Cassie McCullagh

But it certainly felt like...

this was maybe the last hurrah for the, because, you know, a lot of it was about settling old debts and going back to things that had happened in the train spotting days and making retribution and looking for forgiveness and tying things up.

So there's a slight sense of finality about it, or maybe it's just me having a slight sense of hoping that it's the end.

I suspect that might be our author here too.

There's always a couple of what's next.

I want to finish a book that I was well advanced reading before Mr. Welsh came into my life, which is called American Witness.

And it's a biography of the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank and

So I want to finish that.

And also I was recommended by a friend whose taste I respect a book of short stories by a guy called Scott O'Connor called A Perfect Universe, which is all stories set in and around California.

And it was the first book I bought when I got to Los Angeles.

I read the first story about a guy whose job is going around killing

repairing telephone boxes and and it's a rumination on on the you know the the end of the telephone box but where they you know where they still exist and people who rely on them and how you know and it's all this and then and then he hears a noise and and basically it he's caught in an earthquake and he's buried below ground for three days and

So that was the first one and there's nine more to come.

So I'm hankering to leave the world of Spud and Sick Boy and go back to that.

I guess you could call this slightly a biography, but I've just finished a book that's coming out on the 25th of September, and it's about the Australian roadie.

So I am trying to tell the story of those men and surprisingly large number of women who set up gear and equipment for rock and roll bands.

So I go back, I think I've identified the first Australian roadie and that was back in 1959.

And I go through to the present day and the road crews that work with, you know, Flume and a whole bunch of contemporary artists.

So I've interviewed about 80 people.

uh roadies and i've had the first book i've done where i didn't want it to end because i've just been flabbergasted by the characters that i've met and it was also driven um by by a more serious um component i mean road crew in australia have almost five times the national suicide rate there's a there's a horrible terrible toll um