ADRIAN Edmondson & The Bad Shepherds’ Pocklington Arts Centre show on December 8 is the first on their 24-date autumn tour to have sold out.

Pocklington School alumnus Edmondson’s folk-punk outfit will be promoting their third album, Mud, Blood & Beer, after its August 19 release on his own Monsoon Music label.

As ever, classic punk and alternative songs, such as Madness’s Our House, The Jam’s Going Underground and The Stranglers’ No More Heroes, have been lovingly re-imagined in the Bad Shepherds’ distinctive folk style, complemented for the first time by original material.

The lyrics to title track Mud Blood & Beer were penned by Edmondson as an homage to his new career as a festival musician, while the closing Off To The Beer Tent is a furious jig written by the band.

In the 2013 line-up are Edmondson, All-Ireland Fiddle Champion Andy Dinan and uilleann piper and cittern player Troy Donockley, from Warter, near Pocklington.

The Bad Shepherds have re-grouped this year after time out for the members’ other pursuits, as Edmondson reveals. “Our last performance was at The Union Chapel in London at the end of 2011. We’d been going since 2008, made two albums and done hundreds of gigs. We needed a break, to get a fresh perspective on things as much as anything else,” he says.

“Troy was going on a year-long world tour with the Finnish prog-metal band Nightwish and Andy was starting a new band, Ducie. Knowing how the balls can sometimes drop forever when you stop juggling, I wasn’t sure that we’d ever really get back together.”

Edmondson had “some TV shows to make”. “Bizarrely this involved a move to revive Bottom,” he says. “When the idea for the new Bottom series came, we met and worked on it for a while, but pretty soon I realised it wasn’t what I wanted to do – it felt too much like treading the same path again.

“Instead I realised that what I really wanted to do was get together with The Bad Shepherds again. Why? Because I am in love with the band. Because I love the sound we make. Because I love being with Troy and Andy. Because the best gigs I’ve ever done in my life, in any art form – in terms of excitement and connection with an audience – have been with The Bad Shepherds.”

Roll on December 8 in Pock, when the support act will be husband and wife folk duo Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou. Before then, the tour calls in at its only other Yorkshire destination, Leeds City Varieties, on November 17; box office, 0113 243 0808 or cityvarieties.co.uk