Adrian Edmondson explains to Viv Hardwick why he’s decided to switch from comedy to music and how he managed to get musicians to take him seriously.

THE Bottom line is that there will be no more Bottom, says Adrian Edmondson as he prepares to switch from anarchic comedy to performing his favourite punk rock songs on folk music instruments.

As tickets for his appearances next week at The Sage, Gateshead, and Durham’s Gala with his band, The Bad Shepherds, are almost all snapped up, the 52-year-old confesses that little or no planning went into his new career.

“I don’t really know how it happened. It wasn’t a plan I didn’t sit down and think ‘what shall I do now?’. I’ve always played songs to myself and been an inveterate collector of instruments and had a bit too much drink at one Christmas lunchtime event and ended up walking down Denmark Street in London, which is full of beguiling music shops, and bought a mandolin without knowing why,” says the man best known for his appearances as Vyvyan Bastard in The Young Ones and Eddie Hitler in Bottom.

As a result he put aside his ten electric guitars and set about forging a musical career. Despite admitting “People think of me as punk, and I do love punk, I was never a real one. I was far too middle class” it was these songs he turned to while learning to play the mandolin.

“These songs sounded, instantly, really good. If you change the instrument like this you’re forced to re-think things and I always thought those songs were under-appreciated.

People always think of punk as people jumping up and down and just spitting. I think Paul Weller’s one of the best songwriter’s there’s ever been and Johnny Rotten was a fantastic songwriter and the Sex Pistols only had 17 songs,” he explains and was encouraged by the success of appearances with a reformed Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band.

“On tour I took my mandolin along and said ‘listen to this’ and played them London Calling. I had a go over a couple of days with Neil Innes and he told me ‘what you need is some red-hot folk musicians’.”

Edmondson recruited Troy Donockley “from a kind of operatic Finnish metal band” to play pipes after telling him he wanted to play punk on folk instruments. “The line went dead for a couple of seconds, and I thought it was going badly wrong, but he came back and said ‘brilliant, I’m in’ and it just kind of worked.”

Edmondson decided to play the bars of St Lucia – “well it was a crap season” – to “do it in private in front of a few bemused locals and tourists”.

“And it’s no good beating about the bush, it’s been going well,” he says despite parting company with Fairport Convention guitarist Maartin Allcock, who has opted for more diverse projects in future.

He’s been replaced by double-bass player Brad Lang while Andy Dinan “a real cracker of a find on fiddle”.

“Other musicians find out in two seconds if you’re serious. They listen and tell you if it’s a gimmick or not.

Mind you I don’t know how many people didn’t get in touch because they thought it was,” Edmondson jokes.

THE initial result was the album, Yan, Tyan, Tethera, Methera!

which retains Edmondson’s love of the country by using the Northern shepherd’s dialect for counting sheep.

“This was supposed to be an easy way of counting and my reasoning is that if the Ramones were Cumbrian shepherds they would have sung like this. I was actually influenced by Jake Thackray (the much-loved singer on BBC’s The Braden Beat and That’s Life) who used the words in a song,” he explains.

Next came a track, Pete Seeger’s Little Boxes, for the Children In Need album, recorded a few weeks ago at the Abbey Road studios.

“When you cross disciplines people get quite confused, and rightly so, and all you can do is the best you can.

Some people get it, some people don’t.”

He admits that initially the links between songs on tour was long “because I was nervous and used to stick in a load of comedy stuff, but it now gets in the way of the music. It has a wry humour to it, but that has more to do with the audience playing ‘guess the intro’ because they’ll know every song we’re doing. But they never recognise what’s coming until it hits. It’s a fun evening rather than a comedy evening.”

As the bookings have rolled in, Edmondson is putting all his energy into touring and The Bad Shepherds, particularly when he’s listed as singer and “thrash mandolin” in the programme notes.

“To be frank, I’m fairly comfortable and I want to have fun and I want to do what I like. I don’t want to wake up at 65 and think ‘why didn’t I do that?’.

So I’m doing what I want to do which is an indulgence that I’m lucky enough to manage,” he adds.

And there’s also a promising support act on the bill. His daughter Ella. “She’s been going for a while and the last year has been good for her. I’m sort of her manager and an incredibly nice one who doesn’t sit at home lighting cigars from five pound notes. I used to watch the other acts at festivals and I thought ‘I can do that’. It was like my granny when we’d sit and watch Billy Smart’s Circus at Easter on the telly. There would be the most daring act and she’d say ‘I could do that with a bit of practise’.”

He feels the days of injuring himself on stage tours of Bottom with co-star Rik Mayall are well and truly over. “I think we drew a line under that in 2003. We finished while it was still selling bucket-loads of tickets, but I was bored and got to the stage where I wasn’t enjoying a single day of it. It sounds big-headed, but it was easy and no real challenge apart from the crowd control side and the seven hospital visits between us.

“We do have a pipe dream of when we are actually pensioners we’ll do a show about people that are in an old people’s home who are hitting each other with colostomy bags and giving each other the wrong pills. I doubt whether the BBC would go for it however.”

■ Adrian Edmonson and The Bad Shepherds play Hall Two, The Sage, Gateshead, on Tuesday, tickets: £15. Box office: 0191-443-4661 and Durham Gala Theatre on Wednesday, £12. 0191-332-4041