John Waters revisits music of John Lennon in Looking Through a Glass Onion

Leading man John Waters. Source: Supplied

As well as singing folk songs in coffee shops, he delivered fruit and vegetables to make ends meet. Among his customers was a place that captured his imagination - Cloudland.

"It was a beautiful, powder-blue structure perched on top of a hill and it was flood-lit," he says from his Sydney home. "I saw teenagers going into a debutante's ball and I wanted to be one of them."

He recalls pretty girls with long white gloves, young men in tuxedos and Cadillac de Villes with white wall tires.

The image of this "palace of dreams" was the inspiration behind his album of original material, Cloudland, which will be released shortly.

Waters may be better known for acting in TV shows such as All Saints and Offspring, and film roles such as Breaker Morant, but music is his first love.

Since 1991, he has been refining a show Looking Through a Glass Onion, inspired by the music, mystery and memories of John Lennon. Waters returns to Brisbane on January 29 to perform the show at QPAC.

Waters developed an affection for Lennon later in life. When he was growing up in swinging London, "the Beatles were a famous band at the time, but no more than that".

"As a teenager, I had played in a band in London (The Riots) and I was more into the Blues." It wasn't until 10 years after Lennon's death "that I realised how much I missed him", he says.

"Of all the Beatles, Lennon was the most wickedly, satirically funny. He had this slightly bent attitude that came out in his lyric writing . . . Many people had come to ridicule him, and his activities with Yoko, but I wasn't one of them. He wanted to talk about peace and he had his own way of doing that."

Rather than being a tribute show, in Looking Through a Glass Onion, Waters has chosen his favourite songs from the Beatles catalogue, such as A Day in The Life, Strawberry Fields Forever and Revolution, and crafted them into a series of impressions evoking the spirit of Lennon.

"One of the most important things he did for us as performer is to have honesty in your professional career. He worked on himself in public  - he screamed about the loss of his mother in a song; espoused his love for his unconventional lover, and talked about cheating on his wife. He was startlingly unconventional, which made him a performer whose work would resound for generations to come.

"With the song Isolation, it is about being in a sphere of our own  the way two-year-olds are the centre of their own universe. In a way we never escape that. I think it was something Lennon felt very deeply."

From an early age, Waters was determined to forge his own path. Born in 1948, he was the middle of five children of Scottish character actor, Russell Waters.

"He enthused us with a sense of egalitarianism and he detested bigotry," Waters says.

In 1969, Waters emigrated to Queensland as a "ten pound Pom". He had the name of a manager of outback properties scrawled on a piece of paper, courtesy of his Uncle Tom, who had been a bookkeeper for the man.

"Three weeks after I left snowy London, I stepped out of a train in Longreach and it was 40C," says Waters. "It was an incredible culture shock."

He tried working as a station hand, but found shooting bogged sheep too difficult. "I couldn't really do it, so I drove around pretending I couldn't find any sheep."

Instead he headed for Brisbane and later Sydney. "Then I gatecrashed my way into a movie (Adam's Woman) being made on the south coast of NSW."

The actor Philip Lacock had worked with Water's father in 1950s, and offered Waters a job as a gopher on set.

"Through that I met the actors. We hung out and sang songs around the campfire."

Actor Helen Morse told him producer Jim Sharman was holding auditions for the musical Hair, so he tried out for it.

"I had no acting training, and getting into Hair was my first experience of being on a stage and talking. "I was given role of Claude, after first guy who played it couldn't do eight shows a week. It was a genuinely anarchistic experience . . . We weren't pretending to be stoned  we took a lot of pot and LSD and lived the life."

After working on the show for two years, Waters returned to England along with his wife and young child.

"I landed back in southwest London, thinking what the hell am I doing here? I found myself rather depressed and after six months, felt compelled to fight my way back to Australia."

When he returned, Waters did "esoteric musical" Lassiter, by Reg Livermore, with Old Tote theatre company. A succession of roles followed including Judas in Godspell, the movies End Play and Breaker Morant as well as lots of television work in Homicide, Division 4, Matlock Police and Certain Women.

One of his most memorable roles was as the lead in the ABC series Rush. "It was fantastic . . . There I was riding a horse and drinking; a moody, rebellious kind of guy. There is something in me that makes me good at playing those roles."

Yet Waters was also one of the longest-running presenters on the ABC's Playschool.

"I remember being with a girlfriend in Brisbane, walking along the street, when a five-year-old boy shot his (toy) gun at me," he says. Waters staggered and collapsed, to the horror of passers-by.

"I spontaneously react to the imagination of children  I like to inhabit that world. Being a performer is finding the child within you. After all, we are playing a highly structured game."

In 1988, Waters won an AFI award for best actor for Boulevard of Broken Dreams. More recently, it's his role in Channel 10's Offspring that has drawn attention.

Despite his love of acting, "I wanted to go back to my roots as someone who played and sang in bands and Looking Through a Glass Onion was an ideal vehicle," he says. "The idea was that I would never dress up, or directly play John Lennon. I wanted to be palpably me, no costume orround glasses, but to give a sense of John Lennon."

Judging from the reaction of critics, Waters succeeds admirably.

"Recently there were two 16-year-olds in the audience, who knew all the lyrics to I am the Walrus. Not only is it not their parents' generation's music, it is probably their grandparents'. They were absolutely thirsty for knowledge, so hopefully I filled in a few gaps."

John Waters in Looking Through a Glass Onion, January 29, Queensland Performing Arts Centre. www.qpac.com.au or 136 246 to book.