Chumbawamba Musings - Seething Wells, Not Michael Jackson

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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 ...

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