For the young ones won't be young ones very long

I have been to the City Varieties to see Ade Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds, in whom I was rather disappointed. My understanding had been that they played folk versions of punk songs, but actually they played punk songs on folk instruments, which is a rather different thing. The band consisted of violin, mandolin (I think), bouzouki with occasional pipes.  

The two songs that responded best to this treatment were, as it happens, both by the Sex Pistols. The drone of the pipes framed the nihilism (alright the pseudy, play-acting nihilism) of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ very well and ‘God Save the Queen’ was declaimed by Edmondson in a sort of half-spoken, poetry reading style that both reflected its structure and in fact matched Lydon’s delivery in the original. Not of course that I am suggesting it is poetry per se. “We’re the flowers in the dustbin, we’re the poison in your human machine”. I don’t think so.

However, when they covered, for example, the Ramones all it did was remind me how brilliant the originals were when I saw them at the Rainbow on, I think, New Year's Eve 1977. Gabba Gabba Hey!. High point musically of the Bad Shepherds set was a version of ‘Shipbuilding’, not, as you will have spotted, a punk song, but rather one written with the intent that it be interpreted by different artists, in different styles and whose lyrics – described by Elvis Costello as the best that he ever wrote – are certainly poetry.

I was there

So, all in all a bit of a let down, notwithstanding some fine, crude banter between songs by the self-styled “bloke off the telly”. And there were a large number of empty seats for a sold-out gig.