RIP Steven Wells
 

He may not have been a fan of SY but he was a very funny writer in his NME days - eg

NME 21 September 1991 (p.45)

NINE DANKE!
NINE INCH NAILS
BRISTOL BIERKELLER

DEAR MR Trent Reznor. There are pop music baddies and pop music goodies (make up your own list, scribble ‘em on your pencil case) and I really wanted NIN to be on my side. I sort of liked the records, their dumb negativity, their squeaky bleakness and flashes of metal. I’ll be best friends with any band that get so regularly lumped with The Revolting Cocks and their disgusting ilk. I came prepared to be awed.

Your band emerged from behind a barrage of eardrum-rupturing noise and grey fumes and…Oh my God! It’s Adam And The Ants! No the good Adam and the Ants with the funny jolly highwayman costumes and feathers in their hair, but the posy, posturing utterly, totally, definitively KER-RAP! pre-‘sell-out’ art-school version. I mean, you even do the Ants’ song ‘Physical’ and manage to make it sound crapper and even more ridiculous than the original.

OK, so looks aren’t everything, but they’re at least 50 per cent of a live show and, I’m sorry, but the sight of a pretentious little boy with a silly haircut crouched behind a microphone making “strange” gestures with his hands like some awesome rock-messiah always makes me want to laugh, at first. After about half an hour I felt bored and nauseated. Yes, I know the kids think you’re some sort of really cool gut-level intellectual cum poet, but they thought the same thing about Kirk Brandon. Doesn’t that worry you?

Mr Trent Reznor, I’m sure you’re a wonderful guy, I bet you love small children and dogs and are a warm and sensitive lover. But onstage you are about as much fun as Christmas in a genital cancer ward. An evening watching your band is about as pleasurable as three-way sex with Mr and Mrs Himmler.

And yes they sounded awful too. Almost every song plodded along, got good right at the end with some fancy metal guitar and then got crap again. I mean, I’ve seen some tedious gigs in my time, I’ve sat through some hideous hours of unlistenable, tuneless, dull shite – Spear Of Destiny, Theatre Of Hate, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, New Order, Fields Of The Nephilim, Man O’War, Big Country (AAAAGH! My head hurts just thinking about them) – but you really take the industrial disco biscuit.

If you choose to make a T-shirt out of this review you will be invoiced accordingly. Yours sincerely,

Steven Wells

Yes.

"I know the kids think you’re some sort of really cool gut-level intellectual cum poet, but they thought the same thing about Kirk Brandon. Doesn’t that worry you?"

Hahaha

This is the man who accused VU of creating indie. C'mon, he was funny and entertaing as fuck.

hilarious.

Surely someone in the SY hordes must have that fucking interview that we've all read but nobody can find?

Pretty sure they had the cover for the Swells interview issue.

pretty sure it's that one.
"old and indie way" by steven wells, pages 16-18, may 2nd 1998.

will someone buy it? i'd like to read it.

Then I stand corrected. I'll throw a bid on when it's nearer to closing.

he was a bore, the world is a better place without him

He was amazing.

nice. i don't feel like dropping six quid for a laugh (postage costs cuntery).
three seems acceptable.

There was a period around the early 90s, just before he left music journalism altogether, when Swells did sort of regress into a kind of music-crit bootboy, saying little of real substance as he used his articles, reviews or interviews simply as a vehicle for pithily formed insults which, while fun, weren't that helpful. I think he was becoming increasingly alienated from his readers and perhaps felt that he had less and less to say to them. I remember a terrible review he'd written about the Happy Mondays during this period which only made me think that he really didn't have a clue what was actually going on with them. Prior to that he was probably my favourite NME writer, not so much for the bands he wrote about but the way in which he framed them and as a consequence made me think about them. That NIN review is sort of typical of the era when he began to lose focus/interest. Its good fun to read his avalanche of Reznor-directed bile but it hardly displays the same kind of insight that he was noted for. I hope someone compiles a collection of his music journalism so people really can see how good he once was.

Bah, lost out :/ Meant the other bidder had to pay a fiver though, so it's not all bad...