Bodies: Life and Death in Music

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The first hand accounts of events in the author’s own life and his battles with mental health are just as interesting as the tales of those well known names through the book and are arguably more valuable.

Behind this preposterously romantic, transgressive image lurks personal horror and tragedy, which Winwood recounts unsparingly, but with authentic empathy: the story of his own drink-and-drug fuelled collapse, which results in several stays in psychiatric hospitals, is woven through the book.Working as a music journalist his life is adjacent and exposed to the same culture as these musicians, some of which he counts among his friends. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. A band with a singer who was a predator hiding in plain sight (very plain sight as there were forum posts warning fans about him years before his arrest) and the remaining members who have had their life's work flushed away in a manner only members of the Glitter Band have experienced. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.

I reviewed this without reading the extra chapter that was apparently written on Taylor Hawkins, as despite me purchasing this after it was added, it wasn't included in my Kindle version. It's an unusual life, that of a touring musician, long stretches of travel, un-sociable hours, endlessly surrounded by drugs and alcohol. But what he’s saying seems universally applicable: there’s no way of telling directly from Bodies if things are different in, say, the world of hip-hop, but the mortality rate among young rappers strongly suggests they’re not. This book also has moments that speak to Mark Lanegan and Taylor Hawkins (Foo Fighters) in regards to their addictions.

Winwood is excoriatingly honest in his appraisal of both the artists and himself, in this visceral examination of art, drugs, mental health and music.Finished the book feeling very strongly that Lennon was right about the men in suits who take the bulk of the money generated from the sales of the music made by creative but naive people. The glamorisation of drink and drug use in rock music is pervasive in our culture but Bodies peels back the curtain to reveal the deep-seated mental health and addiction problems impacting so many performers, all too often actively enabled by the machine that is the music industry. The question of what the music industry does next is one it’s started to answer incrementally, concludes a three-years sober Ian, though it’s happened all too slowly. The book also deviates to talk about the difficulties for women working in the industry, the sexism and the abuse.