This is a full text transcript of andrzej-swidzinski-interview with polish summaries every paragraph.

Magda Jarczyk: My name is Magda Jarczyk and today is Sunday, 28th of March 2021, and this is an oral history interview for the project Poles of South London. Today we are interviewing Andrzej and to start with could I please ask you to briefly introduce yourself?

[00:00:18]

Andrzej Świdziński: Hello, I'm Andrzej Świdziński, the youngest son of Zbigniew and Basia Świdzińska, who were one of originals in the parafia Balham and Clapham. Basically, they met and married, and bought a house in Balham. And we’ve lived in Balham most of our lives. All my brothers and sisters have now moved to other areas. I also have moved out of Balham. My mother is still alive and still lives in the same house I was born in in Balham. My parents were very, very much involved with the formation of the Polish White Eagle Club. My father was the sekretarz for Lord knows how long, he also assisted Cynar in original planning and idea of forming the club and was the structural engineer and architect behind the old people's home behind the Polish Club, and also the sala młodzieżowa and things which we'll come to when we start talking about bands.

MJ: Thank you. And my first question is, how do you remember growing up in the ‘60s, ‘70s in Balham? How was it for you?

[00:01:34]

AŚ: Very fondly. [laughter] The Polish parish was a very, very tight knit community. We had the przedszkoła at Nightingale Lane. Bogdanowicze, Ciechanowicze were families that lived very, very close by us. We would constantly play together, be involved in Zuchy together. At the beginning Cynar was very, very encouraging and we all służyliśmy do mszy, we've all served at mass, which was great fun because Lech and myself were very much into hopping out of the mass very early, because Cynar was also a very, very good businessmen, we'd got out and sell the Gazeta Niedzielna outside the church and shove it under people's armpits to encourage them to buy. [laughter] Once it was purchased, of course, we would get a cut of the money. So we would walk away from the church every Sunday, very happy with some money to buy sweets and possibly a little dinky toy or something like that if we had a very, very good day. And then after that, of course, we went to proper school. Again, we were an extremely large community at school. I met lots and lots of other Polish people from our parafia who didn't go to przedszkoła with me or didn't go to Harcerze like Tony Piwowarski, Bogdan Bławat, Andrzej Meyer. We were a massive community, a lot of us. Of course, there’s the girls as well, which of course at a young age, I wasn't very much interested in, but there were the girls as well.

[00:03:35]

We kept together. We kept as a unit, because we did have the club where we could meet regularly. We also had Scouts where we would meet regularly. We also had polska szkoła, which I'm sure you're discussing with another person about polska szkoła and everything else, which was basically Bursa, which is Nightingale Lane again. Because of that… We did have English friends, but we prioritised our Polish friends more. And also because of the club, when the club was bought in everything, it had the stage, we would do all kinds of fun performances and shows and things. And creativity was very, very much encouraged, though, individuality, [laughter] which was not that encouraged. So that's why some of us were rather outsiders. Myself, Andrzej Meyer, Bogdan Bławat, Tony Piwowarski, we really didn't fit in like my brothers and the Bogdanowicze and the Ciechanowicze seemed to fit in better. They were very happy with Harcerstwo, they were very happy with everything else and stayed, whereas I rebelled and few of us, the rest of us, rebelled and we kind of pulled away from a Polish community from the age of 13, 14. We still mixed as friends, but we didn't like the… One thing that you have to realise is that our parents were from the pre-war Polish structure and there was a substantial number of the older generation, so people in their very late sixties, seventies and eighties who were very, very dominant and very, very conservative. And we didn't like that. And we didn't want to be involved with any of that. Being brought up under the back end of the hippie movement and everything else… We were rather nonconformist, let’s put it that way. [laughter] We enjoyed each other's company. We didn't speak Polish to one another. We spoke English to one another. Whereas people like Lech Bogdanowicz, Bogdanowicze, the Ciechanowicze, the Bujwidy spoke excellent Polish, did their Polish O Levels and A Levels. Same with my brothers and sister. They all did their Polish A O Levels and A Levels. I didn't. Bogdan didn’t. Tony Piwowarski didn’t. We just wanted nothing [laughter] to do with any of that.

[00:06:33]

But what did tie us all together was our love of music and our love of, basically, creative arts. We all loved… We were all in the comics, collecting comics, American comics and British comics. We were all into music. Heavily into music by the time we were 13, 14. And we were also into literature. We all enjoyed reading science fiction. Every single one of us had read Lord of the Rings by the time we were 14 and things like that. And so, we had a lot in common that way and we enjoyed our freedom. So part of all of that was also that our parents were quite liberal compared to the starsza, najstarsza generacja. I call my parents średnia, the middle generation. I supposed because I was the youngest of all, my parents were the most lenient with me because they had enough fighting with my two older brothers and my sister for control. And by the time I came home, “Okay, Andrew. If you don't want to go to church, you don't have to go to church. And if you don't want to go to Polish school, you don't have to go to Polish school” and so on and so forth, which my brothers were extremely jealous of. And they were going, “How come he can get away with it and we couldn't?”. So I did have more freedom.

[00:08:06]

And not only that. Having a big brother who is also very much into music, Michael, when I was 13, my parents bought me for Christmas one of the good old fashioned tape cassette players. And Michael knew that parents bought me that, so Michael then did me compilation tapes. One being Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which had only just recently come out, and then a compilation of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and Echo, the two best tracks they did about time. Then there was Kingdom Come’s Journey, which was a very progressive record. No need to go into it that too deeply, but I had always wonderful music to listen to. And at that point in time, nobody had heard of Mike Oldfield, really. [laughter] And I would play this music to my friends. We'd sit outside the school, I’d switch on the tape cassette machine. We’d all listen to it and we all loved it. And we were all getting into different bands like Wishbone Ash, Manfred Mann's Earth Band and all these bands that we could go and see live from 14, 15 years of age. First band I went to see was Focus. Then after that I went to see, oh, I can't remember which bands we went to see, but we used to go and see bands like Manfred Mann all the time. We used to go and see bands like Wishbone Ash all the time. I loved Barclay James Harvest, which all my friends considered to be an insult to music, the poor man’s Moody Blues, but I loved it and I’d go and see them a lot. Now, listening to all this live music and listening to music… I'd sit at home and just listen to music, I’d listen to Yes all the time and listen to Genesis all the time, I’d listen to Van der Graff Generator all the time and I would learn… By listening to it I kind of learned the songs. I'd be humming or I'd be singing the lyrics to Tales from Topographic Oceans and my brother would turn around and say, “Look, you can do that, but you can't figure out formulas in mathematics, but you can sing these really complex lyrics at the drop of a hat. What's up with you?”.

[00:10:40]

I wasn't very much of an academic, I didn't like anything to do with it. I did manage to get my O Levels and my A Levels and I went to university, dropped out twice, didn't like it. And what I wanted to do was to play as well, so I managed to convince a few friends [laughter] and they, too, were very, very keen and we decided to try and form a band. So this was myself, Bogdan Bławat, Chris Bławat, the middle brother and at that point in time we also managed to get in Mickey Dalton, a friend of ours from school. So that's two guitarists, one bassist, myself, Chris on drums. And we had no place to rehearse. Thankfully, my granny decided to go visit one of her daughters in the Midlands. So for two weeks, her rooms are getting free. This was back in early, early 1977. So this was just prior to my brother getting married. My brother was living with my grandmother. At that point in time my middle brother Richard was also living at my grandmother's. And it already built up that this house in Elmfield Road was a very popular meeting point for the Bogdanowicze and Ciechanowicze and everybody would go… So my brother would have a little jam sessions with his friends as well because my brother had an electric guitar and things like that. And whilst my granny was away [laughter] for two weeks, we set up in her flat. We put up a drum kit, which was Chris', and we had these amplifiers and everything. And we just got going, belt out songs by bands like Budgie and, basically, they were all metal-y songs and things like that. Very simple. We could not play well, [laughter] definitely, and occasionally I managed to convince my middle brother Richard to sing for us. So we started for about two weeks and we enjoyed it immensely. It was great fun. We would sit there for hours, just jamming and, you know, we'd pop out and buy cans of beer, bring them back, sit there and think, “Oh, what song can we play next?”. And then we'd go downstairs to Michael's room, because Michael's room was still there. Michael had a very large record collection and because Michael was almost getting married, you’d never think, he would be out a lot with his wife-to-be, Basia. And so things were going free and we would play some of his records. He had the most incredible Hi-Fi system, unbelievable top quality hi-fi system. And we would listen to all these wonderful albums we’ve never heard of in our lives, building up our understanding and repertoire of music.

[00:13:54]

So what happened after that was that we wanted to continue somehow and the club had been rebuilt and everything by then, and there was sala młodzieżowa and to my knowledge it wasn't being used very much. I mean, Koło Pań used it for things and the chór used it, but it wasn't used very much by the młodzież. I mean, KSMP [Polish Catholic Youth Association] occasionally would go down there and use it, Harcerstwo would occasionally use it. Occasionally, but they had Bursa at Nightingale Lane, so they didn't really need it. And KSMP much prefer to use the czerwona sala upstairs than go downstairs to the sala młodzieżowa, which already was getting a bit damp. [laughter] It wasn't the best made, it had problems with floodings and things like that. So I talked to my dad, who's sekretarz of the club, and I said, “Look, you've got a sala młodzieżowa, we are młodzież, we'd like to be able to use it”. And he agreed. He said, “Fine, yeah, go and talk to the managers of the club and see what they do”. Now, one of the managers, pan Wiczling, a very, very nice, sweet man, whose son, Boguś, Bob Wiczling, Bob Shilling was in a band called The Fingerprints at that point in time. And so, pan Wiczling was very, very much aware of his son’s, you know, he's a drummer with the Fingerprints and pan Wiczling was very much aware of how much his son loved music and everything else, so he was very open to the idea of letting us use the club.

[00:15:39]

So what used to happen was that we would prefer to use at weekends. At that point in time where we were repeating our A Levels because we failed our A Levels the first time around. So we would prefer to use it on Saturdays and Sundays. Sometimes we could use it for both. So sometimes on a Sunday we'd go in there from about 10:30 in the morning and not leave until 10:30 in the evening. And it was a wonderful venue because we knew all the kelnerki, the waitresses, we knew the bar people, we knew everybody there. By that time, we were 18, so technically it was quite legal for us to buy the beer there and everything else, so we could always go upstairs, buy beers, go downstairs and carry on working. And we didn't really bother about food very much. [laughter] Occasionally we’d pop out across the road and buy a portion of chips and smuggle it into the club, because the club did not like you bringing food into the club, and we'd practise.

[00:16:46]

And then we managed to convince Lech Bogdanowicz to sing for us. In that we were desperate, we had nobody to sing for us, I didn't want to. I did not want to work with my brother ,and we asked a few girls and the girls weren't very interested, “Why would we want to sing with you, you’re rubbish”. But Lech, after a few pints, said, “OK, I'll give it a go, anything for a laugh”. And so we started writing our own material and Lech sang for us. It went quite well for about a year. So we managed to play… We wrote about ten songs, enough for a set. So we managed to play two or three gigs at the Polish Club, during discos organised by Konrad Kądziela, at that point in time he's in charge of… he was about a year older than me, he was in charge of, what was it called, Gniazdo I think it was called, the discotheque. But we can't call it a discotheque. We have to call it potańcówka przy płytach because of a legality, because a discotheque would mean that we need security and things like that, whereas a potańcówka doesn't need security. [laughter] Something like that. So we used to have these potańcówki przy płycie and during that there'd be a 20-minute break where Lolo, Konrad, nicknamed Lolo, would say, “And here are… the band!” because we had no name. And we played our set and after seeing us a few times people were thinking, “Oh, some of these songs aren’t bad, really. [laughter] A bit repetitive in places, and a bit naive but quite interesting”. Then Lech decided that he's had enough because we wanted to start booking places, going to… One of the wonderful things about the ‘70s was that lots and lots of pubs had band nights where bands could play. You would get part of the takings on the door if enough people turned up to cover your costs. But also, it's a great way of practising in front of a live audience free of charge, basically. You had the cost of transporting your equipment to the venue, but it was a great way of practising. Lots and lots of bands did this in the ‘70s. It was just… Bands just blew up in the ‘70s. There were bands everywhere. This was encouraged by punk and then the new wave and we felt ourselves as part of this new wave. We were very, very influenced by bands like The Cure, New Order. Well, at that point in time it was Joy Division because Ian Curtis was still alive, and we very much liked The Associates. There was just lots and lots of bands that we loved at the time, and we want you to do material more along those lines, this new wave. And also, it opened up horizon for us. We didn't have to follow any normal structure. We could do the songs the way we wanted to do the songs, and not sound American and not sound like this, not sound like that.

[00:20:27]

And we formed a band called The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and that was lots and lots of fun, which only lasted just over a year [laughter] because of band intrigue and then we fell apart. But during all of this time, we were also encouraging young people in our community like Staś Metelski, Mariusz Soloczyński and others. We would leave our equipment in the basement in the sala młodzieżowa and told them, “Look, just go to the manager if you want to, ask for a key and then you can get into a szafka and take out the equipment and practise yourselves” and we did encourage other musicians to be musical and to do things. Unhappily, one of them decided to steal Bogdan's guitar, [laughter] but that’s by the by. [laughter] And from that some other bands formed, through all of this. One of them was Helsinki That Way, which is Piotr Bławat’s band. Bławaci were very, very musical. All three brothers were very musical. They’re all kind of multiinstrumentalists as well. Peter is the best in that he plays keyboards, drums, guitar and attempts to sing as well. Helsinki That Way you can listen to two of their tracks on YouTube, if you like. Also, you can hear some The Umbrellas of Cherbourg tracks on YouTube.

[00:22:21]

And it's just interesting what a platform the club gave us, to do with all this creativity, to be creative, to do things. And we also encouraged Staś Matelski to produce a fanzine called Headbanger. So because, as I explained earlier, the music scene was ripe, you couldn't walk out of a door without finding a pub where a band was playing. And at that point in time there were lots and lots of young bands forming, like with the Thompson Twins, for example, they used to play regularly in Brixton, original line up of the two guitarists. This is way before that the trendy Thompson Twins with the electric keyboards. Tom Bailey decided, “OK, yeah”, he would do that interview, Staś Matelski did an interview with Tom Bailey before he became famous. And Staś also was very, very much into punk in Poland and Staś would go over to Poland, pick up all the latest punk singles that you could get his hands on whilst he was in Poland and would introduce that music to us because we had no idea what was going on in Poland. So this was basically the worst time in Poland, 1982, ‘83, when we had stan wojenny situation. So that was all very, very interesting as well. And so, from there we had this musical base to build up from. We kind of split up for a while, people went their own way, but everybody stayed musical. So Chris Bławat formed… joined a number of bands. Bogdan joined a number of bands. I joined in a number of times. I even formed a short term combination with Peter and Mariusz Sorociński to go off to a demo studio to do some demo tapes. Lots and lots of fun, we were very free and easy. We would come out and do whatever we wanted to do, and it was very, very enjoyable.

[00:24:53]

And we also had the club to meet up in the evenings and have drinks and everything else. And also, as before, Elmfield Road would be another hub for the młodzież, so it would be a meeting point. But that part behind the Polish Club, there were lots and lots of Polish families like that. Knops just two roads up. Then you had Soroczyński and Bogdanowiczowie around the corner and you had Ciechanowicze on Tunley Road and then you had the Piwowarscy, moved to Tunley Road as well. And after Polish Club, we don't all meet, go back to my flat and we continue drinking and chatting or we go off to see bands together, then we come back and sit in the next room. At that point in time, we managed to get rid of some of the lodgers. Lech Bogdanowicz moved in with us, Bogdad Bławat moved in with us, so it was a very young people's house, and we would drive my granny nuts.

[00:26:02]

Prime example: śmingus dyngus. Śmingus dyngus was a very, very popular tradition with us over here. We don't consider ourselves to be Polish or anything, but it's so much fun wicking people during Saturday, Sunday… [laughter] no, Monday morning, right? Monday morning, Easter Monday morning. We had situations where we had guests staying with us. So, for instance, because Richard was very much involved with volleyball and also Basia Klimas’ dancing groups, so we quite often had volleyball tournaments and things. We'd have a Belgium volleyball team staying with us and we let them sleep in… My room would be used by the boys’ volleyball team. Richard’s room would be used for the girls’ volleyball team and I'd even sleep with Lech upstairs or Richard would sleep with Bogdan or back around my parents place, which is just around the corner. And śmingus dyngus came along and basically buckets of water everywhere. And we were running around throwing water over each other. House soaking wet, stairs looking like a waterfall. And my granny comes out and says, “Jaka tradycja to jest? Co wy robicie?”. “Śmingus dyngus, granny, it’s śmingus dyngus!” And granny said, “Foreign tradition. You're all speaking in English. Polish traditions, you should be speaking in Polish”. And she wasn't happy about running around and it took about two weeks to dry out. [laughter] But it was great fun. So where would you like us to go now?

MJ: How long have you lived at your granny's house?

[00:27:58]

AŚ: That was from 19… Michael got married in ‘77, so Michael moved out in ‘77. So I moved in about September ‘77. So when I started redoing my A Levels, going to South West London College, where my mother was a lecturer. Bogdan and I studied, repeated our A Levels there, one year repeat course to redo our A Levels, so I moved in ‘77. Then there were two friends, acquaintances of my grandmother, both Polish people, single men, bachelors, who lived in two of the other rooms in the property. And once we managed to get rid…, well, one left, and that room went free, so I managed to talk to my parents and say, “Can Lech go in that room? Can Lech live in there?” and everything else. And my mom agreed, “Okay, if Lech wants to live, Lech can live there” and basically Lech ended up living there and, as per usual, my mother wasn't very good at collecting rent from him, so ended up almost living there rent free. [laughter] And so, yeah, he had a pretty cushy time. And then once he moved in, within six or eight months, because we’d have these late night chats and were playing music and everything, the person below got very, very annoyed with us. You know, thinking obviously, “It's not nice living here”, so he decided to move out well and he got Bogdan to move in.

[00:29:48]

So by 1978 it was a very young people's house, just my grandmother and another gentleman who lived on the ground floor and it was myself, Richard, my brother Richard, Lech and Bogdan. We had a great time [laughter] and it was wonderful. It was a very, very creative house because it gave me the ability to… I had a very large room where I could have a drawing board and I was drawing. At that point in time I wanted to become an artist as well. So once I finished my A Levels, I went to art school to do a foundation course. That totally disillusioned me in art altogether, and I became an art college dropout, which is exactly the right thing you want to be if you want to go into music, because all the top musicians were art school dropouts, [laughter] but it didn't get me anywhere. Also, we had the Polish Club, literally down the road. So every evening, if nothing else is going on, we took our watches at 10 o'clock and we know we got an hour left of drinking time, “Who wants to go to the club?”. We’d all go down to the club, have a couple of drinks for the last hour or two at the club and then back home. And this was how we lived for a considerable length of time. That went on until… must be 1982, my parents decided enough was enough, my grandmother wasn't capable of living there on her own. She'd already moved back to my parents’ house because, of course, no children were living there by then, so they had a spare room. It was an effort to go round to my grandmother's every day with food and keep an eye on my grandmother. She was rather healthy under the circumstances, but weaker and weaker. She was already in her middle eighties by then, so she moved to my parents late 1981. So her flat was going free for about a year and a half, but nobody moved into it. So we used it as communal rooms and occasionally would set up musical instruments in there as well, practise and things like that.

[00:32:28]

So by ‘83, ‘84 that's when Hysteria Ward formed. That's another band that I formed with Bogdan and Michael Smith and Lou. And this band still exists to this very day. And we would occasionally practise and at that point in time we managed to get a friend of ours, Phil Staines, from Canada, he became our drummer at that point in time and he used to stay with us quite often, so did Michael Smith, went and stayed entire weekends. We would still have this ability to maybe use the Polish Club all day Sunday or something like that. Neither of them lived that locally, so they’d stay with us. And Lou would always prefer to go home and not stay with us. Being a girl, maybe she felt out of place. We would regularly have a very social time, plus have the ability and time to practise musically together. Then it's also on the other side, the artistic side, I was trying… Basically, repeating A Levels and everything else, I already decided I wanted to go to art school, but I knew I had to do a portfolio. So I was doing a lot of drawings and everything else to build up this portfolio. At that point in time Stefan Bogdanowicz was very much still in charge of Harcerstwo in those days, decided to start a gazeta called Zawisza. And our Polish gromada, group, was called Czarna Zawisza, I believe. Zawisza Czarna, get it right. So Stefan decided to… He liked the idea of fanzies, I'm sure he came across what Staś was doing with Headbanger and then Uber Alles and thought to himself, “Oh, młodzież, the young people, maybe will read this and it will encourage young people to contribute and put in ideas”, so he managed to convince Krzyś Gepart to be at the editor and he approached me and he said, “Look, Andrew, can you do some artwork for this?”. And I said, “Fine, yeah, no problem”. So this is a quarterly, little hand out, bulk photocopied at Vistaprint or something like that. I had to produce artwork for a cover and inside illustrations for this quarterly magazine for the next couple of years, which also gave me something to put into my portfolio. [laughter] And it was very enjoyable as well and also it gave me something to work with, with other people. So myself and Leszek came up with ideas for a little cartoon strips inside there and things like that, which was also lots of fun to do. Any other questions?

MJ: Yeah, I'm also interested in what was the reception of your music? Who were your fans most of all?

[00:36:12]

AŚ: Was there reception? Were there fans? Sometimes… It's the classic Jesus line, “A prophet is never recognised by his fellow citizens”. So, no, there wasn't a huge amount of support from… We were not taken very seriously by our friends. When the Umbrellas of Cherbourg started and we were getting quite serious… Forget about the band with Lech, that was always considered a joke by the entire parafia and everything else. But when the Umbrellas of Cherbourg started, people were starting to take us more seriously. Tony Piwowarsky’s brother, John Piwowarski was a bit of a businessman and entrepreneur. And he heard us and he thought, “Oh, there could be something in this” and he asked us would we like to have a manager and we agreed that we would. And so he encouraged us, he helped us organise… Well, basically to organise demo tapes and things like that and he would take these demo tapes to places, help us with organising gigs. And at some point, in fact, he was recording to record labels, touting us as a band us as a band. And he did get some interest from Virgin Records. But then we broke up, [laughter] which did not help. And also by that point in time, they decided to throw me out of a band because I was unpredictable in my bass playing and I didn't like being on stage and was very self-conscious and everything else, so they decided that they were going to get another bass player, but they never found another bass player. We split up after that.

[00:38:27]

We were still very, very good friends that I continued playing with and we even played a gig at the 101 Club in Clapham Junction, which was at that point in time a very famous venue where quite mid-range name bands like… Young Marble Giants played there, The Cure played… Lots and lots of bands played there. And it was quite, quite a [name?] venue and we managed to play a support spot there. That was the last thing we did, which went down very, very well and everybody really liked it, but after that, we split up. Then also Wojtek Bogdanowicz… We were getting Wojtek very interested in bands. Same with Jaś Bujwid. Every Wednesday or Thursday we'd all go to the Two Brewers pub in Clapham Common because there would be bands there that we all liked. So at first this band called Livewire, then we would go and see Sad Among Strangers, which was very, very popular, and Wojtek was very much into filming then, that's where his career ended up being. He became a producer, doing movies for… Basically promotional films and things like that and he’d set up camera equipment and video this band and things like that, and he also videotaped us, doing a video for us as a potential single, which was going to be Private Eye. So another meeting point for the młodzież of parafia was the Two Brewers. The Knopp sisters would turn up, the Ciechanowicze would turn up, Bogdanowicze were all there, Piwowarscy were there, Bujwidy, Jaś Bujwid was there, Basia [?], Eddie Sokołowski… Basically, the młodzież [laughter] were all turning up to these gigs and everything else.

[00:40:49]

Like I said, music was a very, very strong thing to bond us, to keep us all together. That was lots and lots of fun, but nobody really took us that seriou-… To be honest, we, as a band, didn't really want recognition amongst our compatriots. What we wanted was recognition amongst the young people who knew their music in the area. Didn't matter to us who they were, as long as they liked us. The same thing with Hysteria Ward, our singer Lou was an anarcho-punk and very, very much influenced by CRASS and bands like that. And so, with Hysteria Ward we went in… Lou took us in a very different direction, so we started getting a bit more gothic in the style of music and we were all influenced by Susie and the Banshees as well and, of course, The Cure and things. And that took us in another direction, so Hysteria Ward became rather… If you listen to some of the early music, I've got tapes from some of the gigs, some of the songs were very, very depressing and things like that.

[00:42:23]

At that point in time, I was going out with a girl, Basia Szkutnicka, and I decided I prefer to spend my time with her, rather than with the band, so I quit the band. Hysteria Ward continued for about another year, year and a half without me and then they broke up as well, only to reform… We reformed in 1990. We were asked to do a couple of gigs to support a charity and so Lou contacted us and, well, we were still socially…. We did meet up with Lou. We all met up a lot together, even though we didn't play music together very much. And we all agreed, “Yeah, fine, as long as we do all new material. We don't do any of the old songs, we only do new songs” so we agreed to this and this must have been… 1992 or ‘93, and so we played two festivals supporting the mentally ill and that rekindled things and this is where we produced songs like Owl Walk, which you can also listen to on YouTube, and As Was, which you can also listen to on YouTube, and all these things… This continued for maybe six months. Then we again split up, went our separate ways again, and then it rekindled again by being asked to play another lot of charity gigs and everything else. And we did both. And this kept on happening, we keep on reforming, reforming. In 2014 we played in Paris, we’ve done quite a few gigs and… Being invited in London to do special gigs, at The Latchmere and other places and, oh, the Dublin Castle in Camden Town, that was a good one. So the band kind of heats up, cools down, heats up, cools down. We even produced a vinyl LP, which was lovely. So I can show my friends, “Look, I’m on an LP”. [laughter] I always wanted to be on vinyl and succeeded in that as well. Basically, we always had the parafia to fall back on.

[00:45:12]

But one thing you got to bear in mind about the parafia was that at this point in time, the parafia was very, very, as I said at the beginning, very conservative. But our parents and all the parents, of course, wanted to encourage us to go there, so therefore, thankfully, we had klub siatkówkowy, which basically… Every Thursday night after their training sessions, they’d all end up in the Polish Club. So we'd have a chance to chat with them. Then there was Orlęta, the dance group, they’d always after dancing end up in the Polish Club. And it's all incestuous, of course. Richard forced me to join the volleyball club because I was tall and everything, so I did play volleyball with the team for a while and everything else. I was rubbish at it. And I'd go to quite a few of the tournaments. I did go to tournaments in Holland and Belgium and basically…. [laughter] just a drink fest. [laughter] We’d end up just drinking and drinking and drinking, but it was lots and lots of fun. And also, with Orlęta. Basia Klimas needed a minimum number of people with dance troupe to have rights to a subsidised rate at the school where she did the dance lessons. So I joined the dance groups, so did Tony Piwowarski, Jaś Bujwid, Lech Bogdanowicz, plus the older ones and everything else. So we did participate in that as well. So it's all very… We mixed and melded and involved ourselves in each other's interests and everything else, which was one of the wonderful things about the parafia in that you have this melting pot, you could do all these different things.

[00:47:27]

There were lots and lots of creative young people, like Wojtek Bogdanowicz, who was very, very creative in… It must have been about 1976 when they decided to make a movie called Backlash based on a comic, a DC comic, a cowboy comic. For this they decided… Wojciech wanted to make a movie, so he kind of built up a script along the lines of the Backlash story, but part of it is a cemetery scene. So Wojtek decided, “Okay, we're going to do the cemetery scene at…” That famous cemetery up in north London. It's closed down. Old, dilapidated cemetery. At that point in time, in ‘76, he could get into very, very easily. Not a problem. The gates were off their hinges. It wasn't being looked after at all at that point in time. It's now become… It's all locked up and it's a place of special scenic beauty and kept in pristine condition now. But in those days, you could go there, so what Richard, Michael, Przemek Bogdanowicz, Wojtek Bogdanowicz, Lech Bogdanowicz… I didn't go, but they decided to… They bought a coffin and took it in the Tube up to Hampstead, to do the filming of carrying the coffin through the cemetery. So they had loads of fun carrying this coffin into a Tube train, going on a Tube journey, doing this film and everything else. That was the wonderful thing about the youth in those days, we could do whatever we wanted. It was a wonderful time. It wasn't very expensive to do this travelling, and nobody seemed to be bothered by it, so it was lots and lots of fun. So Wojtek made this film called Backlash and it got played at one of the harcerskie Christmas… Święty Mikołaj thing, Christmas time.

[00:49:58]

And their father, pan Stefan Bogdanowicz, thought it was a good idea to do something along those lines, “Maybe next year you could do a panto?”. So next year they did do a panto, they did Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which also went down a storm. It was a hilariously funny script written by Wojtek Bogdanowicz I believe, that went down very, very well. And then a couple of years later, we decided to do Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which became the big one. The big panto, quite a bit of money got put into it. Myself, Hania Walszowska and Jaś Bujwid, we even spent money for big canvases for backdrops, and we painted backdrops and everything else. Everybody made their own costumes. I was a smok, the dragon in it, and Basia Szkutnicka ended up being a fairy. It was all written by Eddie Djya who also is musical, who also formed the band. And at that point in time, he wrote the thing and he also directed it. Wojtek produced it and held things together, controlled the funds. And that went down a storm with the kids. That was an absolutely brilliant panto, but by that point in time we were all going off to university… All the girls in the parafia, 90 percent of them decided they go off to university, “We're not going to stay in London. We're going to go to university in Birmingham or Scotland or all over the place, but not stay in our parafia”, and the boys, being lazy, most of the boys decided “We’re staying”, you know, “We’ll all do our degrees in London” and everything else.

[00:52:01]

And quite a lot of marriages did form from the parafia. My oldest brother, Michael, fell in love with Basia Żarkow and Adam Kondziela married Ewa Błaszczak and so on and so forth. We did stay rather insular that way. We did marry girls we grew up quite a lot and most of us, practically all of us, married Polish girls. So, for instance, my wife, Agnieszka, she's Polish from Poland, which is really weird because I didn't like anything to do [laughter] with Poland. I didn't really speak that brilliant Polish and now I'm married to a woman, well, I've got to speak Polish a heck of a lot because whenever we go to Poland, her family don't speak English. So I've got to speak Polish. So my Polish has improved in leaps and bounds. And it's a rarity where one of us hasn't married a Polish girl. So Bogdan married Joasia… We all had kind of relationships, girlfriends who weren't Polish at some stage in time, but we all seem to end up with marrying Polish girls, but that didn't help us stay in the community.

[00:53:42]

All our parents did really, really well. All our parents managed to buy their own houses, were upper, middle, sort of upper working class to lower middle class or something along that line. So all the children had a good stepping board to a better life. And most of them decided to buy property outside of the Balham area, and because of that the parafia started to fall apart. But this is also a time when a lot more Polacy started to come to England because of better jobs, better income. And quite a lot of them decided to come here, make money, buy land in Poland, go back to Poland. But they came here, fell in love here, and then decided to stay here. And this rebuilt the parafia. Without them I don't think the Polish White Eagle Club would still exist. Basically, they were the new pillar holding up the parafia. We became… inconsequential. We… did not involve ourselves in very much. Ok, we still… Some of us still involved ourselves quite deeply, especially in the harcerstwo. The Banasiaki were involved in harcerstwo, but also involved in polska szkoła. Basia Klimas holds things together as well. Bogdanowicze, well Wojtek decided… He lives in this area still. Przemek, the oldest brother, lives in north London and doesn't involve himself at all in the parish. My oldest brother Michael lives close to me here in South Purley, but doesn't involve himself in the parish. Most of the older, my generation, so the baby boomers, totally washed their hands of things. It's only a few, like Wojtek Bogdanowicz, Maciek [Trzuksza?] and a few others, a handful, still involve themselves in Polish parafia. Of course, Basia Klimas, that’s by the by, that’s dancing, something else completely… But if it wasn't for this new młode pokolenie, the new generation that came over from Poland, supporting… doing basically exactly the same thing that our parents did, they’ve rebuilt the Polish parish, they rebuilt the Polish community. They keep the church more than afloat. Through them everything has restabilised and rebuilt. But it's no longer… Our parents built that all, so it was a present for… it was there for us. We decided to discard it. Thankfully, the next imigracja came over, have stabilised it all, and made it all still there for potentially another generation. Same with the Polish school, I'd say 50 percent of the children, and maybe more, are from the imigracja, because, of course, they settled down here, bought houses here and keep the Polish school going. And it's wonderful. But we don't really… So, I've not been to a Polish Club for… oh… since Lech Bogdanowicz’s funeral, I think, stypa. Oh, what a stypa. 300 people. It was a party, [laughter], it wasn’t a stypa. And that’s about the last time I’ve been now, especially with coronavirus, we don't socialise anymore at the moment, which doesn't help matters as well. But we do stay in touch through the medium of telephoning and e-mailing and using other media things.

Thank you, that's very interesting. And what are your memories about Poland from the ‘70s, ‘80s? Did you visit Poland at all?

[00:58:35]

Not very often. My first memories of Poland are back in the ‘60s. The first time my parents took us to Poland must have been about 1960… ‘64, I was five years old. And we drove all the way to Poland and my dad managed to organise a visa for us to go to Poland and everything else and the whole family, so that’s six people in the car. And we went to visit my grandmother. My grandfather died during the Second World War. He died in Tobruk, I believe, or somewhere in the desert, fighting part of desert campaign. And we went to visit my mother and grandmother who lived just outside Toruń, in the north Poland, in the countryside. Thing I remember is that there's no tarmac road, there is a dirt track. I remember going with my sister and brother to collect the milk. So milk was on top of a milk cart led by a horse. A big metal pot full of milk, and he'd go with a menaszka or something like that and they pull the milk into your menaszka. You'd pay them the money and take the milk away. And this is unpasteurised milk, which of course would then have to be boiled and everything else. I also remember walking into the cold room, where we’d hang up the things, and my grandmother wanted to make a special dinner of pheasant for us and there were pheasants hanging there still with their feathers unplucked and everything. And you could see the maggots on it and you’d think, “I'm not eating that!”. [laughter] Strange how you remember certain things. I was only about five, coming up on six years old, or something like that, so I was quite young.

[01:00:56]

And then again we went to Poland about ‘68 the second time. Then I went in 1974 and in ‘74 it was just the boys. So it was myself, my father, again, we drove, so it's me, Richard, Michael and Przemek Bogdanowicz, the oldest of the Bogdanowicze brothers. So we went there by car and once we go into the Polish border, Michał and Przemek split up from us. They went their own separate ways and rather than my dad taking us to my grands, dad took us to Jantor, close to Hel, on the spit to the north there was a cousin of dad's who was staying there and she had this holiday rental. So we stayed with her for a week, just myself and Richard. So I was 14, 13-14, I think, something like that. She was 14-15, and we had a great time, basically it was lovely and sunny, so we could go swimming every day and everything else. And we had funds to buy whatever we want, but even by then, in 1973, ‘74, there wasn't a vast amount of stuff that you could buy. And we do remember buying Sporty cigarettes, which is dirt cheap, and we didn't know what else to do, and you couldn't smoke when they were just awful. [laughter] They were the worst cigarettes I’ve ever come across in my life. But we had the money, so most days there were those sellers of… carbonated water, sparkling water. You know, you pour syrup into it and top it up with fizzy water. And so we used to drink a lot of that. We managed to find some really nice piwo mleczne, milk stout, which is very sweet and not terribly to our taste, but you see at 13, 14-year-old we were already drinking beer. I was already seeing bands by then, so it was a weird time. But my memories on the whole of Poland… I was very much impressed on the whole, the Polish people impressed me. I remember it being stifled, starting a bit stifled, which I remember on Hel, you couldn't get to Hel at that point in time because it's all fenced off because of the army and everything else. So we’d walk along the beach from Jantor as far as we could go and everything else, and they could walk for miles and miles and miles. And when you catch a quick little train, walking back, with a central line kind of train thing, and I do remember the guard post and people with machine guns and things like that. And so you constantly felt this threat in Poland.

[01:04:29]

You're well aware it's not the West. It did not feel like the West in any way, shape or form. Did I feel at home in Poland? I felt comfortable, but would I have wanted to live there? No. It was nice to visit and everything else, but it was… I felt no affinity with Poland or anything like that. The affinity came later, with the 2000s when I would go there with my wife and especially in the early 21st century. I was seriously considering, thinking, “Oh, this would be a wonderful place maybe to retire in”, but things have gone downhill since then [laughter] and with Covid, who knows what the future will hold in store? We don't even know whether we'll be able to go to Poland this year at all.

[01:05:38]

But yes, I do have very fond memories of Poland, thinking about it. And of course, we had lots and lots of Polish cousins and things coming over to visit us, because my father's side of the family was pretty big. My mother's side of the family didn't really exist in Poland. They all came to England or to France or somewhere else, my mother's side, but my father's side, my father and a cousin of his were the only two people who came over to England. The rest all stayed in Poland. So my father's older, eldest brother was a doctor in Poland. A doctor had a reasonably, reasonably good quality of life in Poland. So they would come and visit us here. They knew I liked music, so they'd bring me vinyl. So I'd get some of the newer Polish bands and some of it was absolute rubbish. Some of it was very good. But I really liked the early Bajm stuff, that was very, very good. But on the whole, we stayed in touch. My father made us stay in touch with the family and everything else. My brother Richard went to Poland quite a lot, because he was involved in Orlęta, the dance group. So there would be dance festivals in Poland that Orlęta would participate in, which the Polish government was very happy about, “Oh, look, we've got an English dance troupe coming to show us their Polish dancing” and everything else. And so Richard would go to Poland a lot. But Michael… I don't think Michael went to… He might have gone to Poland again a few times after that, but not very often. Lech Bogdanowicz and Bogdanowicze got property in the Tatry, so they, especially once the doorway opened, they were in Poland a lot. Lech loved going to the Tarty. He used to go mountaineering in England and everything else, so the ability to go for a month to Poland and in a property where he got his own things and everything else and then go climbing in the mountains, he loved it. He very much enjoyed it. And that's basically it, really.

MJ: Thank you. We are slowly coming to an end and is there anything else you would like to say?

AŚ: I think I've rambled on long enough to be honest. [laughter]

MJ: Thank you so much for sharing your stories. It was a pleasure to have you with us.

AŚ: My pleasure. And my best wishes to everybody who's listening to this.