bad shepherds

We went to hear Adrian Edmondson and The Bad Shepherds at The Colchester Arts Centre last night.  They are a folk-punk band, playing classic punk and new wave songs of the 1970s and early 1980s on folk instruments, intercut with traditional reels.  This ticks three of my boxes at once, and sounds like pretty much a dream project.  The Jam, The Stranglers, Ian Drury and the Blockheads, The Talking Heads and The Clash provided the soundtrack to my teens and university years.  My father got into folk music in the post war revival, and stayed there, so I grew up with traditional Irish music on vinyl (sadly no live gigs to speak of, in 1970s East Devon).  And I have had a soft spot for Ade Edmondson since The Young Ones.

It might have proved an odd and unsuccessful mixture.  After all, I like olives, fruitcake and baked beans, but that doesn't mean I want them together.  The Bad Shepherds, however, have made a triumph out of oddity, and last night's performance was a sell-out, an honour shared with only three other shows between now and Christmas.  Their music works because they are good musicians, and because it is actually a good idea.  There are three of them in the band, between them covering fiddle, mandolin, vocals, bouzouki, whistles and Uilleann pipes.

The fiddle player won the All-Ireland Fiddle Championship, twice, and has worked with some of the best folk musicians in the business, including American Irish fiddler Martin Hayes. ( Hayes is Irish, lives in the States, and is quite simply a genius.  Any other fiddler who dares perform with him is either very good themselves, or so terribly bad they don't realise how bad they are, otherwise they would die of shame.)  Adrian Edmondson plays what he calls thrash mandolin, which means strummed rather than fancy tunes picked out with a plectrum, in other words the rhythmn section.  He has got a good sense of rhythmn and has discovered where enough chords are, and while no Richard Thompson has learnt to play the mandolin pretty well, given that he bought his first one in a junk shop when he was drunk.  He sings lead vocals, and you can hear the words quite a lot of the time, and he is a first-class showman.  The third member of the band plays everything else, and sings.  His credits on their website include working with Lesley Garrett, Midge Ure, and Status Quo, as well as Maddy Prior and Barbara Dickson, but he plays the Uilleann pipes like a true traditional Irish (which he is) musician.  So the three of them are no novelty act, but two highly skilled musicians from the Irish tradition, plus a competent and charismatic front-man.

The fusion of punk and new wave songs with traditional tunes works because they are so similar, under the surface.  You could say that punk was a protest movement, folk tunes are the music of the common masses, ergo they go together, but the similarity runs deeper than that.  A reel consists of four lines, each with four bars, each with four beats in it, taken fairly fast.  Turns out, a lot of new wave songs have the same structure.  You can carry on from the song straight into an instrumental break without shifting tempo.  New wave and punk didn't have much of a back beat, compared to classic rock, and reels don't have a back beat either, so the rhythmns match up nicely.  (I think myself it is a better natural fit than folk-rock, when English dance tunes are put on top of a rock drummer.)  Irish reels do have a complicated and beautiful pattern of beats, which I hope one day a friendly musicologist will explain to me.  A good piper puts them in using the drone, or a fiddler with the occasional double note, but they sound like low pitched morse code, a complex underpinning.  (That is why people who try to clap along to Irish music are a menace.)

If the song and the instrumental don't go at the same speed, you can bridge the gap between them using a drone on pipes or fiddle, to give a break point where noise is still going on (so the audience knows you haven't finished this one yet) but the first tune has stopped.  The Bad Shepherds use this, as did Planxty, and everyone from time to time, but a clean shift from one to the other is more exciting.  The Uilleann pipes are always exciting anyway, but especially so when they are pumped through a very large speaker.

We even met a couple of friends in the crowd, people I know via beekeeping.  They are connected to the world of international music, in that they are the parents of Belle and Sebastian's keyboard player.  That's the nearest I get to knowing anybody in rock.  Most of the audience were nice and well behaved, and the Arts Centre couldn't have been anticipating trouble in that while pints of beer were served in plastic glasses, they were also selling bottled.  My only gripe, and it is a really major gripe, was with the quartet stood near us who talked.  Not just the odd comment, but a full running conversation.  I thought at first that the band would drown them out, but they responded by talking louder.  After the first three and a half songs I worked out that if I stayed where I was I was going to spend the evening thinking about nothing except how annoying they were and how much I hated them, so I went and found myself a corner near the front, where people were taking the music seriously.  Why do people do that?  I mean, why?  Apart from the fact that they have no manners, why shell out seventy quid on tickets if all you are going to do is talk during the act.  You might as well just go to the f**cking pub.  I managed not to say that to them, but I thought I'd better move before I did.

So that was an evening spent in tribute to the music of my youth.  Middle age comes to us all.  Adrian Edmondson had to perform most of the gig sitting down, wearing a pair of slippers.  He said he had first sprained his ankle, and then broken his toe, and then succumbed to that rock and roll disease, gout.  They did all look as though they were enjoying themselves, and I hope they were, as they've got another twelve gigs to get through between tonight and 26th November (Union Chapel, Islington).