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Bodies: Life and Death in Music

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Finally tipped over the edge, one British band’s drummer attempts to stab their guitarist during an argument over a spilled beer. In Bodies , author Ian Winwood explores the music industry's many failures, from addiction and mental health issues to its ongoing exploitation of artists.

Winwood’s point with much of these brushes with history is to show the depths of depravity that goes beyond the drink and drugs that have allegedly stemmed creatives bursts with a unique intimacy only gained through the trust and interest of rockstars that still tour and take their chances with substances today. Bodies is unflinching with its harsh truths, and Winwood’s anecdotal approach to these flows with extreme merit.

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. 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.

The conversation about mental health has become more public in recent years, although Winwood notes sharply that the music industry’s willingness to have that conversation seems “contingent on it not interfering with the workings of an unjust business model”. Winwood 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. Bodies relates a number of incidents where an artist is pushed or feels impelled to work despite being clearly unwell, sometimes with terrible consequences. 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. Anyone familiar with Ian Winwood's writing knows that he's more than capable of bringing broadsheet-quality appraisal to genres of rock music beloved by millions but considered beneath serious consideration by much of the mainstream media.The saga of Ian Watkins is, by some distance, the most shocking in Bodies, a book filled with shocking stories. 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.

And not conducive to good mental health, and yet with the large consignment of musicians whose lives end abruptly and prematurely there is no more emphasis put on wellbeing on ones mental health in the current climate that any previous decades. Eric calmly explains the comparatively mundane things he’ll be doing at the same time his son arrives in The City Of Angels, before signing off. 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. It is like a government health warning but would help you enter with your eyes open and ready to protect yourself.The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. It blends this with a genuine insight into mental health issues that can plague any of us, regardless of ages, sex or perceived success. 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. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. An extremely sobering book about a music journalist’s descent into addiction and his examples of why working in the music industry is dangerous for your health.

The author comes across as another one of those self obsessed and odious individuals that plague the music industry. Finally, a book about the music industry that tells the truth … a visceral examination of art, drugs, mental health and music. Ian Winwood's had a hard time of it himself, as someone who's as much a part of the scene as those on stage. Actually makes me think that not achieving my teenage dreams of becoming a rock star was probably a good thing.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. It's an unusual life, that of a touring musician, long stretches of travel, un-sociable hours, endlessly surrounded by drugs and alcohol. Rather than providing a comprehensive overview and making arguments based on critical analysis, this is more of a memoir - with first hand accounts and anecdotes from the author’s time as a music journalist.

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