Eulogy for Steven Wells,

Smokin' Betty's, July 1, 2009, Philadelphia, PA

Steven is well known for his relentless attacks on what HL Mencken called “boobus Americanus.” Many hereabouts were mystified and upset by what he wrote for The Weekly. But as you also know, the lazy and complacent of Philadelphia were not his first targets.

From the early 1980s Steven wrote for one of the three leading British music weeklies. The New Musical Express was a print highlight of our week at a time when information about music was infinitely harder to come by. At our village news-agents we graduated from lemon bon-bons to a weekly dose of pop, punk, and funk. And as we began spending Mum’s child allowance on records and finally on the gigs themselves, Steven’s reviews helped make sense of it all.

This was true even if half the time we had no idea what he was on about. As Susan Williams, he wrote that the audience is essentially the enemy and “must not be allowed to breathe.” But Swells’ importance, to me at least, was that he made us want to find out—to fight back and to breathe free.

He must have known, of course, that he also supplied countless pretentious sixth-formers with our lines in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. We parroted freely.

As to what he wrote, much has rightly been said about his humor and his humanity. He fought patriotism, racism, and homophobia at a time when Thatcher and Tebbitt encouraged all three. And of course he refused to believe that the political-economic status quo was good enough.

Some have also remarked on how angry and intimidating he could be.... He was a judgmental bastard.

But the key to understanding his relentless rectitude, is not, as one might think, the fact that he was English. Rather it was his high expectations. He demanded a lot from humanity.

This is related, if I may, to the tension between what dear Katharine and others in the academic world know as structure and agency. Steven understood that the world constrains us: that, as Marx said, we make our world, but do not do so exactly as we please.

We are subject to forces over which we have little control—the dominant racist culture of 1970s Bradford, what our mates do, finance capitalism, or the Radio One DJ Steve Wright. We might, it follows, go along. We might put up with the crap we’re being fed, or worse still reproduce it on stage or on record. We might be wankers.

But Steven, I think, would have agreed with James Baldwin’s comment: “I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly—but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.”

Steven fucking demanded this.

It underpinned his attack on people—musicians or fans, politicians or voters—who can’t be bothered. Like proper punk, he expected us to know or learn our place in history and space, and to change it where we can. We are to be agents despite our structures.

This is both a collective and an individual move. It begins in adolescence, reading the NME or the Philadelphia weekly. It continues in society, whether in a union or a party, whether at a club or in the pub. Whether making music or buying it.

The point for Steven was that those unwilling to make their move needed to be told.

And even at the end he was still feeding the lazy among us lines: as, for example, when he pointed out the remarkable similarity between what Americans call football and dogs making love.

He’ll be missed.