Atrax Records: The Swarb Archive: The Obituary Files: Daily Mail
Loved The Obituary, But I'm Not Dead
Daily Mail - 21 April 1999
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REPORTS
OF FOLK MUSICIAN’S DEMISE PROVE GREATLY EXAGGERATED By ROGER SCOTT THE praise was plentiful, the sense of loss heartfelt at his passing. But happily for his family and his legion of fans, folk musician Dave Swarbrick, pronounced dead in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, is alive and - if not entirely well - still definitely with us. Swarbrick, who suffers from the smokers’ lung disease emphysema, has been battling with a chest infection for a month after being taken ill in Germany. He has been moved from intensive care to a normal recovery ward at Walsgrave Hospital, Coventry, where his condition yesterday was described as ‘comfortable’. |
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Thanks to the Telegraph, he will doubtless be feeling like Mark Twain, who after a similar blunder by the Associated Press complained that ‘reports of my death have been exaggerated’.
Swarbrick’s wife Jill and former members of the legendary group Fairport Convention, with whom he found international fame as a leading exponent of the electric violin, were swamped with misplaced sympathy calls.
‘This is really going to tickle him pink, but it is just as well it didn’t happen a few days ago when he was in intensive care,’ said Mrs Swarbrick.
‘The phone has been red hot this morning with all the musicians who know him ringing up to find out how he died and offer their support.’
Former colleague Dave Pegg said: ‘It is a glowing obituary and Dave will be very pleased with what they have said, but it is unbelievable it has been published now.’ An embarrassed Telegraph spokesman said: ‘I have spoken to Mrs Swarbrick this morning and apologised to her, and we will be printing a full apology tomorrow.’
The obituaries editor and his staff were said by insiders to be ‘distraught’, but no explanation for the error was forthcoming.
The generous and lengthy notice enables Swarbrick to become one of the few living people who know what at least one obituarist thought of his life and works when prematurely recording his death at the age of 58.
It described him as one of the most influential folk musicians of the 1970s and 1980s, ‘a small, dynamic, charismatic figure’. It continued: ‘ “Swarb” - cigarette perched precariously on his bottom lip, unruly hair flapping over his face, pint of beer ever at hand - could electrify an audience with a single sweep of his bow. He never failed to produce a dramatic effect, whether on fiddle or mandolin, whether playing in folk clubs or at huge open air festivals.’
The obituary describes his rise from the 1950s skiffle boom to the height of his fame with Fairport Convention and his first album with them, Liege & Lief, in 1969 which ‘broke new ground in marrying traditional songs with rock’
Over the next 15 years, the report intones, the group made more than a dozen albums ‘albeit of varying quality’. Later he developed ‘into a surprisingly sensitive songwriter’ and took on the role of lead singer. But continual playing of the electric violin had left him virtually deaf in one ear and in 1984 he decided to retire.
Others who have been consigned, still breathing, to an early grave include the Queen Mother, who in November 1993 was said by two Australian radio stations and a TV network to have died.
In June 1998 U.S. congressman Bob Stump announced the death of comedian Bob Hope to the House of Representatives, when Hope was eating breakfast with his wife Dolores at home in California.
And in August that year, Bob Geldof had to broadcast an apology after saying on radio that rock singer Ian Dury had died. It was put down to a hoax call.
Last updated on 26 September 2002
