The 21 Most Read Entries On My Old Blog

Thought I'd print the stats from this one, as well.

Steven Wells R.I.P. - spoken tributes from his wake

Trust me, I wouldn't be sending you to the NME site if there wasn't a good reason, but some very sweet reminisces here about my former colleague and peer, Swells.

Everett True (2)

I don't mind people holding my name up as an Ideal of Something or Other, but this fellow's way off-the-mark.

(Taken from Stereokill, article written around a recent review carried in the NME.)

...In 130 words, Kharas makes one criticism of Isaac’s music, and then devotes the rest of his word-count to a pathetically contrived attack on his perceived image of Isaac (and fans). He rounds the review off with a trio of sentences taken straight from the kind of fiction you write for a school English class:

… from the dark a dancing, pissy-pantsed gaggle in whose fire lay – yes! – not just my balls but scores of charred gonads, roasting in the flames like woolly nuts. I turned and ran, castrato screams tearing through the night. I had become Sam Isaac.

Is this what music criticism has become? The trade that produces copy like this – smug, low-rent rants with little or no substance; articles that leave the reader with a stronger sense of the reviewer’s personality than of the character or quality of the subject’s music – cannot be the great art of Everett True and Steven Wells, can it? This kind of lazy, elitist journalism bears no resemblance to the profession that John Peel devoted his life to.

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I mean, whoa, hold on there boy, let's not get too carried away.

"Smug, low-rent rants with little or no substance; articles that leave the reader with a stronger sense of the reviewer’s personality than of the character or quality of the subject’s music" were almost exclusively the province of myself and Swells during the 80s (and beyond).

Credit where credit's due.

If you're here and...

... you haven't got your arses over to Drowned In Sound this week, do so now! Article (and link) breakdown follows...

Swells. Rest in peace, you bugger.

I'm not sure I've ever felt so proud, and humble, to have an article commissioned in my life. It's only short, and I'll put the fuller version up later - but, for now, be thinking of Swells when the folk at Philadelphia Weekly raise a glass to him in a few hours time.

Steven Wells tributes

I want to put a few of the tributes to Swells up here.

Steven Wells R.I.P.

He gave my band our first major review in the NME.