Michael Smith, Journalist

“Technically me and Ian are useless... I can barely turn my TV on without assistance! But I’ve got an iPhone, a laptop and a guitar plugged into a practice amp – I’m the low-tech dude. My job is to supply the riffs and the melodies.”

“It’s definitely different to what we’ve put out in the past. The album’s more diverse again, so there are a few more songs softer than that and there’s even an acoustic one.”

"We’d never done a full covers album before,” Beckley admits, on the line from Dayton, Ohio, a few weeks out from their next Australian tour. “We’d, on occasion, done a cover song, so it was interesting to approach it from scratch."

Not that she’s become a roaring rock singer of course, but there’s a confidence that allows for big choruses and notes that reach out to better express the human emotion behind the lyric.

It’s a long way from Birmingham from Los Angeles, but Dave Wakeling of The English Beat has proved his dad wrong – you can make a living singing your own songs – as he tells Michael Smith.

There must have been a lot of people who were surprised to hear, back in 2000, that Midnight Oil drummer Rob Hirst had decided to add The Backsliders to his list of then-Oils side projects.

He lit the fires of popular consciousness 44 years ago covering The Doors. Now Jose Feliciano has taken on the King – Elvis Presley – as he tells Michael Smith.

"We don’t really mind if people that only want to hear heavy stuff don’t really like what we’re doing. We’ll let them go and listen to their own music. We just wanted to give the people that are into us a bit of insight into what sort of music we like."

He’s a big promoter in that part of the world and I think he had seen the figures on our tour in Australia [last year’s record-breaking Light The Nitro Tour that saw them play to more than 270,000 people] and he rang [co-manager] John Watson and said he’d like us on the bill for Friday night of the festival, which is the rock’n’roll night.”

Illumination is quite a journey.