jenks

thread death
It"s just come out that Dele Fadele died in 2018.
I just saw that, Neil Kulkarni had only recently been tweeting about him and their friendship. I always enjoyed his writing. As with all these things the news makes me feel sad, old and lucky.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
I didn't know Dele well but enjoyed running into him over the years - lovely guy. One of the few NME people we at MM fraternized with.

Classic example of the kind of oddball who found a home on the UK music papers he wouldn't have been able to find anywhere else

There's a story I've long cherished about him - and which I've begun to realise may not be strictly true, after reading other accounts in the last day or so about his life story - but I continue to feel in a really profound sense is true - or should be true

When he arrived in England from Nigeria, he had one suitcase with him - and the entirety of its contents were various Factory records (like his beloved Crispy Ambulance) and a vast number of clippings from the NME, articles by his heroes like Paul Morley and I Punman
 

craner

Beast of Burden
More on Dele:


Edit:

When Tomashevski made contact with Dele’s family in Nigeria she says they weren’t fully aware of the details of his achievements as a music writer. But they were also a little suspicious – if Dele was such a big deal, why had nobody contacted them for two years?
 
Last edited:

luka

Well-known member
I've said it on here before but one thing I really like about Reynolds is that he always knew and made it clear that his writing was more important than the music it was pretending to defer to, and that his writing would even shape the music and create it before the fact, that the real artist and visionary was himself. The landscape painting is more beautiful and meaningful than the dreary vista it is an idealisation of.
 

luka

Well-known member
The best music writers always know this. The music is boring, the writers job is to make the music what the music should have been, with an extra layer of imaginative scaffolding.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: sus
its sometimes satisfying for someone else to scoop the energy and articulate in a way that connects, but this is typically behind the curve by necessity isnt it. at best allowing us to contextualise the energy or put it in the bigger picture. the best writing using music as a prism to view everything else. but writing and criticism doesnt and shouldnt make the music better obviously. nobody should be going into the studio thinking about journalists
 

luka

Well-known member
Let's say you sense some kind of latent energy, some potential, you can shake a mound for it to flow into
 
Top