Ade Edmondson on being a bad shepherd

He talks really fast.

Ordinarily this wouldn't matter very much but I got the sense that he'd just finished another telephone interview and was therefore thoroughly warmed up, talking-wise, whereas my shorthand takes a while to crank into gear. I mention this because while we were out of sync he was saying some interesting stuff, so it's a shame that you'll be missing some of it...

I saw him and his Bad Shepherds - Troy Donockley and Andy Dinan in the band's present incarnation - at Folk by the Oak in 2011 and had the exact experience that he describes to me during our conversation: despite their performance being freighted with the expectation that it would be funny, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the musicianship and impressed at how hard they were working to subvert my expectations. It was a beautiful afternoon and they played versions of punk-era songs on traditional instruments, including Uilleann pipes, with Edmondson on mandolin. Then they made me laugh harder than I've laughed at a folk festival before or since by doing a punk version of All Around My Hat with a lyric that ran like this...

"We used to do that version of All Around My Hat because I was embarrassed that people would want comedy," he explained. "But the more we took the funny stuff out, the better the gig became because the more people actually listened to what we were playing.

"What we're aiming for is joy rather than humour. People hear things at our gigs that they are vaguely familiar with" - they usually start with Anarchy in the UK - "and then there's a difference between what they are used to and what they remember - and it amounts to something different again. There's this great thing that happens at festivals: people come to us with an expectation that it's going to be shit and then we win them over. It's like fly fishing."

Edmondson as Vyvyan in The Young Ones is an edgy childhood memory for me that eventually shaded into warmth, though I never came round to Bottom, in which he worked again with his university friend Rik Mayall. "A lot of women say that," apparently.

There was, however, a level of hysteria to his television characters that bumps awkwardly against his present, fly-fishing orientated, media incarnation, in which he presents a TV show called Ade in Britain (see what they did there?) that follows him as he goes around the country being nice to people, and plays in a folk band. I put it to him that he may have turned into a codger.

"Have I got a codger in me?" he deliberated. "I think of a codger as someone who is full of their own self-importance."

Ah well then, we should define our terms. I think of a codger as a man of certain age who wears a hat.

"Well, I do wear a hat, I think the world was a better place when we all wore hats. I like looking at pictures of men walking to Wembley stadium in the 1930s, all of them wearing hats, and wondering why on earth we stopped wearing them?"

Did umbrellas become the cheaper option? Hats seem quite pricey these days...

"I like them because they frame your face, especially if you've got a head like mine that looks like an onion. I started wearing them to keep my head warm because I don't have much hair, but think that they frame my face and make my features look better."

And is tweed your jam? (I may have been encouraging the hat-talk.)

"I have a couple of tweedy flat caps and then a black one because I like to change my mood now and then. Also, you should wear a hat in this weather," he said as the temperature outdoors crept into the low 80s "to prevent your head splitting open like a tomato."

I've noticed that ordinarily when interviewers ask how you ended up being in a folk band, you tell them that it was an accident.

"And you don't believe that?"

It seems a bit unlikely. Here's a video they made in 2008 about how the band started.

"It is slightly disingenuous to say that it was an accident. I have a history of enjoying folk. I'm in my late 50s and the pop charts of my youth were full of folk instruments. Rod Stewart... there was mandolin all over everything. And then the drama department at Manchester University had this pub we all went to that was an Irish session pub. So we'd go from watching a session there to the squat, where we'd watch punk bands wearing bin liners. And these kinds of music seemed very similar to me, equally thrilling."

Do you still find it thrilling?

"I love watching The Unthanks."

Well, yes. But I read that you don't relate to the bucolic side of folk?

"I don't quite understand the reason for singing songs about blacksmiths and jolly milk maids. It seems a bit anachronistic - unless it's a timeless metaphor that actually means something else." I've had similar thoughts myself, which set me off.

I waffled on for a while about how the act of recording music has changed its nature and how these days, because of digitisation, bands are competing against every other band that has ever existed rather than just the ones that are fighting to get into the chart that week. I mentioned the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury and how all the teenagers knew the words to their music. I may also have mentioned the coconut tree.

"I heard another brilliant story about Keith Richards falling off a ladder in his library," Edmondson giggled. "It was good not just for the idea that Keith Richards has a library... but that it is so vast that he needs a ladder for it.

"It would be interesting, though, wouldn't it, to find out what songs we'd all know if recording studios had never been invented? We wouldn't be able to listen to Jacques Brel, we'd be relying on whoever was keeping the songs alive by performing them.

"I don't know really what it means to be a young musician these days. Everyone is recording themselves all the time."

I ventured that all this recording may have elevated the role of the promoters and middle men. I mean, when everyone can record because the technology is no barrier to entry, the scramble becomes for other people's attention and it becomes much more important to understand the buttons and levers of the industry. Hence, perhaps, the number of musicians who are also graphic designers who have cropped up on this blog recently. Their trade - graphic design - is all about commodification and promotion.

However, being famous for something else is another way of getting a band off the ground, I suppose?

"I wouldn't recommend it as a way to become a musician: pretending to be a comedian for 30 years. Although the notoriety is kind of a plus, trying to persuade people that you mean what you're doing is difficult. Getting them to listen is quite hard: you wouldn't believe the number of interviews I do with people who haven't listened to us and never will."

How ambitious are you for The Bad Shepherds? Is there anyone in particular you'd like to play with?

"I'd like to get Andy Cutting into the band, though he doesn't know that yet."

Glad to be of service. I detected from reading your blog that you're not a massive fan of camping? For instance, you said that the Glastonbury festival smells like human excrement...

"Ah. That must have been from a few years ago. We didn't go this year, I just haven't got around to updating the blog much."

Good to see that you're really getting the hang of being a folk musician then...

"I don't camp unless I can help it because it hurts your bones. I'd go as far as to say it's bad for your bones. I wouldn't mind being in a big camper van but I really can't camp because it's so hard on the hips. People roll out those thin little mattresses... Ouch. When the kids were small" - he has three daughters with his wife Jennifer Saunders - "we had to pretend to enjoy camping. But I like hotels.

"What I do enjoy, though, at festivals is teasing people from the stage about the fact that they're camping.  'It was raining last night, wasn't it? It was really banging on my hotel window', that kind of thing. We've done a lot of festivals, this band, and we like to arrive a day early and then stay a day later, wobble around and get drunk. But we stay in a hotel nearby in order to do it.

"Glastonbury was like some kind of hippy refugee camp. You know, we used to get paid in cash when we started out and once, at Glastonbury, Troy left the van open and there was a bag in the back of it with about fifteen grand in it in cash and no one nicked it. How we laughed about that - before we punched Troy in the face. That was back in the days when we didn't trust promoters but we've got ourselves a better agent now."

Oh right. Who's that then?

"Matt Bartlett. He was a promoter and we were so pleased with him that we turned him into a manager. There's so much work connected with gigging that isn't actually gigging... Getting contracts out and that kind of thing."

Ah yes. The whole trying to get paid shenanigans.

"We've been to court from time to time to try and get a contract enforced but the trouble with that is that even if you win you still end up with nothing because of all the fees you have to pay. We've tried chasing them but these days we just deliver a lot of paper."

I also read in that rather-out-of-date blog that you once managed to lock yourself out of a hotel room when you were completely naked?

"That was at the Ibis in Liverpool. There had been a lot of drinking, as you would probably expect, and the toilet door was on a curved wall. I was trying to feel my way to it in the dark and went through the wrong door. If it wasn't for the fact that the staff there were all foreign" and presumably therefore didn't know who Edmondson was "I'm sure that video would have ended up on YouTube. It was all caught on CCTV. I walked boldly into the foyer covering myself with my hands."

You didn't try sticking your head around the corner first? I think I probably would have tried that...

"No. There was only one way to do that particular thing unfortunately."

I mentioned to a couple of people that I was going to be interviewing you and they both said the same thing, which was: "He's married to Jennifer Saunders, you know." I understand she's been unwell: is she OK these days?

"Yes. She's been very well for a couple of years now, though I don't think you ever get the all-clear from breast cancer. They just keep doing tests every once in a while."

And all this stuff about John Inverdale over the weekend: the casual sexism of the BBC's Wimbledon coverage. As the father of three daughters was there ever anything you said to them that was an attempt to prepare them for that kind of thing?

"I don't tell them anything about men. They are all grown up and have left home now: one is married and the other two have permanent boyfriends and I think they've all chosen extremely well. They're lovely blokes. In fact I think for the lot of them there were only two bad boyfriends in 30 years and that's not bad going, is it?

"I think you live by example, don't you? I sometimes wonder whether we've been strict or liberal parents but I actually feel that my daughters are such perfect people that we must have done all right. I really don't understand these men who say 'Three daughters? You must have been at the door with a shotgun!' I mean, why would you not want your daughters, who are in their twenties, to have fulfilling sexual relationships? That's what life is all about, isn't it?"

And what about Mumford & Sons? Any strong feelings one way or the other?

"We saw them at Cambridge a couple of years ago. They were first on the bill and we were headlining that time. Ha! We were supported by Mumford & Sons... I watched them from the side of the stage and thought they were fucking brilliant. I downloaded their stuff from the web and listen to the original - it was from before they rerecorded the first album - and love it. I know people who hate them but they've got a great vocalist. I love his singing."

Ade in Britain: what came first, the idea for the series or the title?

"I came up with the series idea and they came up with the title. I'd had an awful name for it originally though I can't remember what it was. I'd done the Dales and they asked whether there was anything else I'd like to do, so I came up with something based on this book called England in Particular by Sue Clifford and Angela King. Quite often the programmes include folk bands and I must be the main conduit for morris dancing on national TV. In 50 episodes I think we've had seven or eight morris sides."

So what's next on the telly?

"There's a short series on beer in development. I'm trying to convince BBC2 to take it."

Can I recommend a blog by a friend of mine that's about that exact thing?

"Is it the one with the funny name?"

Yes! Zythophile by Martyn Cornell. I used to work with him.

"I've read it. It's a bit historical in places but it was one of the first things I looked at when I started doing some research. It's fascinating to think beer was invented in Iran..."

* Ade Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds have a new album out on August the 19th called Mud, Blood and Beer and will be touring to promote it in November and December.

* If you enjoyed this post, you may also like this, which is an interview with actor and folky Stephen Mangan. Or this, which is a Desert Island (folk) Discs with David Oakes, star of The Borgias and The White Queen.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

What do Sir Paul McCartney, The Civil Wars and Damien Barber have in common?

Andy Cutting told a story during his gig at The Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell on Monday, about his inability to read music. It was something along the lines of how he couldn't do musical notation so he can't write his tunes down and because he can't sing (he claims) it's no good trying to record them on a dictaphone either, as they all come out sounding the same: as a kind of droning noise.

It was a powerfully moving gig and it was hard to imagine anything he did musically coming out badly. So I asked him about it later and he explained that he'd learnt piano as a child but never got on with the notation side of it. "I remember doing grade two and having to choose a piece out of four on a page for sight-reading during the exam. I made a start but by the time the examiner asked me to stop I thought I'd probably finished the one I'd chosen and moved halfway through the next one. It just didn't make any sense to me." Here he is doing something lovely.

He added that he doesn't have any trouble reading or writing words and that he's not alone. Damien Barber, of The Demon Barber Roadshow, is in the same boat, as - he said - is Ralph McTell.

Barber confirmed this. "I never needed to know how to read music really, I pick it up quickly by ear.  They tried me on recorder at school but I never liked it. I once entered a recorder competition and had to play a piece of music from a book. I put a book on the music stand and played it from memory - and came second.

"Now I play with other people I see the benefit. I think the band stuff would be quicker for me if I could read music but I doubt I'll ever find time to learn now. I don't know many people these days who can't do it - I think most younger musicians understand the academic side. But I'd think that most of the people I grew up with couldn't read music.

"It would certainly make arranging quicker and it would be easier to compose - I always forget the tunes I come up with because I never get around to recording them and I can't write them down. But I was impressed with the band at The Transports in Sidmouth this year - they came in and played really complicated music together just from paper. I'd like to be able to do that, but not enough to learn. I quite like being natural, though, and I think there's a nice, earthy honesty to playing by ear."

I asked how he was with other forms of language: words and numbers. "I'm good with words and I love numbers. I can be quite physically clumsy though."

We're very notation-orientated, humans in the 21st century. Writing things down to pass useful knowledge from one generation to the next is central to the story of civilisation and it's why burning books is a taboo. The internet puts a whole new complexion on things again.

Inaccurately, we say that musicians "write" music, when we mostly mean that they've come up with a tune, and a professional musician who can't write music is considered to be in some ways analogous to a famous writer - Hans Christian Anderson, Agatha Christie or WB Yeats, for instance - with dyslexia. I suspect that this is true largely because the western orchestral tradition relies on the ability to read music. So perhaps it's unsurprising that when Cutting was talking about it at the gig, his banter had a self-effacing quality.

But not everyone feels that way.

And there's this, which links through to a transcript of an interview that Eric Clapton did on the Larry King show in February 1998, in which he describes how he learnt to read music and then it "went away".

While I was putting this post together I tweeted this

and got this from John Paul White, of The Civil Wars, who I interviewed a couple of weeks ago

So I was really starting to wonder how common it is for musicians not to be able to read music?

Uncomfortably, I remember traipsing around carrying a violin case and sheet music as a youngster, feeling slightly trapped by my own inability to make the music sound perfect (the way it does on records). Perhaps when you lose the sheet music you get in touch with something more important? Joy? I did enjoy playing but found a lot of the trappings - music stands you could catch your fingers in, orchestra rehearsals at the same time every week, the drone of the tuning up - slightly oppressive.

Professor Pam Heaton is a psychologist at Goldsmith's college who went to music school. I'd been intending to ask her about neural pathways and whether the same part of the brain that is used for reading words is also used for reading music. This was mainly because I'd been sent this very interesting document about the links between dyslexia and "amusia" (which is less amusing than it sounds). I was particularly interested in the part about how there are at least three different kinds of output involved in reading and playing music: playing an instrument, which is reading music and transforming it into motor skills; singing, which is transforming visual symbols into vocal code; and naming notes, which is transforming a visual symbol into a verbal code.

But when I mentioned the number of musicians I'd heard about over the last few days who don't read music, Professor Heaton got very excited. "It's not unusual at all! We've only been writing music down since the 13th or 14th century and 150 years ago it wasn't at all uncommon for people not to be able to read words, even in our society. Music reading is a real add-on: you have to remember that a lot of musical traditions around the world are still entirely oral.

"When children learn music, sight-reading is the thing they find the hardest. But if you think about it, when you're learning to read words you go to school and you read every single day. You do it during the day and then you go home and you probably do it a bit with your mum too. You spend hundreds of hours on it.

"But no one does that with music. You have your music lesson and you do maybe an hour of sight reading in a week. And then if you are a person who hears a piece of music and remembers it when you are learning it, you wouldn't be reading it off the page. It's only if you need to read it that you will end up reading music a lot before it goes into your memory. So in a strange way becoming good at reading music is something you only really do if your memory skills aren't good: your reading skills improve because you need them.

"Perhaps also for a dyslexic musician who plays extremely well it is very burdensome to then have to go back and look at the music: it creates anxiety. The quality of your performance is not affected by your ability to sight-read. The only thing it affects is the kind of work you can do - because session musicians need it."

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