The Night We Kept for Seething Wells

I mourned, a while ago, the death of angry music journalist Swells, formerly known as Seething Wells the communist poet and officially known as Steven Wells. He hated every band I've ever loved, which made him compulsive reading.

A big tribute night was held in London at the weekend, and my friends The Nightingales (or most of them) were on the bill, alongside poets John Hegley, Little Brother (author of 'PC Gone Mad' - a poem about a policeman with mental health issues), David Quantick, various other indie luminaries and compered by my favourite communist punk poet, Attila the Stockbroker. The 'Gales played an Electric Eels number, a punked-up Mel and Kim track, their recent hit 'Little Lambs' and a thrash interpretation of The Internationale. A good time was apparently had by all.

Never mind Michael bloody Jackson

Swells is dead! Steven Wells, the wonderful, angry, witty, committed music writer from the days when NME did more than print bands' press releases. He died of the seemingly inevitable cancer: his final column (for the Philadelphia Weekly) treats cancer pretty much the same way as he treated all the bands I liked - with total contempt.

How I loved buying NME on Wednesday morning to see what fresh torture he'd inflicted on the English language to express his true feelings towards Slowdive, the Field Mice or anyone else who wasn't absolutely bloody furious every single day. Charlie Brooker learned everything he knows from Swells, though he as yet hasn't managed to write an anarcho-Trotskyist novel entitled Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty.