Comedian Ade Edmondson talks about his new project ‘The Idiot Bastard Band’

THE purchase of a mandolin on a drunken whim led Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band devotee Ade Edmondson to form his own group dedicated to singing silly songs

Over the years we’ve seen many faces of Adrian Edmondson, 55. Vyvyan Basterd, the violent tangerine-haired punk and hamster-cuddling madman of The Young Ones. Eddie Hitler, Bottom’s bespectacled dimwit and drunk with a propensity for, yep, violence. The husband of Jennifer Saunders and devoted father of their three daughters. And, in recent years, a rather more gentle and avuncular presence in the likes of Jonathan Creek, Holby City, a documentary series The Dales exploring life in Yorkshire, and Ade in Britain, in which he toured the country in a classic caravan, chatting to folk about sausages. He even reached the finals of Hell’s Kitchen, though he cheated with his ravioli. You might say it’s a typical trajectory, from madman to middle-aged. The punk put out to pasture, the agitator turned establishment.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Edmondson’s other lifelong passion is music. Once a sideline to the comedy, it is more and more becoming the main draw. He has been in a folk-punk outfit called The Bad Shepherds for years now, ever since he bought a mandolin on a drunken whim and started thrashing out melodies such as Anarchy in the UK. Most recently he formed a comedy super group called The Idiot Bastard Band. It features some of the great and the good of British comedy – Phill Jupitus, Neil Innes, Rowland Rivron – singing, joking, strumming, plucking, bowing, and coming soon to a venue near you. You only have to talk to Edmondson for five minutes to realise how much he loves his bands. In fact these days he seems more interested in singing for people than making them laugh.

“The comedy just became a job,” he tells me, somewhat apologetically. “And most jobs are boring. Being in the bands feels like how it used to feel with Rik [Mayall] when we first started out. You’re doing your hobby and, f*** me, you’re actually earning money from it. How amazing.” He grins, and starts telling me about the time they did Glastonbury, and how next year the Idiot Bastards will tour Australia.

Hang on a minute. Isn’t Edmondson reuniting with Mayall, his partner in The Young Ones and co-writer and star of Bottom, for one last hurrah? As recently as August an official announcement was made that the duo were writing six new episodes in which their characters, Eddie and Richie, were marooned on an island and presumably still finding new ways to beat the living daylights out of one another. Edmondson and Mayall had been flirting with returning to Bottom for years. There was often talk in interviews about the laughs Edmondson felt were still to be had from seeing their ageing, decrepit characters beat each other about the head with Zimmer frames. Suddenly it seemed to be happening.

Except it’s not. “No, we are not reuniting,” says Edmondson, looking sheepish. “We wrote a couple of episodes and I decided not to carry on.” Why? “I just feel like I’ve been there,” he says with a sigh. “Bottom was really good. Why f*** it up with two old gits who can’t quite punch each other any more?”

So why did he agree to it in the first place? “I made a complete mess of it and everyone is very cross with me,” he admits. “Rik... well, he nearly understands why I don’t want to do it. Anyway, I feel a lot better for it. I wasn’t enjoying it at all, though I have to say it was quite funny, the two episodes we wrote. It just felt like being on a treadmill. When I called a stop to it after the last live tour in 2003 I think I was right. I shouldn’t have been tempted back.” He starts laughing and then adds, “Rik shouldn’t have asked me and made it so easy.”

Not that there has been a fall-out. “Oh no,” he says. “We meet each other infrequently, go for a meal. We’re like brothers, with everything that implies – love and hate. He always bleats on about us writing something. Eventually I caved.”

We meet first thing in the morning at the private Hospital Club in Soho. Edmondson is already there when I arrive, though it takes a while to spot him. He has something of the everyman about him: a kind, clean shaven face, laughing eyes, big open smile. He looks like someone who looks a bit like Adrian Edmondson, which is probably useful when you’re one half of British comedy’s most famous and enduring marriage. He is wearing a checked shirt with suede elbow patches, a brown corduroy jacket and dark jeans. The look is well-heeled, well turned out, well off. He comes across as a cool dad; silly, funny and exceptionally nice. The only time I detect one of his characters lurking inside is when he grins. That combination of smirk and grimace, like he’s just sniffed a bad smell and liked it, flashes across his face. Very Vyvyan. He tells me he has been for a long walk already today, grabs a handful of stomach, does the grin. “I’m trying to do one walk a day,” he explains. “My new regime. I’m trying to get smaller.”

For a conversation with a comedian, things get serious. In 2009 Saunders, whom he met in the Eighties when they were performing at the Comedy Store in London, was diagnosed with breast cancer. How is she doing? “She is very well,” he says. “She had a check up the other week and it’s all looking very good. But you know, she’s going to be on pills forever... She rattles.” He chuckles softly and tells me he how much he hated all the talk of ‘battling’ cancer that was bandied about in the press. “Basically it means that if you don’t beat it, you’ve lost. You know... ‘she was just a complete loser with cancer’. Anyway, it’s best not to talk about it. It just looks pathetic. People bleating on... I mean, cancer happens to so many people. The press like to make out that it’s unusual and unique, but it’s not.”

We talk about his love of music growing up in West Riding, Yorkshire, and in particular musical comedy. “The first album I ever bought was a little EP of Val Doonican singing comedy Irish songs like Delaney’s Donkey and Paddy McGinty’s Goat,” he says. As a teenager Edmondson discovered the Bonzo Dog Doo- Dah Band, the avant-garde Sixties outfit that inspired everyone from Monty Python to the Beatles, and was blown away. He is appalled to hear that I don’t know their music and instructs me to go and listen to them in depth, which I do, in particular his favourite song of all time, I’m Bored.

“I was 16 and it was 1973 when I heard the Bonzos’ first album, Gorilla,” he recalls. “It was a huge moment for me. I basically talk like I do because of [lead singer] Viv Stanshall. All of my family have broad northern accents but I spent all my time basically being Viv.”

It was through the Bonzos that Edmondson created the Idiot Bastards (and pretty much everything else he has ever done). In 2006, to celebrate the band’s 40th anniversary, he took part in a tribute concert with various other comedians – Paul Merton, Stephen Fry, Phill Jupitus, Bill Bailey – who had been influenced by their particularly English brand of surrealist humour, wordplay, whimsy and physicality. “While the remaining members of the Bonzos were rehearsing we were like a bunch of little boys in the balcony confronted with their heroes,” he laughs. “I think it’s pretty telling that though the Bonzos aren’t necessarily that well known now, all these comedians that are worshipped them.”

After the concert and accompanying tour, Edmondson decided to form a new band. And so the Idiot Bastards were born, with a happily shambolic remit to sing songs old and new, play instruments old and new, and introduce guests old and new. Originally, there were five members. However Simon Brint, one half of comedy musical duo and French and Saunders house band Raw Sex, committed suicide last year. “Do you know about Simon?” Edmondson asks me quietly. “He topped himself, which was just unbelievable.” He shakes his head, laughs a hollow laugh. “I’ve had two friends do that over successive years. Do you think it’s me?

“I really miss him,” he continues. “Really miss him. I mean, I knew he was poorly. We were all trying to help him. It’s just that... he promised he wouldn’t. People often feel suicidal, but the decision to do it is something else. It’s quite an aggressive thing to do. An act of aggression against everyone you leave behind.”

Nevertheless, they decided to keep up with the band. “I love it,” he says. “I love the people in these bands. I love touring. I love performing. It’s where I feel really happy. I know it’s not the most high profile thing to be doing...” He looks sheepish again. “They are never going to be enormous or anything. But, well, it’s a lot of fun.”

He wanted to be an actor from a young age. Or a musician. The family moved around extensively because his father was a teacher in the armed forces. They lived in Cyprus, Bahrain and Uganda, but when Edmondson was 11 he was sent back to England, to boarding school. “I was the arty one, forever putting things on,” he tells me. “We did little festivals in the school hall. You know, a piece of Pinter and then Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin on recorders.” Were his parents arty? “Oh no, they were dead against it,” he says. “My dad used to disparagingly call my guitar my banjo. And then I eventually got a banjo...”

He tells me a rather sad story about being suspended (“just for smoking and drinking, normal stuff”) and running away from boarding school. He went missing for three days before deciding to return home. “My dad came to pick me up and drive me home,” he recalls. “It was a very silent car. At one point he said to me,” and now he adopts an impeccable northern accent, “‘what are you going to do with your life?’ I told him I wanted to be an actor and he pulled over into a lay-by, turned the ignition off, and put his head in his hands. Then he said, ‘you’ll never get a mortgage’. That was my dad.” Edmondson laughs and laughs at this. But it must have been tough? “Well, it spurred me on,” he says, refusing to feel sorry for himself. “It’s good to have something to kick against.” He hated boarding school though it was, at least, “an invitation to be naughty”. His parents, meanwhile, were in Uganda. “It was around the time of Idi Amin and I didn’t really hear from them for a long time,” he says. Then he switches to perfectly clipped, Viv Stanshall-esque, RP. “Stiff upper lip, and all that. I quite like repression as a mode of dealing with things.” He gets serious again. “But you know, boarding school was appalling. It was a regime, like being in the Army. Step out of line, and you get hit. We even had fagging, though it died out just at the point when I would have got my own fag.”

He studied drama at Manchester University, arriving in the city in the midst of strikes, the three-day week and the birth of punk. On his very first day, he met Rik Mayall.

“He got off the bus in front of me,” Edmondson remembers with a smile. “I remember thinking, what a twat. He had very long hair and smoked his cigarettes with great affectation. He was one of those people who tapped his cigarette on the packet and lit a Zippo on his thigh.”

Nevertheless, they quickly realised they were cut from the same cloth. “We were both sons of teachers, we both had the same Bonzos album with us, and the same paisley dressing gowns from M&S that our mothers had packed for us. We had both been in Waiting for Godot. We had been the same people in different places.”

After they graduated they set about doing small, punk-inspired gigs in pubs before winding up at London’s Comedy Store, the hub of the so-called alternative comedy boom in the early Eighties. This is where they met French and Saunders (“I met Jennifer in a strip club, and five years later we got together”), Paul Merton, Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton and many more. And not long after, The Young Ones blasted on to the scene. Anti-Thatcherite, anti-capitalist, anarchic, and just plain silly, it represented Eighties Britain at its best (or worst, depending on who you were).

“We made the pilot episode and the BBC did not understand it at all,” Edmondson says. “Ben [Elton] had to write an essay about it, explaining why it was funny.” He chuckles. “Oh, I’d love to read that essay now. We were very influenced by the 1930s film Hellzapoppin’ – that wacky, zany Marx Brothers feel with a bit of Fred and Ginger thrown in. But you watch The Young Ones now and really, it’s not very funny.”

He remains most proud of Bottom, which “came from a tradition of Morecambe and Wise, mixed with a bit of Waiting for Godot”. Nihilistic, crude, and extremely violent, it became a cult hit though, like The Young Ones at first, it puzzled critics. During the live tours that followed, both Mayall and Edmondson regularly got injured pulling off their outlandish stunts. “We did split each other’s eyebrows a few times,” he says with a smile. “It creates a lot of blood and makes the audience very nervous. I remember clipping Rik once on the top of his nose with a pan and there were great strings of blood. He sweats so much he never noticed.”

Edmondson doesn’t watch much comedy these days, apart from when he goes to see his daughter. (She performs in an all-female outfit called Lady Garden, while another daughter is a musician). Instead he has set up a projector at home where he watches Laurel and Hardy films, while his study is full of instruments. Since their children left home, he and Saunders have returned from Devon – where they were living a quiet rural life, complete with farm animals – to London. Life is good, it appears, without the bother of comedy. “You do get to a stage in life when you think, what do I really want to do?” Edmondson says. “If you’re fortunate enough to be able to choose, well, you should choose.” And what has he chosen? He flashes me a dirty grin before he answers. “I want to have fun with bands.”

The Idiot Bastard Band plays Edinburgh HMV Picture House, 10 November, and Glasgow Old Fruitmarket, 11 November, tickets £22.50, www.theidiotbastardband.co.uk