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RIP Swells

As a child of the late 80’s & 90’s I used to read NME. And in NME there were many writers – from the wispy and fey Everett True (just like his beard) and the funnily bizarre yet removed David Quantick there was only one writer, Steven Wells.

Sadly Swells (aka Susan Williams and Seething Wells at various points) died a few days ago of cancer aged 49…he enraged and irritated people as much as made them laugh and think, being from a Marxist left and red skin persuasion, but was usually right, exposing homophobia and racism as much as swearing and WRITING IN CAPITALS!!!! writing about music, sports and generally winding up liberal Grauniad readers and indie-fey students and Radiohead fans which is A GOOD THING.

You can read his last column for Philadelphia Weekly here – as well as checking out the last line (he must be cacking himself, wherever he is over the Jackson thing – not that he is cos he didn’t believe in that complete codswallop, quite rightly too) check out the comments which are from many journos and writers from his history, it’s very moving.

Two things that have come up though:

1) James Brown you useless FUCK. No interest in music? Utter bullshit you useless toerag-piece-of-shit. It’s obvious from reading more than his name that Swells he loved music, just hated musicians and those who wanked over them without thinking about it. He loved the music that was against the grain, POP music or just damn unloved. Very like Peel in this respect, unlike Peel who lovingly bumbled about it, Swells was happy to get into verbal fisticuffs about it COS IT MATTERED.

2) Mikerichi you are a utter cuntmare, you snivelling shit. Yes let’s flag up Swells Wikipedia entry for deletion as ‘Recent death does not establish notability.’ -I wonder if your recent death will establish YOUR notoriety? Let’s find out shall we, with the anal application of a large FUCK OFF chainsaw. Swells would’ve liked that, you fucking ponce. Really I think Wikipedia has a real problem, these devolved excuses for humanity who patrol Wikipedia like some SS Nazi compound, they’ve terrorised people who WERE ACTUALLY THERE AND HAVE LIVES and have actually done shit. What have they done apart from sit at a computer getting fat and spotty, FFS? Wikitrolls, Fuck OFF.

Yes let’s remember Swells with ANGER and RAGE and kicking the shit out of these people for a start, none of this liberal panty-waist ‘oh he was a good bloke’ crap. Yes he was, that was blatantly obvious if you looked past the swearing and the music at the politics and what he stood for. He FUCKING CARED. Unlike most of the sad excuses for music journalism who are all about ‘managing their brand‘, FFS.

Ones that lest we not forget, operated a colour bar for many years on anything other than pasty-white dishevelled sub-teens on their cover (yes NME did that, saying their audience was racist, or didn’t like buying those issues. Well then DO something about it, you cunts. Rock Against Racism? Remember that? Oh you only create ‘specials’ for it now, but don’t really want to actually push against the insipid racism and homophobia inside the music industry, only from a limp middleclass liberal stance from the VIP area) and age bars – they won’t usually cover new bands over 23, and only established ones over that age – hence unless you are Kele from Bloc Party (one of the few exceptions) or that bloke from Flaming Lips, you are completely fucked.

So what killed the NME for me and many people was this idea that you have a brand director, you have a TV station, you have gigs, but no real idea for what the paper stood for anymore, at least until they saw $$$ signs in Rock Against Racism mk2 ‘Love Music Hate Racism’ – but even back in the day they were more the problem rather than the solution, and even more so now.

So I salute you Steven Wells, and those punks and ex-punks and people who actually gave a fuck about more than music, and understood music could say and mean much more than ‘Shoobydoolanglang’.

You’re a dying breed, as music becomes just another ‘pathway’ and soundtrack to video games and inane mobile commercials, which is why it’s sad when we lose someone like this, who always ranted at the dying of the light, kept it real like Peel, like Hicks never sold out, unlike some of his contemporaries who now litter the sad pathetic excuses for digital TV and radio stations. I raise a drink to you, Swells.

Comments

3 responses to “RIP Swells”

  1. mikerichi avatar
    mikerichi

    You are a fucking idiot. At the time the Steven Wells Wikipedia article was nominated for deletion, it had absolutely no citations to establish notability other than a citation about his cancer and death, hence “recent death does not establish notability,” and the article had been flagged as needing sources for years. If you turds cared so much about his Wikipedia article you should have written something establishing his notability while he was alive. Without citations, I could just as easily create an article for myself claiming that I’m a well known journalist who wrote for the NME, the Guardian etc and it would be just as legitimate as the Steven Wells article before the citations were added.

  2. mikerichi avatar
    mikerichi

    And additionally, you illiterate shit, I’m not even the person who proposed the article for deletion. Someone else nominated it and formatted the deletion proposal incorrectly. I saw the deletion proposal having recognized the name of Stephen Wells from a local news weekly, saw that the article had been flagged for years without anyone producing documentation for anything contained within other than the fact that the guy was dead, verifying the claims in the malformed deletion nomination, so I formatted the deletion nomination properly. How stereotypically arrogantly British that you blame me for not knowing who a “legendary British journalist is” when none of you could be bothered to add the citations while he was alive.

    1. Tim avatar

      Nice of you to notice…a year and a half later.

      Still a shitty move, and I was with you on the first reply, whereas the second reply a) doesn’t really understand Swells writing style and b) uses sad nation tactics of ‘ooh you Brits’

      You sir are still a Wikitroll, and the reason that I don’t ‘add citations’ or do much with Wikipedia cos useless trolls like you reverse it – and yes with references and citations – or with stuff that doesn’t have online citations…I know it might be hard for a child of the internet age (20?) to understand but most of the world’s knowledge IS NOT ONLINE. So when another wikitroll deleted the entry for one of the socialist newspapers that a friend of my partner’s ran – cos there weren’t enough Google hits -and that person was the EDITOR of said paper, but like most of that history unless you have Carnegie Fucking Mellon digitising your paper or LOC and you have to be some major publication to do so – then FUCK ME of course the references won’t be there.

      So that’s why I don’t add stuff to Wikipedia, cos the utterly depressing thing of having your edits reversed by some twonk who wasn’t there – If you did you’d not have flagged Swells entry – .and has no idea of what they are talking about ‘because they disagree’ or ‘because they go around anally cleaning up Wikipedia cos they have small penises and want some sense of self worth’ – that’s what I suspect anyway.

      It was a cuntmove and will always be a cunt move, being a jobsworth or not, it’s still cunty thing to do.

      Good night sir!

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