Everything Flows

Music may be the universal language but when veteran actor and musician John Waters first moved to Australia he found his love of music wasn't always helpful in making new friends. “I know that the Australians who were into music like I was had a little a bit of jealousy that I grew up in South West London which had this massive music scene,” Waters says. “I saw The Rolling Stones live and I was directly affected by the Beatles.

“England was radically changed by the Beatles. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that. There was a complete sociological change in the '60s. The Beatles weren't the only ones in it but they were a big part of it. I think the fact you can now come from Liverpool or Huddersfield and you can appear as a BBC newsreader or someone who has intellectual credibility is because those prejudices were done away by the Beatles.”

The Beatles and John Lennon, in particular, are a topic than John Waters had been exploring for over 20 years when he first started performing Looking Through A Glass Onion, a show using Lennon's music to explore his enigmatic and endlessly fascinating life. Waters says he's still learning about the man behind the myth. “More and more seems to emerge with every new documentary or piece of writing that comes out,” Waters says. “I saw something recently on ABC [Rock 'N' Roll Exposed: The Photography Of Bob Gruen] that was about one of the photographers that worked a lot with Lennon and Yoko [Ono] in New York. Lennon emerges as a far gentler character, certainly during those years. The thing was he was sarcastic, arrogant and violent. There was a lot of anger inside him as a lot of children who are deserted at the age of three or four tend to have so being that complex and having that complex a past there are so many facets to John Lennon that there's always plenty more to learn.”

It's the many facets of Lennon's personality that Waters says keeps his performance fresh after all these years. “I carry certain thoughts with me onto the stage and I'll do an aggressive show one night and a slightly mellower show one night. It's what I love about the show. It is a fluctuating thing even though it's the same material and the same script that I follow every night. Live performance is such a magic thing in ways that are hard to pin down.

“I'm really looking forward to getting back to doing it this time because these songs were written with an acoustic guitar or a piano and that's what we do now onstage. We don't have a full band. We do it the way it was intended it to be and our audiences are hearing the lyrics a lot better for the first time. I have this feeling that this latest incarnation which is a return to the original, we've got a lot more satisfaction yet to get from it.”