Wrecks & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Bodies: Life and Death in Music, Ian Winwood (Faber 2022)

An interesting and eye-opening book. If you’re in a band, you’ll find it much easier to become a mental and physical wreck than to become a millionaire. Indeed, you’ll find it easier to become a mental and physical wreck than to earn a living. Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse weren’t the average when they died so young and with so much promise unfulfilled, but they weren’t anomalies either. There is a lot of mental illness among rock musicians. And among rock journalists too. Ian Winwood has seen addiction from the inside. He’s drunk too much, snorted too much and chased sensation too much.

That’s why he tried to kill himself and ended up in a mental hospital. So when he writes about rock musicians who’ve trodden the same perilous path, he knows some of what they’re going through. But he doesn’t know performance from the inside and he admits his own complicity, as a journo, in wanting to hear and write stories about bad behavior and difficult lives. Maybe music attracts vulnerable people before piling the pressure on them. Or maybe music makes people vulnerable. The high of being on stage only lasts while you’re on stage. That must be part of why musicians pursue other highs when they’re off-stage.

But the more you chase chemical highs, the more you invite psychological lows. Winwood looks at that truism playing out with everyone from Metallica to Frank Turner. He has interesting stories to tell about them and interesting stories to tell about himself. Unfortunately, I found his prose tough at times. I was reminded of what Frank Zappa once said: “Rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, in order to provide articles for people who can’t read.” Winwood can write well sometimes, but he admits in the credits that he has “an occasionally distant relationship with the rules of grammar.” He’s thanking a copy-editor for saving him from himself when he says that, but there are still some spectacular hanging participles in the published book. This was the best, or worst, of them: “Amy [Winehouse] was taken from her place of death to a post-mortem at St Pancras Coroner’s Court. Required by Jewish law to be buried after three days, the gang at the morgue got a wriggle on.”

Pity the poor gang at the morgue, rushing to finish their work before they get popped in the ground. Alas, Winwood’s bad writing isn’t an anomaly in rock journalism either. A few journos like Alex Petridis write consistently well, but the pretentious Guardianista dreck at the Quietus is closer to the average. And Winwood is closer to the Quietus than to Petridis. Plus, Bodies doesn’t have an index. I read all of it and I learned a lot from it, but it could have been a lot better.