Bodies: Life and Death in Music

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A real peek behind the curtain at the music industry, I had to keep stopping and starting this book as it took me to some dark places and was a little triggering. Absolutely essential for anyone wondering what it is like on this side of the fence, Bodies is as experienced as it is alarming. He makes a compelling argument and overturns some long-held notions about "rock and roll excess" by deftly tying together a vast amount of information. Actually makes me think that not achieving my teenage dreams of becoming a rock star was probably a good thing. Those encounters and much of the text within come with a blinkered, flashing red light that acts as a real warning about the dangers of the industry and anyone near to it.

Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall).

As Daily Mail readers sometimes use the platform to know what they should be thinking rather than having a balanced view on something, many people used to use the publications to find out who they should be listening to, and this books shows how parts of it all works. Seven years stooped in darkness, inhaling coal dust, gave this sweet and modest man license to provide his music journalist son, Ian, with some lessons in perspective.

Visceral, empathetic, profound and affecting, Winwood’s book operates on a number of levels: as a j’accuse of the music industry not only in its failure to safeguard those who operate within in but for the ways it drives them to addiction and self-destruction; as a plea for greater awareness of mental health issues within said industry; as a cautionary tale of how said industry pulls into its destructive orbit associated practitioners, most notably music journalists; as a memoir of personal loss, grief and aftermath; as a threnody for those who didn’t survive; and as a hymn to those who did.Also not sure about his assertion that Brian Warner's (aka Marilyn Manson) career is over post allegations of abuse from multiple women. It was certainly the least to acknowledge that some idols (Bowie, Prince, Steven Tyler, Iggy Pop, Jimmy Page just off the top of my head) did some extremely shady (illegal? The book has opened up a much-needed debate about the nature of the music industry as an insatiable meat grinder for creative souls with an instinct for self-destruction. he draws on his decades of interviewing bands in dressing rooms and tour buses - not to mention his own bracingly described drug hell - to examine why the industry attracts so many people vulnerable to addiction and mental health problems, and what happens to them once they are plugged into its dysfunctional amps. But name dropping aside it’s part rock biography by a man who has seen a lot and part a record of his own downfall and battle with addiction, and he’s very honest about that.

Perhaps this was intentional; the author spends time boasting about the amount of coke he was shoveling up his beak, but this means that stories about individuals are only hinted at or loosely defined. Bodies relates a number of incidents where an artist is pushed or feels impelled to work despite being clearly unwell, sometimes with terrible consequences. But while these elders and kind-hearted individuals are doing their best, the industry itself has a ways to go. And it’s a story still unfolding: in the gap between writing and publishing Bodies, two of the book’s subjects - Mark Lanegan and Taylor Hawkins - lie dead. The second isn't an issue of credibility but more a personal wish to never ever be reminded of the case of the singer (whom I refuse to name) from the Welsh band Lostprophets.

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. At a time when bands are thankfully pulling back to focus on themselves rather than their careers, Bodies provides an articulate look at the other side. And there are those who are no longer with us, including Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington and Mark Lanegan, whose frailties would have been the same if they’d worked in offices rather than the world’s biggest stages, but their fates might have been different. He drops a lot of band names and places he's visited as if to reinforce the privileged position he found himself in but for me this just makes his cliched decline into substance abuse even more idiotic.