Biggedy Biggedy Bong! Twenty years after Mark Radcliffe and ‘the boy Lard’ Marc Riley broadcast the last of their beloved Radio One gig, they’ve reunited for a tour celebrating the show that got a generation through their Highers.
What kind of thing should we be expecting from the show? You’ve worn so many hats over the years that it could be a million things.
Mark Radcliffe: Yes, indeed. Well, I mean, this was really, I mean Marc Riley and I, the artist formerly known as Lard, we haven’t done anything together since we finished on Radio 1 in 2004. And so it was Marc out of the blue who said we should do something to mark the 20th anniversary. Because that show in some ways is the show that sort of refuses to die. I think we had about eight and a half million listeners at its peak. And everywhere we go people just still shout the same old daft catchphrases from it, even now, 20 years on.
What’s the catchphrase you get the most?
Stop… Carry on!
And the funny thing is that the last word ever said on Mark and Lard was ‘stop’. 20 years ago, Mark shouted stop. And then Radio 1 stopped for 10 minutes. Now, people assume that was some elaborate prank on our part but it was just some kind of bizarre technical hiccup. And so this show is called Carry On, which obviously carries an association of a certain kind of humour.
It’s just nice to know that you did something that people liked, that people still remember fondly.
What you gotta remember about that show is it was pre internet. And perhaps if you lived in a small town where not much happened, there were a lot of cultural touchstones in that show. I think we feel very proud of that now. That if you felt that you were slightly left field or didn’t quite fit in… I think it was kind of a big club for outsiders really.
You were famously instrumental in the success of Whitetown, Pulp, and so many other bands. Were there any that you thought were going to be huge that weren’t?
Oh all the time, you know, I think our track record is actually quite poor! If you play a load of records, just by the law of statistics, some of them are going to be successful. Most of the things we played never got anywhere. I couldn’t see Oasis getting anywhere, so I don’t think my judgement is good. All I’ve ever done is played the things that I like and some of those people did become huge, you know, but I take no credit for any of it. I thought Granddaddy were going to be huge, you know, filling stadiums and everything. Not that that really matters. I don’t really judge a band by how many people go and see them. I mean as you know some of the best gigs you’ve ever seen there were 30 people there. There were 30 people there at King Tut’s when Oasis got signed.
There’s a bit of a running joke in Glasgow that pretty much anyone over the age of about 45 claims to have been at that King Tut’s gig.
Yeah, well it’s the same thing in Manchester with Sex Pistols. Some things pass into mythology, don’t they?
Honestly, in the early days, we never expected it to last. So our joint recollection of it is that we felt like it didn’t matter because, you know, we’re only going to last a couple of years. And it was a sort of a badge of honor that we were an irritation to Radio One in some ways.
I wanted to talk to you a bit about The White Room, which was a piece of television that I remember very fondly. What were your favorite moments of chaos from that?
Iggy Pop’s transparent trousers – I remember that.
And I remember introducing Little Richard, and saying, ‘one of the Godfathers of rock and roll’. He just looked at me and he said, ‘Not one of. I am the Godfather of rock and roll.’ I said, all right, then I’ll do it again; ‘The Godfather of rock and roll. The creator of the known universe, the fromage de pompadour of popular culture, Little Richard’. I remember we had Prince on – I mean the guest list on that show is astonishing, really. I remember Prince came on and he had a veil on. So I introduced Prince by saying ‘he’s here and he’s got his beekeeper gear on’.
I suppose that I felt the need to do it with a degree of irreverence really and sort of never wanted to be too fawning. And it looked great. And I met my wife there, who was also working on that show. So that’s a lasting plus for me. It’s one of my great disappointments that it didn’t last as long as Later with Jools Holland. I thought I had a job for life there.
You mentioned that you’re still playing music and that leads me to the question that obviously everybody wants you to answer: Is this a precursor to a Shirehorses reunion?
Before the Mark and Lard thing started, Marc said did I fancy doing a The Shirehorses tour of the Shires. And I said no, because I didn’t really feel that I could be that guy again and some of those songs would possibly get us cancelled. It was always a pretty thin act anyway. So I said to him no, I don’t really want to do that, but what about some kind of ‘audience with’ or some kind of talkbased thing. And so that’s how this came about really. But we do do a couple of songs.
Carry On! An Audience With Mark and Lard is at The Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow on 13th March. Tickets here.
