Tribute to the late, great NME writer Steven Wells | Tim Jonze

The late, legendary NME writer, Steven Wells, always told it like it was. With extra expletives

Some very sad news: Steven Wells, one of the greatest music journalists on the planet, has died of cancer. Swells, as most of you will know him, was the NME’s funniest, most expletive-prone writer throughout the 80s and 90s. To say he had a way with words is something of an understatement – a way with rampaging, amphetamine-crazed, cock-shaft metaphors was closer to the truth. He was a journalist who didn’t so much write as spit, curse and hyperventilate. He was brilliant.

I won’t attempt a proper obituary here (I’m currently in a tiny cabin having just arrived at Glastonbury festival – I don’t think I could do it justice), but I will mention that Swells was a personal hero of mine. He singlehandedly made the NME worth buying every week when I was a teenager (the phrase “the stench of fetid cock meat” in a Green Day feature still sticks in my mind – oh, the poetry!). Whether it was scrapping with Stuart Murdoch, enthusing over System of a Down or picking a fight with every racist, sexist, homophobic music-industry fool on the planet, he was an inspiration. It didn’t matter that he hated every band I adored at the time (Radiohead, Belle and Sebastian) or that we only ever truly agreed on one band (the pop genius of Daphne and Celeste!). What mattered was the fact he knew that the job of a music journalist wasn’t just to report on bands, but to wind them up. To shatter their pomposity. To ask them questions nobody else dared ask. He was a genuinely unique voice, the first music writer I came across for whom the byline meant more than the band. How many other music journalists can you say that about?

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.

Pop and rock

source : www.guardian.co.uk

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