I was a child of the NME; from the moment I first glimpsed the faded, dog-eared pages that adorned the battered walls of the form room I entered at my first day a high school, first talked to the Smiths/Fall loving teacher – who would later hand me my a copy of The Stone Roses LP and change my life forever – I wanted to know who these strange alien people were. The Sundays, The Cocteau Twins, The Swans, Microdisney, Morrisey (yeah, well, I got over that quick enough), Paul Haig, are just some of the ones I can vividly remember, and who I have bought with me…
Fast forward three years, and my own bedroom became a facsimilie of that form room: the ‘Roses self-splattered splendour, Tim Burgess walking on water, Courtney Love in silk, Kurt Cobain in shades, Mudhoney, The Chillis in fish-eye. I can see each pic vividly – I have never had the heart to throw them away, as it happens.
Behind every one of those covers, lurking somewhere within the pages – shouting at the wind, pissing on your table, berating letter-writing self-obsessed knobheads and popping bubbles of pomposity where e’re he did go – was Stephen Wells.
Yesterday could be characterised as being about loss, I s’pose… If you want to do that collective mourning thing, fine -just leave me out. I see it as being more about appreciation. I didn’t know Michael Jackson, I didn’t know Stephen Wells (but I care more about him); he’d have probably hated me… But he went a long way to shaping my views on many things – not least the dour hoardes of overly earnest ‘but he’s speaking about my sad life’ wanker Smiths fans dreaming of loss and oblivion with one hand poking from their baggy cardigans straight into daddy’s wallet.
He moved on, and so did I… The covers faded, and I started reading Select, probably. I didn’t follow his work, and he didn’t give a single good fuck that I didn’t. It seems he just kept on being the same obsurdly literate obscenity machine that he always was. That is, until yesterday… When he died after suffering with Hodgkins Lymphoma, aged just 49.
The strange thing is, the last words he ever clattered into a laptop, from a Philadelphia hospital – on June 14th – were as follows:
“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.”
I’m sorry, but how weird is that?
Additional: Swells on form… From his series Stephen Wells’ America, which you can find here.
