[T]his bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity — the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans — the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks.
RIP, Steven Wells. I’m genuinely gutted about this, not least because I didn’t know that he was suffering from lymphatic cancer, which is ridiculous because he’d written about it often enough for Philadelphia Weekly. But I suspect that it’s better that I was continuing to enjoy his columns in the Guardian and for The Quietus, rather than wallowing in his imminent demise.
Swells was the best thing about the NMEh before I stopped reading it. We rarely agreed on anything (well, apart from Smiths fans), but dear God, I loved the way he said it.
He will be missed.
Friend and former colleague Everett True has collected some tributes here, as well as posting his own.
The Guardian also has a retrospective of some of his sports columns.
It seems to be a truth universal that Swells was the only reason anyone with a brain rather than a haircut carried on reading NME after/during it’s dismal decline. Yet everyone who loved him tended to disagree with him. I think that says a lot about how good a writer he was. I already hate using the past tense when referring to him.
Crikey. I grew up with Swells, he’s one of the formative voices of my youth.
I have a copy of Philadelphia Weekly saved for you.
you’ll have to stop by to collect it.