LIKE some of the best ideas, Dickie Ticker came up with the concept for the Lancashire Hotpots when he was sat on the toilet.

He chuckled to himself as he imagined some of his flat capped Lancashire heroes like Fred Dibnah wearing mascara and turning ‘emo’ or grasping with modern technology and embracing social media.

The songs began to write themselves and six months later Dickie, Bernard Thresher and Bob Wriggles were in the studio. Ten years have passed since then but the Hotpots’ recipe of music and northern humour is still going strong.

“Every now and again we do have to pinch ourselves,” said Dickie.

“But I think we’ve been doing it that long that we’ve hit upon a winning formula of how to put on a show and how to make everyone have a great night, the band included.”

The band will be at the Pyramid on Saturday for their lively show, which is described as a cross between a concert and a night of stand-up.

Dickie added: “We do our songs which are fairly rigid in the set and we have a few things planned for this particular show but otherwise we like to keep it loose and free and easy. Good old Bernard, our lead singer, is the most spontaneous man I know.

“Something will just pop into his head and then we’ll have a comedy diversion that could be rambling for a good five minutes. We all like to chip in. That’s why we’re getting this thing where some people like to come to every night because they know they’re always going to get a different show.”

A far cry from the Lancashire folk scene, Dickie, Bernard and Bob actually began working together in a very guise – as the electronic music act, Emmet. But comedy was never far from their minds.

Dickie said: “We were going out doing live technos at disused warehouses. Then we did a comedy techno band called Moped who were a mickey take of the German act Scooter.

‘I just sit down in my underpants and things come to me’

Dickie Ticker

“Chris Moyles picked up on that and we did lots of things for him on Radio 1. We even did a live broadcast in Brighton where we performed in front of Fat Boy Slim so comedy has always been on the menu.

It was around that time that Dickie had his toilet eureka moment.

The 47-year-old added: “The first album was taking the basic idea of having a traditional Lancashire folk band singing about modern things. But going out we’ve discovered that people want a show more than anything else. We’ve taken those experiences on board and tried to explore different themes.

“So every time we come out with an album it’s something slightly different. The last album was 80s inspired, the one before that was a country album and this particular tour is food based. It’s taking these Hotpot ideas in terms of northern humour and wrapping it up in a different parcel and giving people something new each and every time. Hopefully the joke is never going to get too old.”

So where do the ideas come from?

“I just sit down in my underpants and things come to me,” Dickie said.

“We do live in the north west of England and whatever tickles me generally tends to tickle the rest of the north west as well. The summer shows we do are all sit down theatre shows and we do tend to like those a little bit more than the stand up shows at the O2 Academies of this world.

“Obviously we play the songs and everybody laughs, cheers, claps, waves their hands and stamps their feet. But when everybody is stood up the night has to be that bit quicker.

“If everybody is sat down they’re more relaxed and they’re up for more of a performance from us. They’re more receptive to us rambling on between songs. I think the first opportunity we had to take on something like that was when we toured with Paddy McGuinness in 2008.

“We’d only been gigging for 18 months and we did 20 dates of his UK tour – basically all the shows we could get to after work and at weekends. We were in front of literally thousands of people every night in some of the biggest theatres across the country. It was very much a showmanship and comedy apprenticeship.”