Ade Edmondson & The Bad Shepherds
Exeter Phoenix
16th May, 2009

The Bad Shepherds came about after Edmondson woke from a drinking session in Soho to find he’d purchased a mandolin. Challenged, he started to learn his favourite punk songs on it, and so was born folk-punk. The Shepherds’ lead singer is a resident of the Exeter area, and like the City Football team he supports, his band played a promotion-winning 90 minutes. Man Of The Match was All- Ireland fiddle champion Andy Divan, alongside a sterling performance from ex-Fairport Convention’s Maartin Allcock on guitar. Promoting Yan Tyan Tethera Metheral (‘one, two, three, four’ in the Celtic language, Cumbrian – overdue a revival), The Shepherds reinvented punk classics with a fun Celtic edge that took the packed room and made it sway to intricate reworkings of threechord classics.