When John Waters takes the stage at The Street Theatre alongside Stewart D’Arrietta and band in Radio Luxembourg, he’ll be very familiar to Canberra audiences.

We last saw him here in the mystery play The Woman In Black in July, but he’s much more famous with Canberra audiences for his John Lennon interpretation, Looking Through A Glass Onion. When I catch up with him by phone, I find he’s on a very different path.

“Radio Luxembourg is quite unlike Glass Onion, which was a very tightly scripted show with me in a role, just me as John Lennon talking to the audience between the songs,” Waters tells me.

“It’s nice to be fluid now, this show is nice and free-flowing.”

In it, Waters takes audiences on a journey through the British Pop Invasion, recounting personal anecdotes and the music that inspired him when he was young.

“I was born in 1948,” he says, “I turned 12 in 1960 and this is the music of my teen years and my young adulthood, it’s my music.”

It was a transitional era though, and he can still recall the sounds from his childhood years, such as Frank Sinatra singing Love and Marriage.

“Rock ‘n’ roll brought black American music to white kids with a bit of swing and became a new form of music that teenagers before that era didn’t have,” he says, reflecting that although some say teenagers are a modern invention, “people always had to go through that age”.

Considering that in previous eras there were arranged marriages at 13 years of age and other forms of oppression that were stealing teenage years from young people, he views it as a special time “a transitional period, a kind of a postponed entry into adulthood”.

“I lived through the rock revolution of the 1960s as a teenager when the BBC wouldn’t play our pop and rock ‘n’ roll music, saying it was contrary to their brief,” he says.

But since recording companies needed to sell their product, Waters notes, it was time for something new and that was Radio Luxembourg.

It was already around from 1933 but later, with the most powerful privately owned transmitter in Europe provided a way to circumvent the legislation which gave the BBC a monopoly on radio broadcasting, and garnered huge audiences in the 1950s and 1960s, becoming a forerunner of pirate radio and modern commercial radio.

Bands that played on Radio Luxembourg included The Who, The Kinks, The Bee Gees, Thunderclap Newman and The Small Faces, but also it was the go-to place to hear The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and The Beach Boys.

“It really made a huge mark on the music scene of the time,” Waters says.

“We started out with a small season, touring this show, devised with Stuart with the idea of appealing to the baby boomer audiences.

To perform all the great hits, they needed a great band, so Waters and D’Arrietta put together a six-piece band of Sydney’s best musos that they say sounds more like a 10- or 12-piece band – “not your local down at the pub kind of players at all”.

“I put together a sort of playlist for the baby boomers, but it’s not just for them, there’s a new generation who want to hear that music,” he says.

“I sing most of the songs, but the others give me a break as well. It’s a lot of fun and we sign records and talk to the audience afterwards.”

Waters doesn’t only perform in gigs, he has a thriving theatrical and film career and last year played Michael Parkinson in the Robbie Williams biopic, Better Man.

“That’s more notable for the fact that Robbie Williams is played as a CGI chimp, but I knew Parky personally and have been on stage often with him, so it was a pleasure to be asked to play the role. He was a warm, lovely human being.”

Radio Luxembourg, The Street Theatre, February 28 and March 1.