Get The Flock Out Of Here
“The best gigs I’ve ever done in any art-form have been with this band – there’s so much more connection with the audience than anything I’ve ever done."
It all seems rather appropriate really. Nearly three decades since he last stole the show in riotous UK comedy The Young Ones as psychotic punk medical student Vyvyan Basterd – he of the orange spikes, denim jacket and studded forehead – Ade Edmondson now finds himself fronting a punk band, of sorts. In reality The Bad Shepherds are actually more of a folk band – Edmondson plays mandolin and sings, alongside Troy Donockley (uilleann pipes) and Andy Dinan (fiddle) – only that they reinterpret '70s punk and new wave songs in the folk tradition, covering tunes from obvious culprits such as The Clash, Ramones and Sex Pistols through to more left-field artists such as The Members, Squeeze, Motorhead, Talking Heads and Thin Lizzy.
Importantly, this is not a comedy project, even if the concept is capable in itself of eliciting a wry smile. Edmondson is no stranger to the music game – The Young Ones' version of Cliff Richards' Summer Holiday topped the UK singles chart in 1986, he toured extensively with spoof rockers Bad News as frontman Vim Fuego, and more recently spent a stint playing and writing with his beloved Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band – but it's not until he formed The Bad Shepherds in 2008 that the former comedic genius ever really focussed on music as a pursuit in and of itself. And, fittingly, it all started when he speculatively bought himself a mandolin after a particularly boozy lunch.
“It did [start like that], I bought it after one of those long lunches,” he smiles. “It was in a really dangerous street in London called Denmark Street, which has just got all of these music shops on it – it's got fantastic shops with vintage guitars and beautiful instruments and weird stuff. I'd bought nearly everything else already, so this time I bought a mandolin.
“I already had an instinct to buy one, but I didn't know how to play it, so I started out working out the chords and everything – I've played a lot of stringed instruments, just nothing like a mandolin – and started strumming chords over songs I already liked, punk songs that I really like, and I knew immediately... have you ever had that moment where you think, 'Fuck me, I'm good! Christ almighty that really works!'? It reinterprets the song instantly. Because I'm the age I am – the same age as all the punks, so I'm old – but because I'm that age and because those songs meant a lot to me, you suddenly realise that [these songs are] so much more adult than you ever thought they were. Well a lot of the songs anyway, nothing by The Damned works. But the lyrics are brilliantly written, and they just kind of make sense with this type of instrumentation when you're my age.
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“These days I'm very competent; fuck me, I've been playing for five years, I'm quite good now but I haven't got the chops that [Troy and Andy] have got –they really know what they're doing and I do the backing and the singing. It just works, and we love it. We know it's a niche market and we know that we're not going to race into the charts or anything like that, but we know that whenever anyone comes, they love it.”
Given the nature of the transformation that The Bad Shepherds apply to these tunes it's the lyric-driven punk standards that work best, and Edmondson explains that there's no shortage of tunes that fit the bill.
“I can't do anything that doesn't sound right coming out of a 56-year-old mouth,” he laughs. “It has to have some resonance with me, at my age. And a lot of them do – a lot of them are completely brilliant. People say that country music is for adults and pop music is for children, but a lot of punk music is adult music – it's phenomenal how good some of them are. You look at ones we do as a folk ballad like [The Jam's] Down In The Tube Station At Midnight or [Squeeze's] Up The Junction, they're written like ballads with a beginning, middle and end. It's just like any folk song – [Thin Lizzy's] Whisky In A Jar is an old folk song, it's a story song.
“The other part of folk is that it's rebel music. I went to university in Manchester and there was this Irish pub just around the corner, and it used to have proper session players – people would turn up and they'd just play in a group. I kind of had this idea, because this was going on on one side of the university, and on the other side punk had just started – there were punk gigs going on there – and I knew at the time that they were more or less the same. When a real folk tune kicks off it's like a punk performance – it's just anarchic and loud and big, and you just felt overwhelmed. I'd be overwhelmed at both; I'd then go over to The Squat as it was called, the punk venue, and there would be people in bin-bags playing their instruments really loud – it was equally exciting.”
Surprisingly given the breadth of Edmondson's live work during his comedy days he believes that it did little to prepare him for his role as a real life frontman for a touring and recording band (The Bad Shepherds have two albums under their collective belts, with a third in the pipeline).
“Not really, not at all,” he ponders. “I never really did stand-up – [long-time comedy partner] Rik [Mayall]and I used to do a double act, so I never went on as myself. I only ever went on as a character. The big difference between everything I've ever done before and this is that with this I just go on as me. When we started the band I used to worry about it and I used to dress differently and was kind of playing a character that was Ade – a character of myself – but I learned to relax and just be myself, and it's so much more fun. You have much more communication with people, and you relate to people much more.
“The best gigs I've ever done in any art-form have been with this band – there's so much more connection with the audience than anything I've ever done. I've done some big things and things that I'm proud of – and I'm still proud of them – but they've never connected as well, and that's kind of what you want at a certain age. You don't want to leave the field without having given anything, to steal a sporting analogy – you don't want to die without having experienced everything, and I've finally got to a point where I'm working on a life on the stage rather than a pretence on the stage, and I find it incredibly exciting.”
The Bad Shepherds will be playing the following dates:
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