Bodies: Life and Death in Music

By Ian Winwood

London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 2022

ISBN: (e-book) 978-0-571-36420-6

We’ve all seen the headlines about rock musicians dying unexpectedly. All too often we learn in the follow-up that he or she died of causes related to substance abuse and/or mental health issues. Why does this happen again and again? In Bodies: Life and Death in Music, Ian Winwood attacks this question.

Winwood writes, “This is a book about. . . music, musicians, the industry, mental health, addiction, derangement, corrosive masculinity, monomania, overdoses, suicide and a hectare of early graves. . . . But in writing this story, I’ve come to regard artists as victims and survivors of circumstance. In pursuit of a living wage, musicians are required to work themselves into the ground.” At its base, he posits, music is a “proper job” that does not pay a proper wage.

Bodies serves up an indictment of the parasitic relationship between the music industry and those who would make a career in it and the substance abuse that fuels it. In this engrossing yet disturbing read, Winwood strives, he says, “to join the dots. . . . There is something systemically broken in the world of music. It’s making people ill.”

A British music journalist whose career has included more than twenty years writing for Kerrang! and major UK newspapers, Winwood has interviewed members of Metallica, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Foo Fighters, and the Smashing Pumpkins, plus many more whose names are yet to—or may never—become household words. He has lived a rock-star lifestyle, giving him keen insight into how rock stars and wannabes survive. . . or not. Winwood has watched musicians fly to the heights, but he has also seen them crash and burn. And he has been to the depths himself as well.

The book opens with Winwood’s 2003, world-exclusive interview with Metallica following a six-year break during which the band had issued no new music. It’s “my job to discover exactly what has been furring the arteries of one of the most popular bands on the planet,” Winwood says, and the burning question, of course, is why the silence? What went wrong? What went wrong was alcohol.

Metallica was one of the first bands Winwood saw live, at age 15, following their release of Master of Puppets. To support his music habit, Winwood worked two jobs, including one in a bookshop, where he discovered Kerrang! When, later, his mother asked him what he might do with his life after school, he replied, “I want to write for Kerrang!” With his mom’s “I don’t see why not” response, he determined to make it happen, attending a university journalism program and then hand-delivering his first-ever article to Kerrang! and other outlets in hope of getting a writing job. A job offer resulted, though not from Kerrang!

But the call does eventually come and within the week, Winwood is on his way. Life with Kerrang! is full speed ahead. Move fast, write fast, live fast. Turn in a story, head off to the next one. Jetting around the globe, following bands and musicians, Winwood has visited nearly every city you can name. During his career, Winwood has been at the rail, in the pit, and with the musicians backstage and offstage, talking with them about their lives and the music industry. Indeed, his frenetic pace matches that of the bands he interviews, and like the musicians he hangs with, his coping mechanism becomes alcohol and cocaine.

The narrative is woven with anecdotes from Winwood’s many interviews, as well as his own experiences on the road for Kerrang! Throughout, his close relationship with his father anchors him. Ultimately, Winwood believes, the circumstances surrounding his father’s untimely and unexpected death precipitate his own plunge deep into the maelstrom.

“I’m comfortable asking awkward questions; if required I will do so repeatedly,” Winwood writes. Interviewing Layne Staley, vocalist with Alice in Chains, at the time the band was promoting their album Dirt, Winwood was warned not to ask questions about drugs, but he did so anyway. Staley, Winwood says, was “the first obviously damaged person I’d ever met.” Interviewing Ozzy Osbourne in 2011, Ozzy tells Winwood that he could still get drugs anywhere in the world in under 15 minutes. On the other hand, there’s Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister: “Lemmy is an anomaly. He was the one who was in control.” Eschewing heroin, Lemmy’s tolerance for alcohol made him “the kind of drinker who never seemed to get drunk.” In the end, Winwood says, ”I think it was the cigarettes” that got Lemmy shortly after his 70th birthday.

Not long after his father’s death, Winwood is on his way to California to interview Green Day and finds himself stuck in Las Vegas due to a flight glitch. The ubiquitous flow of alcohol and his pursuit of cocaine land him on the wrong side of his appointment for his Green Day interview. For many journalists this would be a career-ending disaster. But through the good graces of the band’s press agent, catastrophe is averted. The band’s label spends a pile of money to fix schedules and rearrange flights, and Winwood finally arrives to his interview, where he’s immediately handed a drink. “It would be wrong to say that all [was]forgiven. . . . I was never really in trouble in the first place. No one ever is,” he writes. A month later, Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day’s frontman, checks himself into rehab after his own Las Vegas debacle. This stuff is simply normal in the supernormal world of music.

Careening out of control, even his editors at a magazine where chaos is routine, begin to express concerns over Winwood’s increasing lapses. The dream job begins to slip away. When a nightmare hospital stay turns out to be real, leaving Winwood with no memory of anything that transpired, he begins to awaken to the direness of his situation.

Through Winwood’s unique lens, Bodies disentangles the whys and hows of this “normal.” For this book, Winwood plumbs the archive of his interviews with countless musicians over the years. Patterns begin to emerge. The lack of accountability in the music industry, the shifting responsibility, and the casting of musicians as mere commodities that can be cast aside if they don’t produce, the relentless show-must-go-on ethic, and of course, the industry’s focus on its bottom line, as opposed to the musicians’, whose cut of the profits is ever smaller—these combine to create an environment where artists are driven to take advantage of whatever is available to keep go-go-going in their own pursuit of success.

At the time he was writing Bodies, Winwood had recently interviewed Dave Grohl, former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters founder. Winwood writes that, in founding Foo Fighters, “Grohl worked hard to ensure that his and his group’s happiness and security would no longer be put at risk by the wild vagaries of an overwhelming and unpredictable industry.” But even that “wasn’t quite enough to prevent drummer Taylor Hawkins from taking a near fatal overdose” in 2001. With painful irony, around the time Bodies was going to press this past spring, Foo Fighters were on tour in Colombia when Taylor Hawkins died, with toxicology reports indicating a variety of drugs in his system.

Winwood doesn’t offer a fool-proof solution, and indeed, Bodies raises many questions for musicians and bands, the industry, and fans to consider. For example, do labels bear responsibility for artists’ mental health, and if so, what tools can labels use to support artists? What part do fans play? If a band pulls the plug on a tour for mental health reasons, will fans continue to support the band, hold on to rescheduled tickets, buy merch? If pay structures for musicians change, are fans willing to pay the higher ticket prices that will almost surely result? Will the industry itself evolve sufficiently to reduce mental jeopardy for artists? And what about independent musicians?

Winwood’s book is an engrossing, can’t-put-it-down read. It pulls you in; it’s captivating, for it has the highs, the lows, and even a few happy endings where bands—Chumbawumba of “Tubthumping” fame and Biffy Clyro, for example, as well as Winwood himself—have been able to save themselves and preserve their sanity and, at the same time, their art.

If you care about bands and musicians, Bodies is a must-read.

Thanks to James Kennedy (@JamesKennedyUK), independent musician, founder of the band Kyshera, and author of Noise Damage, for putting me on to Bodies via his podcast interview with Ian Winwood; find the James Kennedy Podcast wherever you get your podcasts or visit Spotify.