I'M A MOCK 'N' ROLL STAR!

As he brings his new live tour to Britain, Eric Idle reminisces about taking the Pythons on the road and introducing comedy to huge stadiums, the lost friend he misses the most... and the jolly ditty that's proved his greatest hit

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SADLY, given the subsequent death of Terry Jones and worsening relations with John Cleese, of which more shortly, it’s an extravaganza unlikely to be repeated.

Today Idle, always the most keen among the Pythons to get out and perform live, recalls encouraging the group to take their show on the road in the early days and make some money. After all, no one got rich work-

ing for the BBC. (“Except Gary [Lineker],” he smiles today. “He was very smart and very good at it, though.”)

Their first live shows took place at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, in January 1971.

“I chose the material we should do and we pulled some costumes and threw it all together very quickly,” he recalls. “We ended up with the likes of The Lumberjack Song. It was the fairly obvious ones we'd done in the first two or three seasons.

“It was extraordinary because the fans were crazy — they came dressed up. It was the first time they discovered other people were as crazy as they were. I'd been that way with Beyond the Fringe when I was 16. That had changed my life, so I understood how comedy can liberate you from what you're supposed to believe... even the Prime Minister was mocked. Peter Cook did [Harold] Macmillan and that was a first, and it became the satire boom and we followed that.

“Then there were some rock promoters who said we should tour England. And we were only on BBC money, so we said, ‘Yes, please’. Then we toured Canada.”

In many ways, they pioneered comedy as rock ’n’ roll, then?

“Yes,” agrees Idle. “I call it mock ’n’ roll. We did the Hollywood Bowl, we did New York, we did it in Drury Lane, London, and we played huge stadiums. Today we take it for granted that a comedian can play an amphitheatre — it hadn’t been done before.”