellent in their own right.”

Besides fronting the band, Waters intersperses numbers with backstories, and chats with the audience between songs.

“The hardest part of Radio Luxembourg is choosing the songs not to do. The British Pop Invasion cannon is huge,” he said.

Tickets at bendigoregion.com.au.