Everyone has a favourite memory of Ade Edmondson's peerless comedy alongside Rik Mayall: blowing up the set of University Challenge on The Young Ones, or fielding darts thrown at his head in the bonkers sitcom Bottom. Three weeks ago, the pair made their last appearance together when a tearful Edmondson was a pallbearer at his friend's funeral. Thus, the Bradford-born comic tweeted that this previously booked tour would now be "different in tone". Mayall, one suspects, would have approved of his preparation: "I'm pissed," Edmondson announces.

In The Young Ones, Edmondson drew on his punk past to play Vyvyan Basterd with uncanny realism, and the Bad Shepherds take his favourite songs from that era and rework them in an English folk tradition. It's not pastiche, but heartfelt and fascinating. Edmondson's plaintive delivery unearths the tragedy in Sonny Curtis's (Clash-covered) I Fought the Law and finds new seams of melancholy in the Jam's Going Underground and the Members' Sound of the Suburbs.

The between-songs humour makes the musical poignancy more startling. "Some people think punk songs are three-chord wonders. This has two," he chuckles, before Wreckless Eric's Whole Wide World. However, performing the songs with pipes and bouzoukis has rekindled the rage in songs dulled by familiarity, particularly the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen.

"This was a favourite of Rik's," he splutters before Motörhead's Ace of Spades, revealing that Mayall had been proud when his 1998 quad bike accident left him technically dead for five days before coming back to life.

"Well, I buried him myself, and this time it doesn't look like he's coming back, so you're all safe," he quips. Lemmy's lyrics – "I don't wanna live for ever" – have never sounded as poignant. There is a momentary silence as lumps fill throats. Then everybody cheers.

• At Newt festival on 12 July. Then touring.