Swells, shrivels

I was just looking around to see what Steven Wells thought about the USA vs Spain game, and found he's gone and died on us. What a fucking shame. He was probably the first journalist who I actually recognised as being a distinct entity, having previously more or less assumed that the stuff in the NME and the papers was produced by an undifferentiated blob of miscellaneous employees. I knew he'd been sick because he quite famously wrote about it:

And suddenly it hits me. I'm poleaxed, sobbing uncontrollably. I feel very vulnerable and very, very scared. This is followed by 24 tedious hours of horribly gothic adolescent introspection during which almost every conscious line of thought concludes with, "But what's the point if you're going to die anyway?"

Who'd have thought that post-traumatic shock would have so much in common with being a Radiohead fan?

Swells was utterly reprehensible in many ways; self-obsessed, totally wrongheaded on most important issues, often quite callous and with a pretty juvenile tendency toward provocation for its own sake. But at least he wasn't fucking boring; at the end of the day this will also presumably be Julie Burchill's defence when she faces the Great Scorer. RIP.