In Memory of Steven Wells

 

Steven Wells RIP

Old Rope was saddened to learn today of the death of the journalist, writer, punk-poet and serial sodomite Steven Wells.  I’m only joking about the sodomy, but I think he would have liked the alliteration. Known for his unique acerbic style, Swells wrote for many publications, perhaps most famously the NME from its seventies hay-day to it’s nineties nay-day. His blistering scattergun rapid-fire pieces also enlivened the pages of the Guardian, the Philadelphia Weekly, FourFourTwo, Metal Hammer and many more.  I won’t do his writing justice – it’s out there: find it and read it.

Three years ago Wells was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma and underwent a painful period of chemotherapy. This year he relapsed and in January was told he had enteropathy-associated T-cell lymphoma. “As cancers go,” he explained, “It’s a bastard.”

Tributes are currently flooding in to The Philadelphia Weekly and The Guardian, from colleagues past and present and the many readers who loved and hated him over the years.  I will refrain from attempting a cack-handed obituary, others will make a better job of it. But at the risk of being labelled a tree-hugging feelings-spewing mega-wuss, from whichever rock Valhalla he is currently causing havoc in, I feel I owe the old bastard something.

It would be disingenuous of me to call Wells a friend. I can’t even call him Steven with a straight face.  But for many years we wrote to each other regularly, me as an immature annoying suck-up wannabe and him as a tolerant good sport.  Like many others I spent my teen years reading his furious, funny writing in the NME.  Every Wednesday I would flick through its inky pages looking for his name at the bottom of a review or article – “Get in, Swells is editing the letters page!” would mark a gleeful start to a dreary school day.

When his Creation Books subsidiary, Attack! was launched I readily joined its Beano-esque fan-club. Swells enthusiastically wrote back and a string of correspondence ensued. I would come home to large packages stuffed with books, t-shirts and anything else from his desk that he thought an excitable eighteen-year-old should read. Years later, whilst writing an MA on 21st Century Literature, I would call upon an essay he sent me by Richard Marshall comparing Pride and Prejudice to his own Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty. He introduced me to many other excellent writers, such as Mark Manning and, notably, Stewart Home for which alone I am grateful.

In the new millennium, my blotchy biro drivel and his gaudy red marker scrawls were soon replaced by the burgeoning email revolution – now we conversed more quickly, if not more succinctly. Some days I would receive half a dozen emails, ranting, recommending, teasing, always implying we were somehow equals (which I suspect with retrospect meant a lot to me at that age) or as if we had known each other for years. Swells would always encourage and goad, provoke and agitate.  He told me that you didn’t need to be a ‘writer’ to write.  I wish I had paid him more heed and further taken the opportunity afforded by his advice and support.  He could, probably should, have dismissed me as an annoying idoliser, cloying sycophant or worse, an arrogant little shit. But he always gave me the time of day, whether in a lengthy diatribe about something that was irking or exciting him, or simply a few lines acknowledging your stupid idea as the best thing he had ever heard.

We met only once, along with Dannish Inquisition, at a festival.  I was a young fool with a mass of awful hair. He sequestered tins of beer for the three of us from an NME-sponsored backstage area and was as warm and charming in person as I knew him to be in his correspondence.

By the time I left university he had pretty much bid the NME farewell but wrote encouraging me to nag the editor for a job, citing the need for new blood.  I did and was surprised that it sort of paid off, no doubt owing more to his influence than any flare as a writer on my behalf.  I’m sure he’d have considered the subsequent farce and wrangling with sub-editors to be a rite of passage.  Dannish Inquisition and I struggled (we worked as a tag-team), despite writing many excellent (mostly unprinted) live reviews and were unable or unwilling to play the Brand NME game.  I secretly felt our failure to stay the course was somehow letting Swells down.  He was sympathetic, offering real advice whilst also suggesting we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be walked all over.  Stick it out, if you can, he suggested but don’t let them grind you down:

If the nme piss you off, if they keep bowlderising – then gnaw them off and spit them out like a cancerous cock and move on like a motherfucking godspawned ragewind, scouring the earth of the iniquitous fornicator and the works of his vile whores.

As time went by he moved to America and, though we stayed in touch, it understandably became less frequent. Married and with a new life, he seemed content. Doubtless we both had better things to do, certainly he did not need to read my inane ramblings and I was too old and embarrassed to write them.  It’s ten years later, my hair is starting to thin and go grey already. I like to think that I am not the excitable and naive late-teen wally he persevered with nearly a decade ago. But I can bet I know who Swells would prefer to hear from, if faced with the choice.  The older, wiser, bore would be snubbed for his younger, immature but gungho and enthusiastic self every time.

I never told Swells about Old Rope, I always thought it way too shit to trouble him with.  But I’d tell him one day, I thought, when it was better and I wouldn’t feel embarrassed about it’s fuck-awful quality. I imagine him laughing at me for being so precious, mocking me with his usual good humour and telling me I had fucked up my timing. I’m sure he would have been all too happy to point out it’s many flaws, advice that I should surely have welcomed. Mind you, he also offered me this pearl of wisdom on the subject of blogging,  “The joy of web.2.0 is contact with so many people who hate you. It requires a thick skin and the smug knowledge that these idiots are giving it away free.”

There are many great Swells articles I am sure to remember for some time: raving about Asian Dub Foundation on the cover of the NME, a history of Napalm Death, the long-running Alternative Reading letters, the singles reviews that said more about crocodiles than the actual music… all brilliant.  There are many more I have forgotten and so I hope that some thoughtful bastard will compile some sort of anthology or at least ‘best of…’.  I hear rumours that cyber-prankster, electronic mischief-maker and anti-artist Danolo Vanz has made promises to compile some personal historical highs online. This would certainly be a welcome start.

It is unfortunate that one article Swells wrote will stay with me for all the wrong reasons.  Swells has documented his battle with cancer in a handful of pieces for the Philadelphia weekly, the first of which was written several years ago.  When I first read it I was shocked and moved.  I laughed, laughed like I always did at his turns of phrase and his adroit way with words. And I nearly cried. The pain, embarrassment and fear he described, the shit he went through, resonated in a way that shocked me. And it was a little humbling. He wrote with brutal sincerity, he didn’t romanticise his condition or situation, he didn’t seek pathos.  But he also tried to make you laugh and see the funny side. In an email he wrote to me at the time he said with his usual gusto, “Today me tong is all swole up mekin me look like a drongo. Top fun.”

Many years ago I started to compile some of our older correspondence for my own nostalgic posterity, largely editing out my shit bits in favour of his much funnier replies. I have no idea if I still have them but I am now inclined to look. I feel sad that I didn’t get a chance to send one last email to him, but thus is life I suppose. I suspect he would tell me to stop mourning the dead and write about the living.

Steven Wells was an inspiration and rockin’ right-on man whose enthusiasm and encouragement I have greatly appreciated, though sadly never told him so.   Journalism  -  and the world  –  is a worse place without his presence.  I miss him already, but my thoughts must go to his wife Katherine at such a terrible time.

Steven Wells died of cancer on Tuesday 23rd June. 

Steven Wells 1960-2009.  We’ll keep the red flag flying. Rock on Swells baby

 

His last article: Steven Wells Says Goodbye
Old Rope follow up article: Swells – The Sonofabitch That refuses to Die

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Links and tributes:

Stewart Home tribute
Guardian Sport Blog tribute
Guardian Music Blog tribute
Richard Marshall 3:am tribute
James Brown’s tribute
No Rock and Roll fun tribute
Swells Dies. Caps Lock Buttons Sigh In Relief (The Quietus)
The NME actually writes something semi-decent
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