IT feels like all I've done over the past few days is interview a long line of music biz types about back catalogues and box sets. The business, it seems, has gone totally retro-tastic!

Dougie Jackson talks to Barbara Orbison

IT feels like all I've done over the past few days is interview a long line of music biz types about back catalogues and box sets. The business, it seems, has gone totally retro-tastic!

I started the week by chatting with Hamish Stuart, guitarist and songwriter with the legendary 70s Scottish funk outfit, the Average White Band, as he launched the group's massive 12-album back catalogue package.

"At long last we've put out the full studio album collection, but I have to be honest, it's weird looking at these albums and realising they represent my career with AWB, a career that might not have happened without us landing the support slot on Eric Clapton's 1973 comeback tour," he said.

"Our debut album, Show Your Hand, had been released to some fairly lukewarm reviews but that all changed when we got booked, completely out of the blue, on the Clapton tour and met up with Eric's road manager, Bruce McCaskill.

"He liked our music and became our manager, taking us to America, where thanks to the contacts he'd made through Eric, we got signed by Atlantic Records.

"The first record issued on our new label was the now legendary White Album, which went to number 1 on the charts, spawning the big hit single Pick Up The Pieces.

The rest, as they say, is history - sold-out stadium tours and hit album after hit album, all of which are in this new multi-CD collection."

And, listening to some tracks from that collection, I think it's testament to their talent that, 35 years on, the music of these blue-eyed soul boys from Dundee still sounds as fresh as the day it was recorded.

My next stroll down memory lane came via a chat with Roy Orbison's widow, Barbara.

Although they happened 21 years apart, the parallels between the deaths of Michael Jackson and 60s pop icon Orbison are uncanny.

Both started in out as child stars, before finding massive success in their 20s and 30s, and both died in their early 50s at home from heart attacks brought on by the exhaustion of working on their comeback shows.

Barbara joined me on my Smooth Radio Drivetime Show to talk about the release of a new box set of albums - "the definitive collection", she calls it.

Seconds into our conversation I realised she's a woman on a mission - to keep Roy's memory alive.

Since Roy's death, Barbara has produced TV specials and stage shows about him, digitally re-mastered his old recording sessions, packaged a greatest hits collection and commissioned a documentary on his life.

Funny thing is, when she first met Roy on his 1968 UK tour, she didn't know who he was and had never heard any of his songs!

"We met in a club, or discotheque as they were called then, and it was pretty much love at first sight," said 58-year-old Barbara in her clipped West German accent.

Apart from continuing to spread the word of the Orbison gospel via this new Soul of Rock n Roll box set, Barbara's also touring the world to help promote a new version of her husband's song Love in Time by indie folk/rock duo, Honey Ryder.

Somehow I can't see Debbie Rowe taking charge of Michael Jackson's business affairs and dedicating her life to the promotion of his music.