BOOKSBOOKS
Rock music is
killing its stars
MUSIC
Victoria Segal
Bodies Life and Death in
Music by Ian Winwood
Faber £14.99 pp300
When it comes to egregious
rock’n’roll clichés, one of the
absolute worst is the concept
of “the 27 Club” — the
ghoulishly spurious idea that
famous musicians are
uniquely disposed to die three
years before they hit 30. Amy
Winehouse drinking herself to
death in Camden; Kurt Cobain
shooting himself in the head;
Jim Morrison perishing in a
Parisian bathtub: these “club
members” have become part
of an airbrushed rock
mythology that doesn’t zoom
in too close on the vomit and
emaciation, preferring
instead to celebrate a life lived
at the limits, a commitment to
chasing sensation and
“enlightenment”, the call of a
tragic destiny.
Yet while this misplaced
romanticism is distasteful, it
remains true that a life in music
isn’t the best bet if a long,
happy retirement is high on
your list of career goals. As the
rock journalist Ian Winwood
states in Bodies, his robust
analysis of the music industry’s
apparent death drive, “the
figures are shocking”. In 2011
a study found that the risk of
death for musicians in their
twenties and thirties was two
to three times higher than for
the general UK population. In
2018 the Canadian East Coast
Music Association discovered
that 26 per cent of musicians
surveyed had tried to kill
themselves at some point —
compared with a national
average of 3 per
cent. On March 25
the Foo Fighters’
drummer, Taylor
Hawkins, died
suddenly aged
50; his cause of death is as yet
unconfirmed but reports that
opioids and other drugs were
found in his system underline
this book’s key argument.
“There is something
systemically broken in the
world of music,” Winwood
writes. “It’s making people ill.”
In Bodies 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.
The blithe normalisation of
drug and alcohol abuse is
tagged as the prime offender.
Ozzy Osbourne, interviewed
at home in rural
Buckinghamshire, boasted to
the journalist that he could
score drugs within 15 minutes
of landing anywhere in the
world. “I bet you can’t round
here, though?” asked the
journalist, looking at the sheep.
“How much do you want to
bet?” the singer replied.
Alice Cooper tells Winwood
that he’s lucky to be the soleHis brother, the drummer
Grant Hutchison, regrets the
times they didn’t say no, didn’t
take a break, for fear of losing
vital opportunities or letting
other people down.
In the queasiest chapter
Winwood writes about the
Welsh band Lostprophets,
whose singer Ian Watkins was
sentenced to 29 years in prison
in 2013 after admitting 13
sexual offences involving
children, including attempted
rape and the possession of
extreme child sex abuse
images. Winwood, who saw
them in decline long before
the horrendous revelationsemerged, argues that the
singer’s known fondness for
homemade crystal meth
meant that red-flag changes in
his personality were just put
down to the “routine
ruinations” of drug abuse, that
the music industry’s tolerance
for dysfunction was able to
provide cover for more
sinister, predatory behaviour.
At times, though, Bodies
overplays the exceptional
nature of the music business.
Winwood recalls a colleague
being widely applauded for
passing out in the buffet at a
Metallica party — “I doubt you
see that kind of thing at an
orthodontists’ convention,” he
jokes. Yet the fact that^
prisons and rehab facilities
aren’t exclusively full of
musicians, PRs and journalistssurviving member of a Sunset
Strip drinking club known as
the Hollywood Vampires (past
members include Keith Moon
and Harry Nilsson); the
doomed 1990s grunge heroes
Layne Staley, singer with Alice
in Chains, and Stone Temple
Pilots’s Scott Weiland, drift
ghostlike through the pages,
their addictions common
knowledge, yet their overdose-
related deaths (in 2002 and
2015 respectively) somehow
becoming inevitable.
Safeguarding, a duty of care —
these aren’t words that fit into
the industry’s traditional belief
that abandon and
transgression are part of the
job, that you can’t sustain the
image of a Dionysian outlaw if
you’re scheduling eight hours’
sleep and a regular check-in
with a therapist.
If the drugs don’t work to
undermine a musician’s
mental health, there’s the
filthy pressure-cooker
environment of life on the
road. The Green Day singer
Billie Joe Armstrong became
infested with lice after one
particularly squalid tour; the
hardcore punk band Black
Flag were reportedly reduced
to eating dog food. Young
bands, meanwhile, face
stressors that would never
have worried Keith Richards.
“In the pre-internet era, if you
wanted to hound someone,
at least you had to buy
stamps,” the singer Frank
Turner tells Winwood,
discussing the strain of
constant social media scrutiny.
There’s also the effects of
financial insecurity: with
touring now the main way to
make any money, the
forward momentum can be
punishing. Winwood gives
space to the story
of the Scottish band
Frightened Rabbit,
whose singer Scott
Hutchison killed
himself in
May 2018.Life lived at the limits
Amy Winehouse. Below, from
left, Ian Watkins and Taylor
Hawkins of Foo FightersThere’s something very wrong in the music world — and this
audit of its many casualties makes for shocking reading
A life in music
isn’t the best
bet for a long
retirement
BRIAN RASIC/GETTY IMAGES. INSETS: THOMAS FREY/EPA, JEROD HARRIS/GETTY22 3 April 2022