FORMED in a bedsit weeks after Margaret Thatcher’s re-election in 1983, Half Man Half Biscuit erupted on to the independent music scene with their debut album, Back In The DHSS.

Their witty lyrics, with a large smattering of cartoonish, cultish humour and bizarre observations of life – remember the wonderful Trumpton Riots - were delivered from the TV-addled perspective of a hand to mouth life on the dole in Birkenhead.

Geoff Davies vividly remembers Nigel Blackwell, Half Man Half Biscuit’s singer, coming into his record shop, Probe Plus Records in Liverpool, with a battered C90 cassette tape.

“I looked at the back of it and it was full of things like The Len Ganley Stance, God Gave Us Life and Time Flies by (When You are a Driver of a Train),” said the band’s manager Davies, who brings Half Man Half Biscuit to Clitheroe’s Grand Theatre tomorrow.

“I said to him: ‘If the songs are half as good as the titles, we’ll do it.

“Anyway, I was listening to the tape with my partner that evening as we drove home and neither of us could believe what we were hearing.

“It was surreal and hilarious, but there was a great likeability and fun about their sound that I’d never heard before or since,” said Geoff.

“So I called Nigel the next day to say that we’d do an album - and I sent the demo to John Peel.”

Peel, the late BBC Radio One DJ, remembered a white label test copy of their first album turning up in the post at his London studio.

“I had no idea who it was,” said Peel at the time. “I put it on and was immediately smitten.

“It came at a time when music was starting to get a little po-faced.

“Bands were all rather grave and taking themselves far too seriously, so Nigel and Half Man Half Biscuit, was such a tonic.

“I always thought it was a shame that punk never had its own Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and, while Nigel wasn’t that, he was there in spirit.

“I couldn’t stop playing it.”

In the early 1980s, along with nearby Eric’s, the legendary Liverpool club, Probe Plus Records was at the heart of a burgeoning scene that saw Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and Pete Wylie’s Wah launch themselves into musical orbit.

And once signed to Probe Plus, it marked the beginning of a relationship between Half Man Half Biscuit and the label that lasts to this day.

“When I called John Peel I said to him, ‘You might like this LP, they are all Tranmere Rovers fans',” said Geoff.

“After the Half Man Half Biscuit Peel session then everything went crazy and they were number one in the indie charts for a year.”

Blackwell, who eventually took a lengthy sabbatical from the music industry, does not do publicity these days.

“Nigel’s not a big head or anything, he is a really sound guy who doesn’t think that the music business is a big deal.

“He likes to get out on his bike, cycle to North Wales.

“He has all sorts of interests in his life and he doesn’t do interviews because he gets fed up with the same old questions.”

“I’ll tell you what, though,” added Davies, “Half Man Half Biscuit are as brilliant as ever live and they can’t wait to play Clitheroe.”

Half Man Half Biscuit, Clitheroe Grand Theatre, Friday, June 9, Details from 01200 421599