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Seething Wells, Not Michael Jackson

Irony. It’s what the British do best.

Seething (Steven) Wells died two days ago. Then tonight, starting to write this, I find out that Michael Jackson has died. One of these two men owned a ranch called Neverland and had three children called Michael Joseph Jackson Jr, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince Michael Jackson II. The other one was the King of Pop.

I grew up reading the NME, the New Musical Express as it was called back then in the mid-seventies. I ate it up, all the cynical hipster talk and the post-hippy anti-establishment rants. Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray sticking it to Pink Floyd and ELP and the rest of their bloated ilk.

Then along came Tony Parsons and the new writers, ably deconstructing the decade and rebuilding it as punk, replacing cynicism and cannabis with positivism and anger and come on, get off your arse and do it yourself.

That was important for me back then – I needed to read stuff by people who were prepared to kick me up the arse and tell me to do something. Anything. Anything except sitting down reading the NME.

Post-punk (those salad days between the gruesome let-down of Sid joining the Pistols and the horror of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet) was a vacuum filled by those clever enough to see that good music, good art, involved a knowledge of politics and a sense that the world was much bigger than Top of The Pops: Crass, The Specials, Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, Dead Kennedys. And so a new bunch of journalists came crawling out of the lefty woodwork to champion this music, slowly at first, but eventually picking up momentum… ex-fanzine writers, pushing and jabbing each other into saying something worthwhile in the national music papers (there were three back then – NME, Sounds and Melody Maker).

Swells came along on that wave. I first heard about him through a couple of fanzines done by himself and a local Leeds lad called James Brown – Attack On Bzag and Molotov Comics. Swells wrote poems, polemic-disguised-as-poems. Great, ranty, in-your-face poems. Along with people like Mekons’ Jon Langford I contributed stuff to both zines, convinced that here in Leeds in the doldrums of the early eighties there was something exciting and important coming out of the Rock Against Racism, Miners Strike northern city culture.

Next I knew he was in the NME writing reviews. Scathing reviews. All the old guard – all your Phil Collins has-beens – were summarily summonsed and shot by Swells. I remember an interview with Mike Oldfield. It may or may not have been on board Mike Oldfield’s private jet. Or was it conducted while playing tennis? Memory tells me it was an exercise in the annihilation of pompousness, but mostly I remember laughing at the lad’s cheek and his ability to sneak his brand of agit-prop into the pages of the New Musical Express. James Brown says of Swells’ time at NME that “he was obsessed with class war, masturbation, dogs, cancer, Jello Biafra and the multiple use of the exclamation mark.”

Come 1985 and Chumbawamba released our first single and got our first proper live reviews in the music press. And who was there singing our praises, sticking up for this weird northern punk/cabaret hybrid? Seething Wells. From that time on he stuck his neck out for us. In a world where the NME editor increasingly dictated copy according to what the advertisers/record companies wanted to see, Swells was the thorn in the side who refused to kow-tow to the bland norm. Through the miners strike he was alone in championing the idea that music could be used for something important, that there were bigger issues here than whatever gold lame was being worn by Haircut 100 or ABC on Top Of The Pops.

Swells stuck by Chumbawamba when we were ridiculed and lambasted by the journo hipsters who celebrated the return of bland, everyday and utterly non-political ‘indie’ music which dominated the next decade. Politics was unfashionable (especially if you had a job writing record reviews for a music mag). Bands like us disappeared from the popular cultural radar, despite growing live audiences.

When ‘Tubthumping’ was a worldwide hit in 1997, all the old magazines and writers suddenly had a change of heart and wanted to get back in touch with us again. Ha! How funny. Get lost.

We agreed to an interview with the NME only if Seething Wells was to do it. They agreed (bloody prostitutes). Through all this time, our dialogues with Swells were peppered with anarchist v Marxist arguments, disagreements on the merits of the Third International and debating the difference between Redskins and Conflict. Him and us, we ranted and barked like wary dogs, snapped and snarled and probably dribbled at the mouth a bit, too. But always, Chumbawamba recognised what this Swells bloke was doing, how much he meant in a world where the same old groups made the same old charts and the same old magazine covers time after time after time.

And my goodness the rest of the journalists hated us. It seemed like Swells was the only one who ‘got’ our sense of humour and our way of laughing at ourselves while doing something utterly serious. In 1998 we made a documentary of the band. We contacted all the major journalists who’d gone on record slagging us off and asked if they’d like to be in a documentary “about pop and politics”. They all said yes. Each of them turned up (not suspecting they were being interviewed by that their most hated band) and, with little prompting, slated us. They signed cleverly-worded release forms and bob’s your uncle, we stuck them all in our film, slagging us off. The exception, of course, was Swells. We interviewed him straight. Sat him in a pub and asked what he thought of this rag-tag bunch of situationist clever-arses called Chumbawamba. He did his usual thing on-camera – told stories, embellished, sexed-up, ranted etc – but essentially came up with how Chumbawamba elongated its stay in the pop world: “It’s alright walking around with hair like a gonk. But it doesn’t half alienate you from ordinary decent working class people like their parents. That’s the reason why they changed.”

Seething Wells. I can’t, even now, get used to the idea of calling him Steven Wells. Because by rights he was always seething. Really, he was. Not seething with undirected, Liam Gallagher-style dumb-ignorant fury, but with a righteous (yes, that’s the word! Righteous!) indignation that, bloody hell, while he was around, things could be better! Now!

He died of cancer; specifically, Hodgkins Lymphoma. My Dad almost died of it two years ago. It’s a killer that sneaks up on you not because you’re unfit or you’ve been smoking thirty cigs a day but because… because nothing. Annoyingly for a ranting poet/journalist who spent his life pointing fingers and trying to get to the heart of society’s ills, there’s no explanation and no reason for suddenly finding out you’ve got lymphoma. A big question, without an answer. Reading Seething Wells’ blog, detailing his own illness, is to read the powerful madness of someone wrestling with science and logic. It’s Swells telling himself that, if there’s very little beauty in cancer, at least there’s plenty to be got from the wrestling.

Seething Wells died having spent his short life writing stuff that was mainly designed to piss people off, and he probably succeeded. Because those people were the millionaire, hypocrite know-nothings of the music world. And the answer to the question ‘Why?’ would be, in Swells’ case – “because someone had to do it”. And on behalf of Chumbawamba, I’m glad someone was there to do it.

Seething Wells, if you were still writing, you’d probably have something to say about how Michael Jackson chased you into the grave. I won’t say it for you. But the irony, oh the irony. And for a northern English writer who lived his last decade in America, I’m sure you’d understand. One final thing. If anyone ever says to me, remember Michael Jackson, the King of Pop? I’ll think of Swells.

Here’s Seething Wells’ last written diary entry, the day before he died:

“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.
“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.”


What an apt and ironic last line.


Boff Whalley

Swells’ harrowing, funny and typically ranting diary of his last days are at:

www.philadelphiaweekly.com

Jade Goody

Q: What's the difference between cancer and a cow?
A: Max Clifford can't milk a cow.

As with the ‘tragic, shocking and devastating’TM death of Princess Diana, we’ve all been invited of late to fall in line with the sanctification of some inconsequential girl who’s met her maker (her maker actually being publicist Max Clifford) and then shuffled off in as garish a way possible under the glare of the dear old British media (hitherto referred to as ‘the nation’).

Jade Goody. I’ve got nothing against the poor girl. From what I can tell she was a lass who did the best she could to make something of herself, given a terrible start in life and against all the odds becoming one of those rich people who get photographed in magazines and sell their own perfume line. I have nothing against those people, as I say, but then again I’ve got no vested interest either in believing I ought to mourn them on demand when they give up the ghost.

It makes me puke, this media-deification: watching how the red-tops and the paparazzi and the silver-haired publicists have us all in their pockets, worshipping what we once were sold as rubbish. Makes me angry that I’m not allowed to come out and say that the whole thing stinks, it’s all a sham, a joke, a huge expense account payable by the British public for whatever regurgitated morality we’re all spoonfed, without coming across as heartless. And with Jade, of course, the big morality word was Cancer.

People close to me have been diagnosed with cancer. I like to think that their efforts in reaching some kind of breathing space (literally), and remission from the pain of chemo- and radiotherapy, gives them some kind of personal hero status. Not front-page tabloid headlines. Not Max Clifford on morning TV telling the world (for his £200, 000 fee) that he was “a personal friend, and very very close” (pass the sick bucket).

Cancer’s a right bastard (not the best way to describe a wholesale biological killing machine, but you know what I mean) and it’s great that Jade Goody could be highlighted as a focal point for the campaign for women to come forward for screening for cervical cancer. But let’s get this clear: Jade and her media-profiled struggle does not represent the thousands of people who are involved on a daily basis with fighting, struggling with and caring for cancer patients; and so it gets my back up that Clifford can monopolise the word ‘brave’ for a Reality Show client who’s paying him huge sums of money. And as Michael Parkinson said in a recent article – “Why buy a Jade Goody candle, when you can simply make a donation?”

I hated all the Diana crap, the instant canonisation of a deeply-flawed and ignorant rich girl who happened to get famous by marrying a twerp with a Royal lineage. But this Jade Goody stuff takes the biscuit; it’s as if the media wondered whether they could actually pull off the same scam with some utter nonentity from Essex – ordinary woman to instant sainthood in the space of a few weeks. I hear Sky TV went wall-to-wall on the funeral, too, prostitutes that they are. I wouldn’t know, I refuse to watch Murdoch’s tacky version of the news.

Death’s a funny thing. It’s sacred, sacrosanct, above ridicule. Jade Goody was always ripe for a good slag-off, a right laugh, until she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Suddenly the media stopped its sniggering and guffawing and got all pious and serious. I didn’t. I laughed all the way through the whole charade – not at Jade’s plight, obviously, but at the media’s hypocritical about-face. The media’s pathetic attempt to play the straight man. The media’s black-tie cry-baby seriousness. The media’s laughable ‘we really care’ headlines. The media’s stifled-sniggers hand-rubbing as the sensationalism of the story translated into newspaper sales.

For anyone who read Johann Hari’s piece in The Independent*, no Johann, it’s not about snobbery and class. I’m not talking about Jade Goody as a person (neither I, nor Johann Hari, nor anyone I know, nor most of the people in the media, ever met her) but as a media-construct, a clay model thumbed into life by the indescribably awful Max Clifford and his money-grubbing hangers-on; bloodsuckers who live off the lives and (more lucratively) deaths of real people.

Only one newspaper didn’t feature Jade’s funeral on its front page. (Come on, everyone, join in!) Nevertheless, catching the mood not of a nation I’ve read about in the crap papers but a nation I see and meet and talk to every day, can I suggest that we don’t waste time mourning the death of ‘Our Bermondsey Diana’ (spelled out in a wreath at the funeral), or ‘the Nation’s Brightest Star’ (OK Magazine) or indeed ‘an ordinary woman from a rubbish telly show’ (me). Let’s mourn instead the death of common sense and the passing of a sense of perspective…



*Johann Hari’s piece about Jade Goody can be read here .

Boycott Israel - by Naomi Klein

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.

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Lies, Lies, and Palestine

The most recent issue of Q Magazine has an interview with Radio 4’s John Humphreys. There’s no other reason I would have bought a magazine with U2 on the cover (other than to read Bono’s latest preposterous chest-beating, of course).

John Humphreys, for anyone that doesn’t know, is the main interviewer for BBC radio 4’s Today programme. He’s a man that continually interrupts the politicians that he interviews, won’t let them get away with their two-faced, mealy-mouthed, half-arsed attempts at lying.

This is what he said in that interview:

“There are three types of politicians. Those who never lie; those who are economical with the truth when it comes to the possibility of embassing the government; and then there are those that don’t give a bugger what they do.”

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Pulling Punches

Never let it be said that the BBC has lost its remit to ‘educate’. Watching the first part of the ‘John Prescott on Class’ documentary was a simple lesson in understanding the nature of class in contemporary Britain. Not, however, in the way Prescott presumably expected it to be – his blustering grouchiness was aimed at reiterating the fact that yes, class still exists and that, yes, it dictates a large part of the culture and politics of this land – but by way of showing how not to go about changing that system.

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The Loudness Wars

Some things just gladden my heart. I heard a piece on Radio 4 today about the new Metallica album, Death Magnetic, being too loud. Not, as one might imagine, the complaint of a Cambridge University historian (see Boff's piece), but the opinion of quite a large number of Metallica fans. Some 16,000 of them have signed a petition to have the album remastered. Lars Ulrich (possibly the man I most love to hate in rock music) has dismissed the number of complaints as 'insignificant' - bless.



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