RIP Swells :-(

[Bazza]

Just found out that Swells (aka Steven Wells) has sadly passed away.


Taken from Philadelphia Weekly:

Editor's note: Our friend and colleague Steven Wells died Tuesday of the cancer he had documented so well in two cover stories for Philadelphia Weekly.

On June 14th, he submitted this column.

Why is it that the people with the most profound stuff to say are also those who are the least capable of being able to express that profundity?
I am talking about us. The mutoids. The abyss starers. The already organ-bagged cancer boys. While we are in some mere state of deterioration, our ability to comment is still possible. It might even be occasionally interesting. Certainly every writer who has ever contracted cancer has thought so. We can make cancer jokes. Existentialist jokes, even. The world is ours!

But then as one nudges closer to the edge, in the eye of the tiger storm (Tiger Storm, quite possibly the worst line and the best band name ever written), one is more inclined to shit oneself (literally and figuratively) than to throw shit at the system. Which is wrong and weak and lazy but kind of understandable. As is my wife’s fury this morning upon her discovery that a pair of pre-adolescent oiks destroyed a 95 percent-completed jigsaw puzzle (of cats) in the family waiting room. Even as her own dear husband was having his savagely jigsawed abdomen dressed in a hospital room but two doors away.

But life isn’t that banal or that stupid. Life isn’t about grit and grime and squalor. Life is getting angry at destroyed cat jigsaws. Life is the amazement at seeing the Vanity Fair title erupt as a scarlet mohawk-cum-quiff across a dainty Johnny Depp’s forehead, and the drooling anticipation of watching a Brian McManus-recommended terror-comedy on my computer later tonight. And of course the sight of tireless, tie-less and tire-burning liberal rioters taking to the streets of Tehran.

I speak as someone whose greatest craving at this exact moment is not world peace and universal democracy or a rational and global redistribution of wealth, but a can of ice cold ginger ale.

And of course all this 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. (Check out the AMA logos, those smiling beasts are not snakes).

You could blame this fallacy on poor education, cultural deterioration, or simple moral decline. Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.

[strike]

Swells was an old friend from the miners strike years and afterwards, and was always seething. I only heard from him in march that he was following my blog. Very sad.

[Bazza]

There was a decent write up over on The Guardian website

www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/jun/25/nme-writer-steven-wells-tribute-james-brown

[strike]

I've been pleasantly surprised at the positive comments about Swells all over the web, especially the Philadelphia Weekly site.

[strike]

Bazza, I wrote an obituary for this weeks Socialist Worker. Also, chatting to an old fan of the Redskins, Paul Sillett, he told me Chris Moore is up and about again and is going to try and find some more detail for me.I'll let you know if/when I hear anything. I'm off to London this evening for a drink to celebrate Swells life. Martin will be there so I'll let you know how that goes as well.

[Bazza]

The following tribute was posted by Attila The Stockbroker on MySpace - www.myspace.com/attilastockbroker





Back from Glastonbury and with time to do a proper piece in Swells' memory. Here it is.
I shall be talking about him on 'The Verb' on Radio 3, 9.15pm this Friday.

STEVEN ‘SEETHING’ WELLS – A TRIBUTE

Just about to leave for Glasto last Thursday morning, one final email check...among the spam a message from my footie mate Alan. Title: ‘Have you seen this?’ Open it. Link to Philadelphia Weekly: ‘In extremis: Steven Wells says goodbye.’ Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Two days previously I’d emailed him a poem I’d just written. Must have arrived in his inbox hours before he disappeared off this earth.

Swells, I always thought you’d pull through. I’d read ‘The English Patient’ - your brilliant, witty, moving piece about your simultaneous battle with cancer and the US healthcare system - in the Weekly, swapped emails where you sounded as, well, Swellslike as ever and thought: you’ll make it. This is one roaring, iconoclastic, larger than life, indestructible, stupidly clever, logically illogical everything-demolishing mouth monster who won’t be demolished himself by something as mundane as cancer. But no. Seething Wells is dead. ‘Swells’ and ‘dead’ in the same sentence. We’re all going to die, sure – and our biological health dictates when, not our brain, our spirit, our love of life or our capacity to write verse with the caustic power of concentrated sulphuric acid or prose which immolates crap rock bands, pompous sports stars or anyone else we feel like taking on – but…..oh, fuck.

There have already been some fine tributes, mostly from his music journo friends. Here are my memories, and they start at a slightly earlier time. For me, despite his long ‘career’ (he hated that word!) in music journalism, Swells was first and foremost a poet, and then some. I first heard from him in 1981: I’d christened myself Attila the Stockbroker and had started getting up on stage performing energetic political poems between bands. He wrote to me, enclosing his fanzine Molotov Comics, saying he was doing the same up in Bradford, and so were some friends of his including Little Brother, Joolz and Slade the Leveller from a then unknown band called New Model Army. He called it ‘ranting poetry’….and from the moment I heard the phrase so did I.

Our first meeting was performing on the back of a lorry at a Right to Work demonstration in London in November 1981: coincidentally, Paul Weller was headlining a poetry event at the Young Vic theatre that night, and I persuaded Swells to come and ‘crash’ it with me and try and blag a few minutes. Organiser Michael Horovitz, bless him, gave us ten between us and the audience loved it. So did Paul Weller – two weeks later we were supporting the Jam at Hammersmith Odeon. NME editor Neil Spencer was there to review the gig and was impressed as well, sending budding writer and soon to be Redskins leader Chris Moore to do a big review of us at another gig a few weeks later. A music press ‘ranting poetry’ fad was born. And so was a pugnacious punk poetry partnership……

Swells and I did an EP together, ‘Rough Raw & Ranting’ which hit the indie charts, then a book for Unwins ‘The Rising Sons of Ranting Verse’ and for the next few years we saw a hell of a lot of each other. We gigged together, wrestled, drank, argued, and shouted together, watched bands together, went on demos together. But underneath the roaring exterior (and many people will be astonished by this) Swells never really enjoyed being on stage: many is the time I remember him throwing up before we tackled an audience. I guess it was this, plus his realisation that he could reach many more people writing for papers like the NME than as a ranting poet, that made him make the transition, first to Susan Williams, social surrealist feminist rock critic (many fell for it!) and then to the Steven Wells loved (by bands he liked) loathed (by bands he didn’t) and feared (by bands who didn’t know whether he was going to like or loathe them) everywhere.

I carried on being a poet, but we kept in touch as the years went by and every time we met the same roaring, hyper-opinionated clash would ensue. I’d take the piss out of him for choosing nerdy trainspotteresque behind-the-scenes music hackdom as the vehicle for his scattergun obliterations of everything Middle England held dear rather than getting on stage and doing it in front of a live audience like what a REAL stroppy bastard would do. He’d take the piss out of me for stubbornly carrying on being a ranting poet despite the fact that the entire collected ranks of nerdy music hackdom he hung around with thought ranting poetry was FINISHED and RUBBISH and that everything to do with Attila the Stockbroker was complete and utter DOG FAECES.
We’d agree to differ.
Then we’d smile, get pissed and wrestle with each other. And slag off Morrissey.

In the 90s I tried to coax him out of retirement and instigate the Seething Wells Comeback and got as far as booking him for a gig at the performance poetry series I was running in my home village near Brighton – but he phoned a couple of days before to cancel. So I gave up that idea and just enjoyed his demolitions of shit bands, shit football and shit politics in all the publications that would have him. (Plus the humanity, insight and above all the supreme intelligence which imbued all his writing – but I never told him that bit…..)

The last time I saw him was by chance - he was was a loud Swellsian vision in a pink satin suit by the Thames as I walked through London with my wife- and stepchildren- to-be. ‘John! John! John!’ Then he moved to the States to be with Katherine, the woman he loved, and and our occasional contacts and spats became more occasional and less memorable – apart from anything else it’s impossible to wrestle via email. For a couple of years, silence. Then one day in 2006 I thought ‘I wonder what Swells is doing now?’ and, because you can these days, Googled him. To my shock and sadness the first thing I found was the ‘English Patient’ article, and I got back in touch and stayed so to the end. A month ago I was congratulating him on a great piece on the corporate hijacking of football and he was doing the same to me about the football poems on my website. (Maybe we were mellowing in our old age). Last Tuesday I emailed him a poem, ‘Dad Rock Antidote Manifesto’ which I thought he’d like. Same old Swells. He was up for the battle, that’s for sure. I can’t believe he’s gone.

This morning I re-read that last piece he wrote, on the edge of death but so full of life, so stark, so self aware, so unutterably Swells. Then I went to visit my much loved old mum, battling bravely against Alzheimer’s, deafness and blindness, saying with dignity and calmness for the hundredth time ‘I’ve had enough, John. I want out.’
Fuck me, life can be unfair.
RIP Swells, you wonderful, stroppy, clever bastard. We’ll miss you.


THE NIGHT I SLEPT WITH SEETHING WELLS (1982)

A far off town and a late night bash
And a double bed was our place to crash
So listen here – ‘cos this story tells
Of the night I slept with Seething Wells!

I didn’t mind – or so I said
But I wish I’d had the floor instead
Cos you’d never imagine the thousand hells
Of a night in bed with Seething Wells….

When he got undressed I had to retreat
From his shaven head and his mouldy feet
The feet that launched a thousand smells
In that fragrant night with Seething Wells

So I kept right close to the edge of the bed
And I pulled the blankets over my head
But eerie snores and stifled yells
Soon woke me, thanks to Seething Wells

And, turning, I came face to face
With a massive boil in a private place
And a couple of hairy bagatelles
Made me run like hell from Seething Wells!

And I vowed right then that if need be
I’d spend the night in a cemetery
Or sleep with dogs, or DEAD GAZELLES
But never again with Seething Wells!


ATTILA THE STOCKBROKER

[Bazza]

Jun 30, 2009 4:14:13 GMT -5 strike said:

Bazza, I wrote an obituary for this weeks Socialist Worker. Also, chatting to an old fan of the Redskins, Paul Sillett, he told me Chris Moore is up and about again and is going to try and find some more detail for me.I'll let you know if/when I hear anything. I'm off to London this evening for a drink to celebrate Swells life. Martin will be there so I'll let you know how that goes as well.

Just read your piece in the Socialist Worker Norman, good stuff.
Also good news about Chris if it turns out to be true.

And here is a link to Norman's tribute to Swells - www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=18319

[Bazza]

And here is another tribute to Swells by Paul Sillet

www.lovemusichateracism.com/magazine/2009/06/26/a-tribute-to-steven-wells/