Tribute to Swells

Roger Sargent has made this rather wonderful tribute to Steven Wells:

Steven Wells Tribute Film from Roger Sargent on Vimeo.

[Via NME Video blog]

Journobit: Steven Wells

Steven Wells, what are you, Steven Wells?

There is, of course, a story about Steven Wells, whose death was reported earlier today. The punk-turned-poet-turned-NME-journalist-turned-TV-turned-Phildelphia-Weekly-writer story is a great one, admittedly. With a rotten, stinking, too-soon ending.

But if you read his stuff, if it was during his period on the NME that the paper meant the most to you, you'll have memories. The first time my scrawny little name ever graced the inky inside of the NME it was a letter sent to Angst defending something Swells had written about Sellafield, in response to a harping letter from Cumbria the previous week. (Yes, it was that era of the NME.) Not that Wells needed the support from me - he could take care of himself; the weeks when he took the editor's chair for the letters page were always the best Wednesday night tea-time reads: all screeching sound-effects and all the letters complaining about Morrissey cut into one long, dribbling drool, neatly dispatched at the end with a sharp put-down.

There was the frankly bizarre time Mark E Smith started honking that everyone knew Swells and Quantick were doing it to each other, gleefully detailed in the paper. There were singles reviews which, if Feargal Sharkey really thinks Charles Arthur's description of albums is beautiful, would have made the head of UK Music sob bitter tears. There was little time for the Smiths, less for Chapterhouse, and none whatsoever for The Levellers.

Admittedly, many of these targets were still exercising him as recently as this year, and in much the same terms as he was writing about them back in the early 1990s, but presumably his life in the US made it hard for him to update his British music bile in quite the same way.

I think, more-or-less, I can still do a Seething Wells poem from memory:

I'd die for my country said a patriotic dickhead
Well, go ahead, die, you make me sick
Slice your wrists and slash the statistics
The number unemployed fell today
Fifteen thousand bled away
So we stripped them cold naked
And shaved their heads
Stopped the thrashing of severed nerve endings
By boiling the buggers in sterilized lead
Laid them out in cold, grey ranks
Introducing the human sandbag
A small donation to the nation's maintainence
A YOPS scheme to absorb radiation
This depression won't fade away
It'll trickle away down blood-clotted drains
One way or another

Well, he was never going to be writing Hallmark card verse, was he?

Wells was 49.

Amongst the tributes:
James McMahon in the NME:

I’ve been a fucking disgrace. I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself; the sheer weight of articulating what his words meant to me, let alone at least two generations of NME readers, has almost ruined me. I’ve made cups of tea, I’ve smoked cigarettes, I’ve been for an obscenely long lunch. I’ve done anything I could do to avoid writing something on page. Even in death, the unique talent, spirit and flair of Steven Wells has left me questioning everything I’ve ever believed. Articulating the life and times of a character as big as Steven Wells is a job for a big man and I can’t help questioning whether I’ve got the girth for the job.

Former NME colleague James Brown writing for the Guardian:

Swells had helped me start my fanzine and given me my first NME review to do. He also helped open the door for my staff job there as a 21-year-old. I repaid him by bringing in a generation of fanatical music obsessives and great writers like Steve Lamacq, Bob Stanley, Stuart Maconie and Barbara Ellen and giving them all the work. He welcomed the revolution but not the smaller pay cheques. As an NME writer, he was obsessed with class war, masturbation, dogs, cancer, Jello Biafra and the multiple use of the exclamation mark. His work was littered with it. Almost creating his own language. '(SUBS LEAVE THESE LAST THREE SENTENCES IN)' was a regular sentence in his copy.

Aside from the surreal comedy column he co-wrote with David Quantick, Swells was increasingly marginalised in a more-music, less–politics NME until he took up the offer of interviewing Phil Collins. Asking questions no one else would dare to, the end result was brilliantly funny and he realised that if he delivered a great interview it would piss the rest of the staff off, which seemed to be his main purpose in life.

I think he'd have been amused by the reaction of Wikipedians, recorded by Sarah Bee in The Register:

Say what you like about Wikipedia, you can't accuse it of lacking tact. Within 48 hours of the untimely death of music journalist Steven Wells, his entry has been summarily marked for deletion on the grounds that he isn't famous enough.

The Quietus, for which Wells was writing, had a nice headline:

Swells Dies. Caps Lock Buttons Sigh In Relief

He was also writing for The Guardian - both the sports section and for the music part online. Tim Jonze:

When I started editing guardian.co.uk/music a year ago, it was a privilege to have him writing for us. We were all agreed that he was the master of bashing out killer blogs: keep it simple, keep it funny, drive half the readers into a frenzy of rage. My personal favourite in recent months was this Guitar Hero blog, in which he argued that all guitars should be destroyed (they take ages to learn, they hurt your fingers etc) and replaced with simple, piece-of-piss "button guitars". When I told him that the piece was getting a lot of our readers worked up, his response was classic Swells: "Tim … never underestimate the stupidity of guitarists."

We'll really miss him.

His co-conspirator David Quantick, in a Twitter two parter:

One more Swells memory - after a news story about a small boy who'd had his arm ripped off by chimps after he'd climbed into their cage...
Steven loped round the office waving an imaginary arm over his head, shouting OO OO MISTER SHIFTER!!!

The last word goes, of course, to Swells. The sort-of final line from his final Philadelphia Weekly column:

This blog entry has no last paragraph. Scroll to the top and repeat.

RIP: Steven Wells

Just heard that one of the great music writers, Steven Wells, has died.

[Updated: Fixed link - thanks to Alan C for pointing out the mistake]

Happy 56th birthday, NME

Perhaps the most encouraging thing for IPC as they read Stephen Dalton's Times piece on the NME is that, while it's not an entirely encouraging read, there aren't many magazines whose 56th birthday (or, come to that, future direction) would be considered worthy of an editorial piece in the heavyweight papers.

Dalton lands a couple of blows on the current magazine - calling it like a "training-bra version of Heat" - but is generous to current and former staffer's contention that the NME is always haunted by its past:

“Generations of them, all moaning about how NME stopped being good at the exact moment they stopped buying it,” complains Steven Wells, one of the magazine's star writers in the 1980s and early 1990s. “It must really suck to be an NME writer these days with this bloated Greek chorus of balding middle-aged naysayers on your back.”

It's true, of course, but what might be more alarming is that (unless we're missing something) there aren't many people who read the magazine five years ago who insist that it's gone downhill. The 'not as good as in my day' crowd are paying the brand a tremendous complement by stressing how important the NME was to their musical development. That people are harking back to the early 2000s version suggests that - for about a decade - it's not really held that position. The challenge for the NME is not the crowd of old gits complaining that it's changed, but that their ranks aren't being swollen any more.

Steve Sutherland (former editor, now heading up the division of Time Warner which publishes the magazine) tells Dalton that paper version has a future, but even if it doesn't, it doesn't really matter:

Sutherland dismisses speculation about closing the weekly magazine, at least for now. “Am I married to print on paper?” he asks. “Would I weep buckets if, in 20 years, NME was talking on a minute-by-minute basis with millions of music fans all over the world but the magazine had passed on? Personally, no. Do I believe that will happen? No again.”

It's perhaps unfortunate that Dalton spends most of the piece detailing why it wouldn't matter if the magazine folded - it's online, it's possible to read the NME without buying the magazine, there's a lot of similar stuff around - without actually managing to offer an argument of why it might matter if it did go. There's a space for an intelligent, passionate, popular-ish publication which writes about music like it's important, that realises some music can be more like an initiation than a pastime which presents its world as a clique that you could be part of. The NME isn't that publication at the moment, but it's the only hope we've got of getting one, as nobody would be able to start from scratch to fill that void. You need a friend who likes what you like if you're to trust someone when they tempt you to try something new, and there's no reason why the NME can't be that again, for a new generation. Of course, the brand can make money hosting awards bashes at the Millennium Dome and serving up news gobbets about Pete Doherty, but without rediscovering some heart and passion for the core magazine, it's going to be a brand supported only by its receding heritage.

The risks of reviewing

A new piece by Steven Wells is always a delight, and today he's appeared on the Guardian's music blog writing about artists who respond less-than-pacifically to bad reviews.

Mind you, as horrifying situations go:

I [...] was savagely pushed in the back at a gig by a furious Sci-Fi Steve out of Bis. Or it might have been Disco John - he ran too fast for me to tell.

... is hardly on a par with being chain-whipped by Sid Vicious.

I once had a bloke send his wife over to remonstrate with me over a review I'd written of his live act.