“I’M not at the sprinting age any more, I’m at the cruising age,” rock singer Glenn Shorrock tells “CityNews” by phone from Sydney, where he’s lived for 36 years.

Water, he says, suits him well and he’s watching the maritime traffic from his harbourside home even as we speak.

“Cruise ships are all the go these days,” he notes, and there are upward of 300 a year coming through Sydney Harbour.

“I do quite a bit of my work on those boats, I have a strong affinity with ocean liners – you know, I came to this country as a boy on an ocean liner,” says the English-born singer, who emigrated with his family to SA as a 10-year-old in 1954.

In his heyday, he knew the highways of Australia and the US inside-out, but roads trips are a thing of the past and he prefers short tours, like the one that will bring him to the Vikings Auditorium on September 2, where he can assemble a band from musos in Sydney and Melbourne, friends and colleagues who’ve worked with him for the past 25 years.

Twenty five years is nothing to Shorrock, who grew up in the northern Adelaide city of Elizabeth and made his performance debut in 1958 miming to Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up”.

He went on to a luminous career spanning Australia, England and the US, composing and performing as lead singer with The Twilights, Axiom, Esperanto, Birtles Shorrock Goble and, most famously, the Little River Band.

One of Australia’s most successful bands, LRB was the first to achieve major commercial success in the US. Shorrock wrote hits for them including “Emma”, “Help Is on Its Way” and “Cool Change”, the latter named by APRA as one of the Top 30 Australian songs of all time.

Road travel, he says, is “part of a showman’s life… but I don’t embark on any major long tours anymore.”

In the LRB period, for economic reasons, they had to stay “out there, while American bands could go to their homes”. They were stuck on the road constantly for a seven-year period.

Shorrock finds it hard to comprehend that he is now 72 years of age, saying: “The business I’ve been in all my life has kept me reasonably immature.

“And I still like to work in America… after all, the Americans invented pop music and we just copied them.”

Another thing, American audiences are responsive. “Australians think it’s uncool to be demonstrative,” he says.

Nonetheless, he enjoys Australian audiences, saying: “I have been heckled by some great people.”

Unlike Bob Dylan, who he describes as “the biggest enigma we have produced”, he connects with his audiences. He sees Dylan as “a square peg in a round hole… he doesn’t get along with audiences and it seems normal.”

Shorrock has written about this phenomenon in a recent song called “The Emperor’s Clothes”.

He’s still actively writing music and has a lot of his own new compositions on his new solo album, “Rise Again”.

“I hope it’s not ignored, but people want to hear all the old tunes – I suppose that’s my job and I’m lucky enough to have a body of work to perform each night with songs that mean something to people,” he says. Shorrock is known to be a great fan of the late Bobby Darin and still performs the hit song “Dream Lover”.

He’s sure David Campbell will be good as Darin in the new musical of that name soon opening in Sydney, but wishes he were young enough to play that role.

He’s happy enough to trade in nostalgia, Shorrock says, “until I break the ceiling.”

Glenn Shorrock, the Auditorium, Erindale Vikings, Friday, September 2. Bookings to ticketek.com or 6121 2131.