Thrown to the wolves?

After a bit of a falling out with his drummer, Patrick Wolf apparently announced he was quitting playing tours, and then withdrew the statement. However, diligent internet monkeys gathered up what is claimed to have been a posting announcing he was quitting:

"I have made a decision, my final concert will be this november, a retrospective with an orchestra in London. I am not sure wether there will be anymore public communications after that, Infact I am pretty sure there will be none. Of course, this has nothing to do with my drummer.. but a creative clock is ticking and I have many many projects to be creating with my time left on this earth. I hope to share my last shows with you this year."

Well, yes, who has time for touring round the world playing songs when the pipes in the loft still need lagging and there's potatoes to be planted?

The drummer sackage, says Wolf, was inevitable:

"[M]y drummer was causing arguments within my road family, taking sedative drugs before an important show in a city i really love, so much so he could not play the music I wrote, the songs that I have survived on in the last six years... because I had to slap him to see if he was even CONSCIOUS on stage.... the fact that the only thing that got any reaction out his corpse happened to be made of metal.. because all of this.. does this make me seem like I was on cocaine, or on some power trip?

There was no other way to check he was alive beyond hitting him with metal sticks, then? What a loss Wolf is to the medical profession. He doesn't stop to wonder if the reason why the drummer fell asleep while Patrick was in full flow might have something, you know, to do with the show itself, you'll note.

"I was pissed off because this was just one more musician or businessman taking my good nature and generosity for a ride... trust me, that moment onstage was the end of a long line of bad behaviour that it would unfair to go into in public. Yes I was drunk, but It was one oclock in the morning after seven hours of interviews. I had been running on about four hours of sleep a night for about two weeks... such is the joy of promoting a record. Anyway, I was having FUN until that moment. So was the rest of my band until we realised my drummer was taking the piss out of all of us and our hard work. I dont work with liars and I dont work with thieves."

Hang about... it was one in the morning and hardly anyone had been getting any sleep? Under these circumstances, the drummer seems to be no more at fault than poor, mute Katya, whose round-the-clock stitching of uninsured dungarees at Underworld resulted in her silent slide down the metal stairwell and death on the Coronation Street cobbles. Wolf is lucky he didn't have to haul a dead drummer out of the prying eyes of health and safety.