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An Evening With Chumbawamba and O'Hooley and Tidow

Sixteen days in March 2010.

Here are some random impressions from the tour, little things that pop into my head rather than the 'and then on Tuesday we drove to London' narrative you normally get. That's partly because my rock'n'roll brain is so fried that once it's done the details of the tour start to blur and merge.

We started in the Lake District, I remember that. Boff got up early the next morning and ran up a small mountain before breakfast and then slept all the way to London - a gig which will sadly be remembered by all mainly for the persistent drunken heckling by a lovely woman who was essentially over-excited about seeing us, thought it was still the late eighties, and wanted to hear Whitewash. Good job we're used to it. I wonder if The Unthanks have to put up with that sort of thing?

Food featured, as it always does. The hours on the motorway are punctuated by service station stops. Our observations? Waitrose was a bit of a disappointment, and M&S don't do as good a range of veggie sandwiches as they used to, although the falafel and hummus wrap was quite a hit. We try and stay reasonably healthy on tour - most of us go running if there's time (Phil pops into an art gallery or admires the Norman architecture of a nearby church while we're doing this, and then joins us for breakfast), but illness, as ever, featured on the tour. Heidi (the Tidow of O'Hooley and Tidow) ate some re-heated rice in Keswick and paid a hefty price for a few days afterwards. Lou went down with a humdinger of a cold halfway through, and a couple of times it was touch and go whether she'd be able to do the show. But we are, if nothing else, troopers. Lou did point out, between bouts of coughing, that we have never yet cancelled a gig due to illness, a comment which led us to tell the audience about all the times various of us have thrown upon stage. Thank you for sharing.

Philip, with his crinkly metal tie, and his George Melly impersonation was the star of the show. I think his spell as Narrator in Riot, Rebellion and Bloody Insurrection (where he had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand) may have gone to his head. He took plenty of photos too, so expect a gallery sometime soon.



The new songs went down very well. You can never predict exactly which ones will work and which won't. The rattles were bit hit in Wagner At The Opera and the couple of songs where Belinda and Heidi joined us onstage made it feel like a proper Evening With … rather than just the usual band and support band set-up. Belinda was ecstatic when there happened to be a grand piano in the venue.

We revisited some of or favourite haunts on this tour - take a bow West End Centre and Bury Met, you know you deserve it. We played in pubs, Arts Centres, beautiful old churches, and of course, the wonderfully posh surroundings of the Howard Assembly Rooms in Leeds. Thank you everybody who made the effort to dress up for the occasion - it was wonderful looking out at you all.

We clocked up a lot of miles on the tour - Neil's got the driving equivalent of bedsores - but like the pain of childbirth, I'm told, it's receded and forgotten. We've all got used to making our own breakfasts again now and anticipating the joys of the next batch of shows. Germany (Switzerland and the Czech Republic) here we come. Now, how do you say Devil's Interval in German?

That Thing I Seem to End Up Writing Every Five Years

Voting and Not Voting: a cyclical discussion that’s perpetuated by those well-embedded myths about all the half-arsed deadbeats who can’t leave the sofa for long enough to get down to the Polling Station. Me, I’m usually one of them. Wallowing in my own ignorance, unaware of the great disservice I’m doing to the petticoated women who threw themselves in front of horses for me to be able to vote.

So here’s the discussion again; or at least my side of it. My defence against being burnt at the stake for not voting. And my defence is basically that whether or not I vote isn’t, in most cases, important; what’s important is what I do the rest of the time, in that five-year gap between polling days.

First though, I’ll cover myself. If you live in an area where there’s a genuine chance of your vote ousting the Tories or the BNP, or if you genuinely feel better for having voted, or if you use your vote as a springboard to getting involved in real community politics, or if you just feel like a walk down to the polling booth will do you good and stretch your legs, then it makes sense to vote.

But if your vote is the expression of your political view, if it’s the focus of your politics, then it ridicules the people who lobbied, chained themselves to railings, spent time in prisons, marched and campaigned for the vote in the first place. Those people were activists, not politicians. They believed in the politics of community action, striking, debating, leafleting, singing, direct action, changing the world around them. If they thought for a minute that the eventual extent of our political power would be making a cross on a ballot paper, they might have some sympathy with the half-arsed deadbeats like me.

Don’t be satisfied with your vote against the Tories or BNP; get involved in actively working to stop them gaining ground in your area – I’m talking about every day other than the day of the General Election, here – by talking to people, writing, organising, whatever it is you feel you can do. Because the bigger problem than the right-wing bigots getting Parliamentary seats is right-wing bigots taking over our cultural and social lives, because that’s where people really get hurt. On a day-to-day level.

In my constituency (West Leeds) the Labour Party have such a safe seat that they’ve parachuted in a London-born Oxbridge career politician (and a huge vote-loser in another constituency at the last election) to contest the General Election. She was placed there in front of local candidates because she’s one of New Labour’s up-and-coming stars and they need her in Parliament. Whether we, the people who live here, need her in West Leeds is irrelevant to the Party.

The Labour vote here is usually around the 19,000 mark. The Lib-Dems get around 6,000, the Tories even less. The BNP struggle to top 1,000. This is a safe Labour seat. My vote is irrelevant. There are enough people here who will vote for an unknown Blairite outsider to stop any chance of the Tories or BNP getting a sniff at power. So what’s important for me is that I use my passion for this area and for its people and its politics to get involved in it on an everyday level. Do the things I do best, locally. Maybe part of that involvement would involve keeping a check on our new Labour MP, trying to encourage her to work for the people here and not just for Party Central Office. I don’t know if I could stomach that, to be honest; but I will try.

There’s another argument here. A vote ‘against’ the Tories and BNP doesn’t register as a vote against anything, it registers only as a vote for (in this instance) the Labour Party. And once a party has that mandate, they’ll up and run with it for the next five years, doing whatever their leader decides to do. It’s what whips are for; to stop your local MP (who you voted for) from opposing the Glorious Leader (who you didn’t). That war we opposed? We inadvertently voted for it; shut up.

Yes, people worked, fought (and some died) for the vote. But they did it because they wanted it as a right, not an obligation or a duty. As a right to be used wisely and sensibly. Right now we live in a country where cynicism of the major parties is at an all-time high; understandably so. Basically, they’re all crooks, the lot of ‘em. Why shouldn’t I have the right to refuse to support any of them? Why should I have to demean my intelligence, my work and my ideas by thinking that by putting my cross in a box I am suddenly A Participant In This Democratic System? I think I play my part in this society in the way I live and work, not in whether or not I vote. People who would accuse me of “not caring” or “not bothering” are wrong. I ‘care’ and ‘bother’ every day.

It’s been said before a thousand times, but if ballot papers included the option ‘None Of The Above’ we might have to rethink our attitudes to non-voters; basically they couldn’t be accused any more of “not bothering”. All those people (including me) who are generally typified as suffering from ignorance, or lazyitis, or both, would have the chance to at least pro-actively register their dissatisfaction with the candidates. Which wouldn’t solve anything, really, other than putting a halt to the assumption that my refusal to vote for one war-mongering, self-interested bunch of Oxbridge careerists over another means I don’t care.

There’s a new and hugely-popular group called Folk Against Fascism. I love the whole idea of it, because it works within a definite community and works on a cultural issue (the far right’s infiltration of traditional music) that it understands and knows. It’s a good example of one of the most effective ways of affecting the political landscape – because I believe that most real change comes from the bottom up, through culture and society, not from the top down by laws and statutes and those schoolboy Commons debates.

Changed attitudes to race, sexuality and gender over the past few decades have come about through huge shifts in media, culture and community; in my lifetime, and where I live, black music and black footballers have changed our attitudes to race more than any number of anti-racist laws (essential though they may be). Laws concerning Civil Partnerships, equality for women and tolerance of others’ beliefs have been a response to a changing culture, they didn’t create it.

I see the day-to-day ways we try to change things as being the real politics. Voting with your feet, your mouth and your purse. Where you choose to go, what you choose to do. That’s all more important than that one cross on a ballot paper. I don’t want the BNP in Parliament. But let’s face it, that’s highly unlikely. Much more likely is that they’ll meet in a local pub, or march down the street, or smash the Asian shop’s windows, or start the racist chants at the football match, or join your local Morris Dancers. And those are the places where we can be really effective in changing attitudes and ideas.

There’s an awful lot of ground between “Can’t be bothered to go down the Polling Station” and “People fought for the right to vote. It’s my duty!” An awful lot. It’s in that space that campaigns can be fought, laws can be made and broken, communities strengthened or crushed. And it’s in that space where the real stuff happens.

As I say, if there’s a chance the Tories or BNP could win a seat in your constituency, then it’s worth that trip to the Polling Station on Election day. But the real politics – the way things change – is down to what you do every other day.

Pope To Visit Britain

So. The Pope is coming to visit us. In September. He’s been invited by Gordon Brown, and he will be warmly welcomed by the Queen.

This is a Pope who opposes women's reproductive rights, gay equality, embryonic stem cell research and the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV.

And this is a Pope who plays an ongoing role in the cover-up of child sex abuse by Catholic clergy, a Pope who happily rehabilitated the Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson, and decreed the beatification and sainthood of the war-time Pope, Pius XII, who stands accused of failing to speak out against the Holocaust.

Right now, the Leaders of the Catholic Church – and the Pope as its head – stand accused of child abuse on a mass scale. Meanwhile, a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “The PM is obviously delighted at the prospect of a visit from Pope Benedict XVI to Britain.

“It would be a moving and momentous occasion for the whole country and he would undoubtedly receive the warmest of welcomes.”

Conservative leader David Cameron said he was “delighted” to hear of the possible visit. He said: “Such a visit - the first in over a quarter of a century - would be greatly welcomed not only by Roman Catholics but by the country as a whole.”

Really? Will his visit be welcomed by the country as a whole? That whole would include me and you. I certainly don’t welcome a visit from a holocaust-denying, homophobic and backward leader who is in the act of covering up child abuse.

Pope Benedict XVI will make his visit between September 16 and 19. He will be received by the Queen, who is Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and the Duke of Edinburgh at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh on September 16.

Leeds Refuse Workers

The other night I went to a benefit concert in Leeds, a large hall full of supporters of the Refuse Workers strike. Keith Allen (him off Fat Les) played, and some others. It wasn’t about who played, though, it was about the strike and the workers.

The Leeds Refuse workers – bin-emptiers, street-cleaners – have been on strike for almost two months, because they’ve been singled out by the Leeds Council as scapegoats for a cost-cutting exercise.

The 600 strikers walked out on the 7th September over Leeds Council’s proposals to level down pay for workers in the refuse and street cleaning department as a bizarre way of equalising women’s pay, which they’ve been forced to do by law. These workers face pay cuts of up to £6,000 down from an average of £18,000. The City Council is run by a Lib Dem/Tory administration.

In short, the council officers, the suits and leaders (all on substantial, protected wages, some earning well over £100,000 a year) picked on the sector of the council workforce that they thought might give them the least trouble. They thought wrong, obviously. Bins are overflowing, rats are thriving, but significantly the people of Leeds are almost unanimously supporting the strike.

At the gig I was shocked because this was the union’s crowd, the workers crowd. Where were the young people? Where were the eco-activists and anti-fascists? Leeds is a student city. Where were they all? They get their bins emptied, don’t they? Mind you, we all choose our forms of protest and activism, and I’m happy to have witnessed and been encouraged by the determination of the Refuse strikers.

How long this strike will last I don’t know. Me, I’ll put up with having to take my rubbish down to the dump. I’ll laugh at the council’s scab refuse workers on their once-a-month collection. And I’ll raise a fist for the workers who don’t give in to unreasonable demands, who do a job that we all respect, and who have decided not to be treated like serfs by the well-paid councillors who came up with this scheme.

And to jump issues: The crypto-fascist English Defence League are turning up in Leeds on 31 October. Here’s hoping there’s a huge turn-out of anti-racists; and here’s hoping people might make a connection between the relatively clear politics of anti-fascism and the politics of supporting workers’ rights.

We’re not Jamming!

Canadian Folk Festivals 2009

The Canadian Folk Festival – it’s a closed secret. What happens over there doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else on the planet, but all the British musicians who make the trip over there and play these things don’t ever say anything once they get back. Shhh! Canada? Folk Festival? Don’t know what you’re on about, mate.

It’s like the Freemasons. You meet someone who’s played at one and suddenly you’re all fancy handshakes and nods and winks. Oh yes, ha ha, how weird and freaky… But between ourselves, let’s keep it quiet, eh?

Here’s the big secret (what a blabbermouth. Half a lager and a cocktail with an umbrella in it and I’ll tell you anything). You go to Canada and play one of the Folk Festivals. You may or may not get the chance to play on the main stage (and to be honest, the main stage is an irrelevance there). You’re given an itinerary that tells you that you’ll be doing four workshops over the weekend, at any given time of day, sharing a stage with any given type of act/musician/band. It’s like opening Xmas presents. Ooh, what’ve we got? It’s exciting and weird and interesting.

Canadian festivals open their gates at some unearthly hour of the morning, and hundreds – no, many thousands – of people pile through the gap armed with folding chairs and rucksacks full of sandwiches. At one such festival last year we were told that this morning rush was called (after the preferred choice of footwear) ‘The Birkenstock Dash’.

Those few hundred who get to the main stage first set up their chairs and their little rugs and blankets, do their territorial pissing, and then wander off to find coffee. The chairs and blankets stay put, ensuring that the space is reserved for the time seven hours later when some ageing old folkie strums his/her way through a couple of old hits as the evening’s finale.

Thus, the main stage audience is claimed and staked out first thing. The only thing to do is see what’s going on on the other stages. There are usually four, five, six other stages. Here’s where the interesting stuff goes on. No Birkenstock ‘claim your patch’ bollocks here. Turn up and watch. Elbow your way to the front, like at a proper gig.

The Canadian organisers call them ‘workshops’. That implies teaching, or demonstrating, or something. In reality they’re loose gatherings of several musicians, stick ‘em on a stage together and see what they come up with. And call it ‘a workshop’.

Now anyone that knows Chumbawamba will know that we’re not Grateful Dead or Phish or any of those jamming bands. In fact, we are officially the anti-jamming band. We don’t jam. We meet. We don’t play loosely together, hoping for musical inspiration. We meet. We don’t cruise the old twelve-bar looking for inspiration. We meet.

We meet and discuss what we should sing about, and how, and why, and in what form. It makes everyone’s life simpler and clearer. It’s verbal and open, not hidden behind fretwork and foot-tapping and fancy musicianship. That’s how we see it, anyway.

So the idea of this band sharing music with other bands on stage at these Canadian Festivals could be seen as the ultimate horror. But no! Because, despite our aversion to jamming/noodling/communicating with the musical muse, we love a challenge. Love being thrown in at the deep end. Swim, y’buggers!

And this is what the Canadian Festival has taught us – get up there, and make it work. There’s an audience. Yes, we know it’s 11 o’clock in the morning. But the audience want to be entertained. Now! Fear and thrill all rolled into one.

Over the past few years we’ve been up onstage playing with Scottish trad fiddlers, fey singer-songwriters, African dancebands, the lot. This year at Edmonton we were pitched right in with Arrested Development, fantastic Atlanta rap group, great tunes, amazing history, great politics. But a hip-hop group nonetheless, and how do we fit in with that? We shared a stage for an hour. We played our songs, laughed together, sang ‘Enough is Enough’ and kept the rhythm and chords going as Speech from Arrested Development rapped over the top. We joined in with them, they joined in with us. We marvelled at the ass-shaking women on stage (don’t cry ‘sexist!’, we all love to see a woman shaking her behind), they laughed at our ridiculous Englishness, and we all met somewhere in the middle … somewhere that’s friendly and funny and political and audience-friendly and entertaining.

And half-way through the show I caught myself thinking, ‘this wouldn’t happen this easily anywhere else in the world.’

I recently saw Tinariwen and Tunng playing in Leeds. Two different cultures meeting in the middle. It was brilliant. And I thought then, as I think now, this is what happens on stage at all those strange and obscure and massive and amazing Canadian festivals. Every day of the long weekend, on five different stages. Sometimes it’s a disaster. Sometimes it’s boring. But it’s always an adventure. Always.

We did other workshops that weekend. One with some bands I can’t remember the name of. One with Oysterband and Dick Gaughan (which, frankly, was too easy – joining in with Gaughan on ‘Diggers Song’ and convincing Chopper from the Oysters up to sing Johnny Cash with us) and one with Mongolian throat singers Hanggai, which was incredible. Singing one of our acapella songs along to a throat-sung drone was risky, ridiculous and beautiful, all at the same time. Joining in with their Chinese drinking song was a joy.

So there you have it. The secret of the Canadian festival. It doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else in the world – the Canadians have their own strange rules within their own cultural bubble, and I’m happy for them. Happy that they don’t think like we do, that festivals have to be neatly parceled into genres and styles and boxes. Happy that they don’t feel the need to massage the artist’s egos by keeping them well separated from the other acts. Happy that it forces us musicians into thinking on our feet, working together, dealing with stuff outside our cosy worlds.

And believe me, the Canadian Festivals are well outside this band’s cosy world. Good. I’m glad. Just don’t expect me to buy a pair of Birkenstocks.

Boff 2009

Seething Wells, Not Michael Jackson

Irony. It’s what the British do best.

Seething (Steven) Wells died two days ago. Then tonight, starting to write this, I find out that Michael Jackson has died. One of these two men owned a ranch called Neverland and had three children called Michael Joseph Jackson Jr, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince Michael Jackson II. The other one was the King of Pop.

I grew up reading the NME, the New Musical Express as it was called back then in the mid-seventies. I ate it up, all the cynical hipster talk and the post-hippy anti-establishment rants. Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray sticking it to Pink Floyd and ELP and the rest of their bloated ilk.

Then along came Tony Parsons and the new writers, ably deconstructing the decade and rebuilding it as punk, replacing cynicism and cannabis with positivism and anger and come on, get off your arse and do it yourself.

That was important for me back then – I needed to read stuff by people who were prepared to kick me up the arse and tell me to do something. Anything. Anything except sitting down reading the NME.

Post-punk (those salad days between the gruesome let-down of Sid joining the Pistols and the horror of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet) was a vacuum filled by those clever enough to see that good music, good art, involved a knowledge of politics and a sense that the world was much bigger than Top of The Pops: Crass, The Specials, Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, Dead Kennedys. And so a new bunch of journalists came crawling out of the lefty woodwork to champion this music, slowly at first, but eventually picking up momentum… ex-fanzine writers, pushing and jabbing each other into saying something worthwhile in the national music papers (there were three back then – NME, Sounds and Melody Maker).

Swells came along on that wave. I first heard about him through a couple of fanzines done by himself and a local Leeds lad called James Brown – Attack On Bzag and Molotov Comics. Swells wrote poems, polemic-disguised-as-poems. Great, ranty, in-your-face poems. Along with people like Mekons’ Jon Langford I contributed stuff to both zines, convinced that here in Leeds in the doldrums of the early eighties there was something exciting and important coming out of the Rock Against Racism, Miners Strike northern city culture.

Next I knew he was in the NME writing reviews. Scathing reviews. All the old guard – all your Phil Collins has-beens – were summarily summonsed and shot by Swells. I remember an interview with Mike Oldfield. It may or may not have been on board Mike Oldfield’s private jet. Or was it conducted while playing tennis? Memory tells me it was an exercise in the annihilation of pompousness, but mostly I remember laughing at the lad’s cheek and his ability to sneak his brand of agit-prop into the pages of the New Musical Express. James Brown says of Swells’ time at NME that “he was obsessed with class war, masturbation, dogs, cancer, Jello Biafra and the multiple use of the exclamation mark.”

Come 1985 and Chumbawamba released our first single and got our first proper live reviews in the music press. And who was there singing our praises, sticking up for this weird northern punk/cabaret hybrid? Seething Wells. From that time on he stuck his neck out for us. In a world where the NME editor increasingly dictated copy according to what the advertisers/record companies wanted to see, Swells was the thorn in the side who refused to kow-tow to the bland norm. Through the miners strike he was alone in championing the idea that music could be used for something important, that there were bigger issues here than whatever gold lame was being worn by Haircut 100 or ABC on Top Of The Pops.

Swells stuck by Chumbawamba when we were ridiculed and lambasted by the journo hipsters who celebrated the return of bland, everyday and utterly non-political ‘indie’ music which dominated the next decade. Politics was unfashionable (especially if you had a job writing record reviews for a music mag). Bands like us disappeared from the popular cultural radar, despite growing live audiences.

When ‘Tubthumping’ was a worldwide hit in 1997, all the old magazines and writers suddenly had a change of heart and wanted to get back in touch with us again. Ha! How funny. Get lost.

We agreed to an interview with the NME only if Seething Wells was to do it. They agreed (bloody prostitutes). Through all this time, our dialogues with Swells were peppered with anarchist v Marxist arguments, disagreements on the merits of the Third International and debating the difference between Redskins and Conflict. Him and us, we ranted and barked like wary dogs, snapped and snarled and probably dribbled at the mouth a bit, too. But always, Chumbawamba recognised what this Swells bloke was doing, how much he meant in a world where the same old groups made the same old charts and the same old magazine covers time after time after time.

And my goodness the rest of the journalists hated us. It seemed like Swells was the only one who ‘got’ our sense of humour and our way of laughing at ourselves while doing something utterly serious. In 1998 we made a documentary of the band. We contacted all the major journalists who’d gone on record slagging us off and asked if they’d like to be in a documentary “about pop and politics”. They all said yes. Each of them turned up (not suspecting they were being interviewed by that their most hated band) and, with little prompting, slated us. They signed cleverly-worded release forms and bob’s your uncle, we stuck them all in our film, slagging us off. The exception, of course, was Swells. We interviewed him straight. Sat him in a pub and asked what he thought of this rag-tag bunch of situationist clever-arses called Chumbawamba. He did his usual thing on-camera – told stories, embellished, sexed-up, ranted etc – but essentially came up with how Chumbawamba elongated its stay in the pop world: “It’s alright walking around with hair like a gonk. But it doesn’t half alienate you from ordinary decent working class people like their parents. That’s the reason why they changed.”

Seething Wells. I can’t, even now, get used to the idea of calling him Steven Wells. Because by rights he was always seething. Really, he was. Not seething with undirected, Liam Gallagher-style dumb-ignorant fury, but with a righteous (yes, that’s the word! Righteous!) indignation that, bloody hell, while he was around, things could be better! Now!

He died of cancer; specifically, Hodgkins Lymphoma. My Dad almost died of it two years ago. It’s a killer that sneaks up on you not because you’re unfit or you’ve been smoking thirty cigs a day but because… because nothing. Annoyingly for a ranting poet/journalist who spent his life pointing fingers and trying to get to the heart of society’s ills, there’s no explanation and no reason for suddenly finding out you’ve got lymphoma. A big question, without an answer. Reading Seething Wells’ blog, detailing his own illness, is to read the powerful madness of someone wrestling with science and logic. It’s Swells telling himself that, if there’s very little beauty in cancer, at least there’s plenty to be got from the wrestling.

Seething Wells died having spent his short life writing stuff that was mainly designed to piss people off, and he probably succeeded. Because those people were the millionaire, hypocrite know-nothings of the music world. And the answer to the question ‘Why?’ would be, in Swells’ case – “because someone had to do it”. And on behalf of Chumbawamba, I’m glad someone was there to do it.

Seething Wells, if you were still writing, you’d probably have something to say about how Michael Jackson chased you into the grave. I won’t say it for you. But the irony, oh the irony. And for a northern English writer who lived his last decade in America, I’m sure you’d understand. One final thing. If anyone ever says to me, remember Michael Jackson, the King of Pop? I’ll think of Swells.

Here’s Seething Wells’ last written diary entry, the day before he died:

“I speak as someone whose greatest craving at this exact moment is not world peace and universal democracy or a rational and global redistribution of wealth, but a can of ice cold ginger ale.
“And of course all this bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity -- the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans -- the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks.
“You could blame this fallacy on poor education, cultural deterioration, or simple moral decline.
“Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.”


What an apt and ironic last line.


Boff Whalley

Swells’ harrowing, funny and typically ranting diary of his last days are at:

www.philadelphiaweekly.com