I was 10 years old when I read a line in music magazine Kerrang! that stayed with me forever. Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott had died of pneumonia and heart failure related to his drug use. The journalist was moved to open the article by breaking the fourth wall: Phil Lynott is dead. I know. I can’t believe it either.
It was effective, but it was also, well, unbelievable that the writer couldn’t believe it. Another Kerrang! journalist, Ian Winwood, has written a book, Bodies, that is so tightly packed with music industry overdoses, suicides and accidental deaths as to be overwhelming. It’s not a gawk at “the 27 club”, but a call to arms. “There is something systemically broken in the world of music,” he writes. “It’s making people ill.”
Duff McKagan suffered from survivor’s guilt, having lost so many friends in bands to suicide. Credit: Paul Rovere
When Winwood joined Kerrang! in 2000, he took full advantage of the permissive culture, using drugs to power through overseas trips and overnight deadlines. In Ireland, he dabbed speed with Primal Scream. In Vegas, to cover Green Day, he was robbed by a sex worker he recruited to buy cocaine. The tortured artist, he admits, is forever celebrated: “Scenting blood, I have written reams of articles that examine in precise detail the degradation of a hundred lives …”
Winwood’s own addiction was also able to hide in plain sight. After his father died in traumatic circumstances, he was in and out of psych wards. “I’ve taken so much medication that it’s likely I’ll be buried in a coffin with a childproof lid,” he quips. At one point, the features editor banged on his front door, chasing a missing cover story, and found Winwood delirious, naked from the waist down, with cut feet. Even his coke dealer wound up barring him: “Sorry, mate, shop’s closed.”
Bodies: Life and Death in Music by Ian Winwood.
While Bodies is largely memoir, the publisher has filed the book under “health”. That’s the lens through which Winwood tells his own story, but he also takes the pulse of the industry in general, catching up with old interviewees specifically to talk about mental health and addiction.
Ginger, the frontman of the Wildhearts, tells him, “I used to look at bands and wonder what drugs they took”. The Wildhearts once smashed up the Kerrang! office with baseball bats after a bad review, but that didn’t stop the magazine covering them. Now that the singer is in his late 50s, he’s had his fair share of being helped off stage, and of worrying posts on social media. His bandmate, Danny McCormack, had some of his leg amputated after an injection of heroin caused massive damage.
Another poignant voice is that of Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, who tells Winwood he suffered from survivor’s guilt, having lost so many friends in bands to suicide. That’s by no means a nightmare trend of the ’90s. A recent Australian survey commissioned by the music industry charity Support Act and conducted by the Centre for Social Impact at Swinburne University of Technology found that suicide attempts in live performers rose in the past two years.
If you’re thinking that’s likely largely down to no support during the pandemic, well, a 2018 report from the Canadian East Coast Music Association found that 20 per cent of musicians had contemplated suicide in the month they were consulted, and a 2016 survey by the New Zealand Music Foundation found six out of 10 artists had thought about it.
Since Winwood is primarily a metal journalist, though he also writes for Britain’s Daily Telegraph, he doesn’t stray far from that genre, which is a shame, when rappers have had a lot to say about addiction and suicidal ideation, Lil Wayne, Chance the Rapper and DMX being only a few. In Australia, rapper/songwriter Sampa the Great partnered with a psychology practice to offer free culturally appropriate mental healthcare to African youth/musicians when she released her track Time’s Up (itself about racism in the music industry).
Winwood also doesn’t delve too deeply into sexism, writing that “the objectification of women under the male gaze of rock’n’roll is a different book from this one”. He does recount Kerrang!’s own shameful moment, when a staffer who had been harassing colleagues was promoted after he had been reported. In recent weeks in Australia there’s been some progress on that front, when Vanessa Picken was named the first female CEO of Sony, in place of Denis Handlin, under whom a toxic workplace culture flourished.
Such good news is hard to come by. As Winwood says at the end of his book, its trajectory surprised him. “I was certain that its two themes would follow a similar path. The music business and I had been unwell; as I got better, it did too. Turns out I was wrong.”
At least, as he says, pockets of the industry are focused on wellness over profits, such as the British charity Tonic Music for Mental Health. Here in Australia, in May, Support Act hosted Head First, a conference discussing mental health. There’s also a spate of Australian musicians who have used their albums to speak openly about what ails them, from PTSD to addiction – including Banoffee, Jack River, Teeth and Tongue, 360 and Jack Colwell.
How would a music writer’s memoir read if it was published five years from now? At this capricious moment in time, it’s almost impossible to say.
Bodies: Life and Death in Music by Ian Winwood is published by Faber & Faber, $32.99.
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