I loved him and read him from the day he started at Melody Maker. I even remember the Clifford Clavin letter that is now doing the rounds. He was always one of my favorites. I brought Tical, The Sun Rises in the East, The Infamous and Goodfellas straight off the back of his reviews and never looked back. He helped me find the music I loved as a teenager in the same way that Simon Reynolds and Simon Price did, and to understand why I loved it.
He's one of those ones who never really got the platform they deserved. Even worse, he was considered barely worth thinking about and was dismissed as a ranter, a has-been, somebody not important enough to listen to by those who'd been careful and cunning enough to carve out their own careers. I remember all those NME cunts like Dorian Lynskey and Eve Barlow going after him for being "old" and out of print a few years ago, and to be fair, he did start it, but he was also right about them, their paper, their shit writing and their shit music. The fact that the only come back they had was to mock him for being old and having to write on a blog revealed plenty about their own values and views.
Back in the 1990s, when he probably meant the most to me, it seemed incredible that he wrote for Melody Maker and didn't move to London. He stayed put in Coventry! Aged 17, I thought that was mental, and for many reasons. I knew Coventry pretty well, because my dad lived near there and it was one of those places (the others being Leamington Spa and Birmingham) that I used to spend hours walking around when I went to see him (usually trawling through the record shops). I think I actually saw Kulkarni strolling through the centre of Cov once, or at least a guy who looked very much like his photo in the Melody Maker singles page and was wearing a Paris 'Guerilla Funk' T-shirt, a record I knew he loved. But I was too star-struck and shy to go and speak to him. It's not that Coventry was a bad place to live, if all your mates and family lived there too, but it was a bit like Swansea, a place I couldn't wait to leave when I was 17. In retrospect, I admire his choice, and his refusal to play the game.
I can't believe he has died so suddenly, so young. I'm gutted.
RIP