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Dele Fadele

Remember him well at the NME. Damn good writer. Didn’t know about his private life...bit of a sad tale.
 
Interesting and quite sad story. I didn't know of him but I must have read something by him at some point, strange how some people can just drop off the radar to such a degree.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/14/dele-fadele-remembered-nme

It's a good piece. I knew Dele pretty well but had no idea he died from stomach cancer in London during 2018. Katie Tomashevski, who battled to find out what happened to him, met Dele at Syracuse University decades ago. She put up a post on FB about him, but nobody had seen or heard from him, other than he'd gone to America for a while and wasn't well.

Katie wanted a tribute to Dele written and published, if he'd passed on. The Guardian article is a response to that.

Dele was born in London, his parents were Nigerian and he grew up in Africa. He was obsessed with music and became a DJ when he did a degree at Syracuse. He started writing for NME in 1985 and was the only black journalist in the UK who dealt with indie music. His work was pentrating and he had his own style. Arguably his best known piece was a cover story where he said that Morrissey flying the Union Jack and flirting with the far right was dangerous. NME readers loved Morrissey, so that didn't go down well.

I got to know Dele at gigs when I wrote for Sounds. We liked similar kinds of music, from hip-hop to Sonic Youth and Einsturzende Neubauten.

When I moved to the NME we hung out together, got drunk and had a laugh in the UK and abroad. He had mental health issues and was on lithium. Sometimes you'd leave a message and not hear anything back for months. That's just how he was.

Although he was reclusive, when you hooked up Dele would often burst into a huge peel of laughter. He was happy to see you and had a great smile.

I kept in contact with him after I stopped writing for NME. The last time I saw Dele was about seven years ago. I met him in a pub in Holborn to make amends for giving him free ecstasy in the late '80s. He laughed and said it was no problem, he enjoyed it. I can, however, remember bumping to him on a Tube platform once. He was wild-eyed and sweaty and asked if I was holding any ecstasy. I had a pocketful of capsules, but didn't tell him.

Three summers ago a former NME features editor asked me at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in London if I'd seen Dele. I said no, I last talked to him when I made amends. The editor said he'd heard that Dele had been to America, but was in a bad way. This information had come from former NME journalist Sean O'Hagan, who now writes for The Observer and The Guardian.

Phoning or emailing Dele, however, led to nothing.

Six weeks ago, Katie Tomashevski put up the aforementioned post on Facebook about Dele, asking if anybody knew where he was. A number of his former work-mates replied, but none of us had a clue. If you read The Guardian article, you'll find out what happened next.

Katie thinks a book of Dele's articles should be published and I agree. Like a I said, he was a great writer.

I know Dele would have been floored by The Guardian feature, but he'd brush it off and you'd have to squeeze it out of him. He was a modest bloke. A lot of his colleagues and readers miss him.

Jack
 
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Strange and very sad. I had an almost life long friend with similar issues, died from Covid last Friday morning, hospitalised twice, the last time got him, Sepsis.
A paronoid schizophrenic with multiple sclerosis, life can be so cruel
 


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