Toby Creswell (born 21 May 1955, Sydney, Australia) is an Australian music journalist and pop-culture writer. He was editor of Rolling Stone (Australia) and a founding editor of Juice. In 1986 he co-wrote, with Martin Fabinyi, his first book Too Much Ain't Enough a biography of pub rocker and former Cold Chisel vocalist Jimmy Barnes. Creswell has also written The Real Thing: Adventures in Australian Rock & Roll, 1957-now in 1999 and 1001 Australians you should know in 2006. The latter was written with his domestic partner, fellow writer and journalist, Samantha Trenoweth.

Creswell wrote his first article on rock & roll for Nation Review in 1972. He subsequently wrote articles about all aspects of popular culture and music for RAM, Billboard, Roadrunner and a range of national and international magazines and newspapers. He has worked for MTV and a variety of television programs as a writer and presenter. As a keyboard player for seminal post-punk band, Surfside 6, he wrote the B-side, "School's Out", to their 1980 hit single, "Cool in the Tube".

James Dixon Swan (born 28 April 1956), better known as Jimmy Barnes, is a Scottish-born Australian rock singer-songwriter. His father Jim Swan was a prizefighter and his older brother John Swan is also a rock singer. It was actually John who had encouraged and taught Jim how to sing as he wasn't really interested at the time. His career as both a solo performer and as the lead vocalist with the rock band Cold Chisel has made him one of the most popular and best-selling Australian music artists of all time. The combination of 14 Australian Top 40 albums for Cold Chisel and 13 charting solo albums, including nine No. 1s, gives Barnes the highest number of hit albums of any Australian artist.

Jimmy Barnes was born in Glasgow, Scotland and arrived in Adelaide, South Australia as a 4-year old on 7 January 1961 with his parents Jim and Dorothy Swan and siblings John, Dororthy, Linda, Lisa & Alan. They eventually settled in Elizabeth. Shortly afterward, Barnes' parents divorced. His mother Dorothy soon remarried, to a clerk named Reg Barnes. After her daughter Lisa was teased by a schoolmate about being adopted, Dorothy encouraged her children to change their surname to Barnes.^{[citation needed]} All of them did except for the oldest brother John, who would go on to be much better known as Swanee, eventually recording a series of albums under that name from the 1980s. This would later cause confusion about Jimmy Barnes and Swan; many thought them to be half- or stepbrothers.

Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor.

He is best known for his work as a frontman of the critically acclaimed rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, a group known for its eclectic influences and musical styles. Before that, he had fronted the group The Birthday Party in the early 1980s, a band renowned for its highly gothic, challenging lyrics and violent sound influenced by free jazz, blues, and post-punk. In 2006, he formed the garage rock band Grinderman that released its debut the following year. Cave's music is generally characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences and lyrical obsessions with religion, death, love and violence.

Upon Cave's induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame, ARIA Awards committee chairman Ed St John said, “Nick Cave has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of popular music. He is an Australian artist like Sidney Nolan is an Australian artist—beyond comparison, beyond genre, beyond dispute."

Bob Dylan ( /ˈdɪlən/), born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" has been described as radically altering the parameters of popular music in 1965. However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.

Dylan's lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie,Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.

Stephen Arthur Stills (born January 3, 1945) is an American guitarist and singer/songwriter best known for his work with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young). He has performed on a professional level in several other bands as well as maintaining a solo career at the same time. Stills was ranked #28 in Rolling Stone Magazine's 2003 list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Stills became the first person to be inducted twice on the same night into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work with CSN and the Buffalo Springfield.

Stills was raised in a military family. Moving around as a child, he developed an interest in blues and folk music. He was also influenced by Latin music after spending his youth in Gainesville and Tampa, Florida, Louisiana, Costa Rica, Panama Canal Zone and El Salvador, where he graduated from high school, and was an avid sailor. He also attended Admiral Farragut Academy in St. Petersburg, Florida and Saint Leo College Preparatory School in Saint Leo, Florida.