Feature
Bluff guy
by Diana Wichtel
Original, deeply indigenous, sometimes barking, Marcus Lush’s surreal 7.00-10.00pm slot on Radio Live is appointment listening.
_“Feel free to ring me and ask me if you don’t understand me.”_ – Marcus Lush, talkback host, Radio Live.
It’s quite late in our first chat that Marcus Lush, broadcasting veteran of more than 20 years, lets drop that the last three times he’s been interviewed, the encounters ended … before the end. What, he walked? “I did or they did.” Goodness. Why? “I don’t know,” he says, searching for answers in the dregs of his second double-shot coffee of the afternoon. “I push some buttons.”
Lush, host of the surreal 7.00-10.00pm slot on the year-old Radio Live, probably doesn’t mean this as a warning. Though he’s clearly spooked at finding himself caught again between a rock and a journalist brandishing a tape recorder. “I can’t bear it. But if you say that you get one of those horrible interviews that start with ‘notoriously difficult to interview’.”
Which he isn’t, really. It all started well enough with this reply to an emailed request for an audience: “gee you have no idea how many interviews i turn down – but no one has tried flattery like you – am living in bluff”.
It wasn’t really flattery. More a cry for help. Many’s the evening, I had emailed him, that I’m forced to stop on my walk, doubled over with laughter, as my dog and passers-by eye me with alarm. Publicly undone by such talkback topics as “Biscuits You Don’t Understand” and the inspired “Condensed Milk Thursdays”.
On Lush’s show you’ll be reminded of the gastronomic abomination that was Chicken-in-a-Biscuit. You’ll hear how Charles Upham’s life was once saved by, yes, condensed milk.
There was the ambitious “English as a Second Language” night. Considering Lush’s free-range approach to the mother tongue – “There might be something else that got your gander up” – you wonder how the audience could tell the difference.
Original, deeply indigenous, sometimes barking: it all adds up to a bizarre brand of social history, peppered with inscrutable Lush wisdom – “It’s easy to like something if you don’t know what it is”; “I think this year is going quite quickly. Except for January.”
Callers range from the young, who get the show’s satiric undertow, to the deadpan (“You could crack an egg on mine,” one old gent phoned in to report when the topic was, wonderfully, sex and smoking), to the nearly dead. If Lush has a talkback modus operandi, it’s to challenge callers to surprise and entertain him with their stories, their infinite oddness, their random information. Their reward will be his highest accolade: “Brilliant!”
Host: What’s petrol costing you?
Caller from Great Barrier Island: $2.10.
Host: Brilliant!
One notorious night – this is the sort of sentence a journalist could never foresee having occasion to write – Lush Tasered himself, live from Invercargill.
Priceless. Pinning Lush down to talk about it all was another matter.
The Listener: When should we meet?
Lush: Oh, any time.
The Listener: How about 10.00am?
Lush: No, that’s way too early.
The Listener: How about lunch-time?
Lush: I don’t think so.
The Listener: Well, when would suit you?
Lush: Oh, any time …
When we finally meet at Auckland’s Cornwall Park Restaurant I don’t know whether to order him lunch or throw it at him. But he soon disarms, partly just by appearing to be in need of care. The current look is intent on crossing the line between boho and hobo.
He proves undemanding – hair and makeup are not an issue – and remains stoically on the veranda like a born-again Southlander as Auckland does sun, black clouds, thunder, deluge, sun. Much the same range of weather as blows in over several encounters with the mercurial Lush. Ask him about the perception that he was a bit up himself in his days as co-host of TV2’s late, lamented Newsnight and clouds roll in. Push too hard on the personal life and thunder claps.
His unease about interviews seems odd, given that he’s conducted plenty himself. In his days at student Radio B (now bFM) – transcripts still circulate in cyberspace – he once discussed pubic hair with Bono on the breakfast show. He seemed so relaxed. “I normally hadn’t gone home. It was the end of a long night out, that’s the reality.”
Right. The days of hard living. Lush did a spell at Hanmer Springs in 1998 when he gave up drinking. Was the need for a change after that why he moved south? “No, it was more that all these other people [in radio] had worked in different places and I’d never done that. I thought I’d see what it was like to go and live in a smaller place and do radio. I loved it.”
That’s all he’ll say about the drinking. “Normally when I do interviews I say beforehand I won’t talk about that. But when you say that you bring it up as well, so …”
Fair enough. While we’re getting the personal stuff out of the way, there is someone and she’s hidden his Taser. End of subject.
Host: I’m not sure if this is one man thinking alone … I’ve always wanted to get my scaffolding ticket.
Until recently, Lush seemed to be on the perfect slacker career trajectory. “Look, I was 33 and didn’t drive and I was living at home.”
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