A SOHO drinking session and Pocklington Arts Centre played equal parts in Adrian Edmondson forming The Bad Shepherds in a union of south and north.

The former television star of The Young Ones, Bottom and The Comic Strip awoke from the aforesaid session to discover he had purchased a mandolin, setting him on the path to reinterpret his favourite punk songs in a folk style with Troy Donockley, the Uilleann pipes player from Warter, near Pocklington.

On Wednesday, Adrian, Troy and fiddler Andy Dinan bring the latest Bad Shepherds tour to North Yorkshire, where the band first rehearsed at the arts centre in 2008.

The line-up has now settled down to a three-piece. “We’ve been through quite a few people; we’ve had three fiddlers, three double bass players and a percussionist, and we finally got to a noise we like,” says Adrian.

“It’s not that we didn’t like the other people, but this line-up has changed it to be more dynamic. I like the look of it: if you can make enough noise with three, and we can, then I think it looks better than with four, because the focus is turned to the middle, with a couple of flanks of interest.”

The Bad Shepherds now have two albums to their name: 2009’s Yan, Tyan, Tethera, Methera, named after an ancient sheep-counting system that means One, Two, Three, Four, in the tradition of The Ramones’ punk intros, and now By Hook Or By Crook, another title with a link to sheep. Available at the band’s gigs from this month, it will be released officially on the Proper Records label early next year, probably in February.

Adrian has Neil Innes to thank for setting him in motion.

“I’d acquired the mandolin semi-drunkenly – I collect stringed instruments – and started playing chords and it has a way of making you play 6/8ths in the folk tradition. I was working with the Bonzos at the time and me and Neil were playing around one weekend when he said, ‘What you really need is a s**t-hot folk band,” he recalls.

Once Adrian met Troy, both sensed a musical partnership would ensue. “It was a coincidence he lived at Warter, near where I grew up [Edmondson attended Pocklington School], and we knew straightaway as soon as we shook hands that we had a bond,” he says.

“He’s in his 40s, I’m in my 50s, and we share a love of Laurel and Hardy, so we talk to each other about that, and we both kind of just get our music. We look at each other sometimes on stage and think, ‘I can’t believe it works’!”

On the new album, The Bad Shepherds reinterpret the likes of The Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK, XTC’s Making Plans For Nigel, Motorhead’s Ace Of Spades and The Smiths’ Panic, but Adrian is at pains to stress they are not a novelty act.

“It’s not a novelty sound. It’s a very good folk band,” he says.

“I like the folk sound but I’m not a great lover of folk songs about sailors being forced out of the navy or the lady of the manor and the blacksmith. I just needed to find a better repertoire.

“I’ve chosen songs of social comment and protest songs and none sounds embarrassing coming out of my mouth. It wouldn’t work if the songs weren’t good, and what surprises most is how lyrically observant they are when some were written by boys in their late-teens, when people thought of them as just jumping up and down and spitting.”

Wreckless Eric was so moved when he heard The Bad Shepherds’ version of Whole Wide World that he said it was “like the geography of his soul”.

“We’re not a covers’ band but a reinterpreting band. We have to make a song ours,” says Adrian. “I do it first; Troy has a listen, rejects my idea and we start again.”

They are in agreement, however, over the purpose of the Bad Shepherds’ music. “These songs are folk songs and they should be passed down the generations and played around with, in the way that folk music is never afraid to play around with things,” says Adrian.

The band played 100 shows last year and are on course to do again in 2010, much to his delight. “Life is kind of a series of accidents; very happy accidents, really. This one just came from me acquiring a mandolin and has become a full-time activity for me,” he says.

There is one novelty to The Bad Shepherds.

“It’s the first time I’ve been myself on stage [rather than playing a character],” says Adrian. “I was uncomfortable at first but now I’m fine with it, and I realise they don’t need three minutes of me filling in with patter. Now we can do five songs in a row without me interjecting.”

• Adrian Edmondson and The Bad Shepherds play The Duchess, York, on Wednesday, supported by Ella Edmondson. Tickets: £16 on 0844 477 1000 or £18 on the door.