In 2011, Australian rock mainstay Diesel celebrated 25 years since he got his “first boot into the music industry” with his band Johnny Diesel and the Injectors.

“Last year Toby Creswell, the well known journalist and former editor of Rolling Stone, did a calculation that it was 25 years since we crossed the Nullarbor with $90 between us and landed in Sydney as a band,” Diesel said.

“So much has changed in the music industry since then and I think, ‘what are we looking at for the next 25 years or even 10 years?’

“It’s going to be interesting to see what forms, and the largest factor of these changes has been the construction of the world wide web and then letting the public use it.”

Now Diesel is using the internet to put out a call to his fans, who he wants to shape the set list for his Into the Light tour.

The owner of five ARIA awards who also boasts two number one albums, Diesel will bring a solo, two-set concert experience to the Eatons Hill Hotel next week.

The first part of the show will feature a set of his most requested, least played tunes from his extensive catalogue of songs from 11 studio albums.

“People are periodically, on a regular basis, coming up to me at shows and also contacting me through Facebook saying, ‘I wish you’d play that song’,” said the man also known as Mark Lizotte.

“There’s quite a varied bunch of songs (requested) but there are a few that are definitely recognisably recurring, and so I just thought it would be a good way to get that whole sector of that catalogue (of songs) out and expose them all.

“Some of them are what we used to call b-sides, some are album tracks and some of them are singles, but singles that I just don’t play that much.

“I’d even go as far as saying some of them were hits.”

Diesel said he was likely to play album tracks such as ‘Satellite’, ‘Darling of the Universe’ and ‘15 Feet of Snow’, as well as rarely played hits ‘Soul Revival’, ‘Please Send Me Someone to Love’ and ‘Dig’, which all reached the Australian top 20.

“A song like ‘Don’t Need Love’, it’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve started playing that again,” Diesel adds.

“I guess we played it an awful lot when we (Johnny Diesel and the Injectors) first emerged on the scene because it was our first single, and then I grew out of it, as you sometimes do.

“When I made this record called Singled Out, which was an acoustic live album, I found a different way of playing it and it kind of grew back on to me.

“I thought, ‘this song still kind of resonates something’, even though I wrote it when I was 19, sitting on a bed in my sister’s house in Connecticut.”

The batch of rarely performed tunes will be followed by an hour of Diesel playing songs “that I really do play quite a lot” and “the ones that are always in the spotlight”.

Or more specifically, as the US born, Sydney based musician attests, “the songs that if I don’t play them, they burn the house down”.

Diesel performs at the Eatons Hill Hotel on 25 May.

Have your say on what he should play at http://www.dieselmusic.com.au/ or http://www.facebook.com/officialdieselmusic