RAY Laidlaw, founder member and original drummer, and Billy Mitchell, front man for the final eight years, have joined together to tell The Lindisfarne Story.

Tomorrow night, they present the history and hits of Tyneside’s best-loved band in a celebration of Lindisfarne devised, written and performed by Ray and Billy at York Barbican at 7.30pm

The duo will play acoustic versions of such songs as Lady Eleanor, Meet Me On The Corner, Fog On The Tyne and Run For Home and relate the stories behind them.

“The first time we did it, it was the two of us chatting and playing some songs after talking about it in the pub the night before, and then busking it on the night at the Customs House Theatre in South Shields,” says Ray. “That was a few years ago when we went along with a couple of guitars, told some stories and played a couple of songs.”

Ray and Billy have developed the show from there, playing big venues with a six-piece line-up and smaller ones as a duo. “When you break it down, Lindisfarne’s criteria was always the song; whether the songs worked with one person or the full band," says Ray. "Now we’re stripping them down to almost nothing, they can work again with just the two of us, just as they can work with six.”

The shows are “largely reliant” on the banter with the audience. “But we do have headlines of what we want to talk about, so we have to have a clock or otherwise we would be there for hours,” says Ray.

He recalls how Lindisfarne flunked it when they were going for a third successive top five hit in 1972 after Meet Me On The Corner and Lady Eleanor. “We were getting a bit ahead of ourselves with our third album when we decided to put it in a plain brown cardboard record sleeve and all we wanted was the band’s name printed it – and we insisted that the first single off it should be All Fall Down, a protest song about architecture!” says Ray.

“We later learned Slade were overjoyed that we put that one out, rather than Wake Up Little Sister, which they were convinced would have been number one when they were going for yet another chart topper, but we didn’t bring it out as we wanted to make a political statement instead.”

Lindisfarne’s legacy will endure. “Our music stretched out a long way beyond the North East, and unlike most successful artists we moved back home after moving away for only a short time,” says Ray.

“We became minstrels for the North East, reflecting what was happening there, and people felt a connection with us because we wrote about them, rather than writing about ephemeral things.

“We never set out to be pop stars or celebrities. We just wanted to be respected as musicians; we never planned to write ‘singles’; we wrote albums. That was our philosophy.”

Tickets are on sale on 0844 854 2757 and at yorkbarbican.co.uk