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Envious words of warning spill from Ian Winwood’s writing. Bodies: Life and Death in Music is as harsh and unremitting a piece as it is deeply moving and warm. It is for music lovers from a music lover. Envy for the experiences of brushing shoulders with the best of the best, the influential scattershot of Lemmy, Primal Scream and Ginger Wildheart. 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. However relevant those dangers are in an era where free music is delivered to the inbox rather than the mailbox is the interesting crux for Bodies, which recalls experiences high and low with an engaged intimacy and personalisation from Winwood. 

But life and death in music are much more than the febrile motions of drink and drugs, it is also the legal wranglings, the unspoken traditions and tribulations of bands trying to create and then survive. Winwood documents that with expert scrutiny. Herefers to the likes of Lostprophets and the fallout of the disgusting Watkins case. He earmarks the so-called "27 Club", of artists who died at the age of 27. 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.  

Despite those horrors, Winwood appears hopeful, and it is the credit of great writing that a reader does not feel that same despair and fear so brutally explained by Winwood's personalised account. This is as much an autobiography as it is a satisfying breakdown of big problem. Bodies is documentation of massive, gaping issues found within the music industry, from the grassroots level all the way to the cream of the multi-million-pound crop. These issues affect all, yet somehow, they have persevered in public. Privately, a different story. The imagery associated with the music industry is an important cover for the leaky pipes beneath. That much is explored with such creative and intimate detail from Winwood, who delves deep into his own career and the rich tapestry that forms it. Gutting details, triumphant moments that anyone in the field will have latched to after their first byline, but without the impressive addition of actually meeting the bandmates as Winwood often does. His writing, too, is honest. That is the crucial element to Bodies. 

Absolutely essential for anyone wondering what it is like on this side of the fence, Bodies is as experienced as it is alarming. 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. Of pushing on beyond that need for a break, of reliance on drink, drugs and the rock and roll atmosphere that was so cool for the time but is now explored in this revisionist period as a problematic cause of a great many deaths. If not death, destruction lingers on. Bodies is unflinching with its harsh truths, and Winwood’s anecdotal approach to these flows with extreme merit. A jealousy-inducing ease to the prose throughout, Winwood has crafted the definitive experience of the music circuit.  

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