The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Rock’n’roll excess nearly killed me (and I was just a journalist)
My drugs hell made me join the dots – the music industry is making people ill
Iused to speak to my dad whenever I was at an airport. Standing on the pavement outside, I’d place a call to his small office just outside Barnsley, in South Yorkshire.
“Hello, Triple Engineering,” he’d say.
To which I’d always reply, “Hello, Triple Engineering.”
“’ey up, pal.”
“How we doing?”
“Fine. Fine.”
“Another customary call from the airport, Dad.”
That’s what we called these brief exchanges of ours – a customary call from the airport. While Eric Winwood sat at his desk (in his slippers) estimating the cost of steelwork on construction projects, his son was off to interview musicians. My father wasn’t much interested in the bands and artists to whom I spoke, but he did get a kick out of me visiting cities that had been revealed to him in the pages of a book.
“Where to this time?” he’d ask. “New York, Dad.”
“Oh, right – the City That Never Sleeps.”
This “oh” would last for two or three beats. The “right” would rhyme with “eight”.
“Chicago today, pal.”
“Oh, the Windy City. Good stuff.” There were a number of things I didn’t share with my dad. I didn’t tell him that the music business tolerates – celebrates – terrifying behaviour. I failed to mention that things were swerving out of control. A world of trouble was coming down the pipes.
In time, medically qualified women and men would tell me that I have Rapid Cycling Bipolar Affective Disorder, Impulse Control Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotional Dysregulation Disorder. I also have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. From a stylistic point of view, that’s a lot of “disorder” for one paragraph. In starkly lit offices in Islington and Camden, I’ve explained my situation to at least two dozen therapists. I’ve taken so much medication that it’s likely I’ll be buried in a coffin with a childproof lid.
Divided in their diagnoses, the professionals agreed that I was gravely unwell. I’ve broken my bones and torn my flesh. Fearing me dead, the police have visited my home in the thick of the night. I’ve had the Old Bill in my back garden in the middle of the day. The purity of purpose with which I drove my needles into the red was a thing to behold; in a certain light, it looked like rage.
Drugs, always drugs. Ablaze with paranoia, there were times when I was certain that an armed response unit sat waiting in the bushes in the back garden. I once moved so far from reality that I believed I was sharing my living room with a pair of kindly Nigerian strangers. As they perched on the settee, I couldn’t believe how placid they were. Turns out they were my cats.
Today, I’m relieved to report that I’ve been well for almost three years. But for the longest time, my behaviour was given perfect cover by the industry in which I work. Out here, there’s always plenty of company. I’ve spoken with many scores of musicians whose behaviour might reasonably be described as deranged. I’ve written about people who, like me, have seen the insides of psychiatric care facilities. I’ve transcribed the words of performers who have since taken their own lives. Drink and drugs are everywhere. Like a magnet, the music business attracts people hardwired for self-destruction.
It’s 1991. Living on the outskirts of Barnsley, I’m up with the milkman each morning for a long commute to a cheerless college in Sheffield, where I’m on the National Council for the Training of Journalists’ (NCTJ) postgraduate course. Weekends and holidays are spent with friends in Buckingham. After a surprisingly slow start, by now we’re getting high.
We enjoy taking acid. In the pub, our little gang has been known to neck as many as six stamps of blotted paper in a single gulp. “Are you feeling anything?” “Not yet.” “Are you feeling anything?” “Dunno. Maybe a little bit.” “Are you feeling anything?” “I... think... I... am.” Like an orgasmic yawn, suddenly the evening is upon us.
But nothing compares to the surging electricity of amphetamine sulphate. Speed. Nasty and synthetic, the accelerating force is like being affixed to the wings of a space shuttle. Whoosh. With an ounce in my system, I once stayed awake for five days. In Buckinghamshire, already there are signs that I’m falling for this life harder than my friends. Failure to score fills me with something more than disappointment. To my 19-year-old mind, it feels like grief.
Soon I have the confidence to come to London and chance my arm in the magazine game. I catch a wave. Reading Kerrang! at Paddington station, I learn that the San Franciscan band Exodus are in town. The following morning, guitarists Gary Holt and Rick Hunolt grant me an hour of their time. Barely five years away from a dalliance with crystal methamphetamine that will rob him of everything but his life, Hunolt already looks like a skeleton. The voluble double act don’t seem to mind, or even to notice, that their visitor is incapable of advancing their cause by even a single unit of sales. I have what I need to get me into the game.
Of course, not everyone in music is determined to paint the town with their own blood. But if you do fancy giving it a go, I can think of no other industry that will make it quite so easy. Certainly I’ll want to write about it. When a musician begins talking about difficult times, I hope for the worst. Scenting blood, I have written reams of articles that examine in precise detail the degradation of a hundred lives. I thrive on ruination.
I will defend the tone of these pieces, but I can hardly deny their existence. In a luxurious apartment near Park Lane, Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, once told me of the time he was sectioned to a psychiatric institution after ingesting quantities of heroin and cocaine. Even as he spoke, I could hear trumpets in my ears. “That’s it, right there,” I thought. “That’s my intro. The rest will write itself.” And it was, and it did.
Selling the sizzle with screaming headlines and tales of horror, my trade offers a ringside seat for a circus at which the unlucky drop dead. We never join the dots; working on a case-by-case basis, the full story is never told.
So here goes. There is something systemically broken in the world of music. It’s making people ill.
Financially squeezed by a business model that has rendered recorded music all but worthless for all but the most popular bands, the road is the only place from which an income is guaranteed. Out on tour, you’ll find a dozen or more people living on a bus; its overworked residents run the risk of becoming co-dependent and infantilised. Brothers and sisters in arms, come the end of a tour, they can barely stand the sight of one another.
Starved of time for conventional relationships, out in the field, musicians form bonds that are tenacious and unwise. Lars Ulrich, from Metallica, once noted that he could tell that his group were going places when, in favour of cheaper alternatives, concert promoters began stocking their dressing rooms with Absolut vodka. There can’t be many jobs that come with a free supply of hooch. For those hoping to go offpiste, a discreet word in the right ear will secure refreshment in the form of pills and powders.
Researching my new book, Bodies: Life and Death in Music, I had a look over the articles I’ve written for the Telegraph over the past couple of years. Marc Almond told me how he was once “horribly addicted” to “benzodiazepine, as well as sleeping pills and Valium”. James Taylor recalled the days when “essentially I was an addict for 20 years, from the age of 17 to the age of 35”, a time when “I was addicted to various types of opiates”. I profiled Aerosmith, a band who were so out of it that they once forgot that they’d hidden an irreplaceable “riff tape” inside a biscuit barrel. I spoke to Jeff Tweedy, from the Chicagoan group Wilco, who became a survivor of his country’s opioid epidemic. I hit upon a quote from Rosemary Barrett, the sister of one-time Pink Floyd singer Roger “Syd” Barrett, about how her sibling “was always looking for the next big thing – and that applied to drugs... Most people know when to stop. Roger didn’t.”
At the Holiday Inn, I realise I'm in the company of a dead man, caked in blood
I spoke to Wayne Kramer, the wunderkind guitarist from the MC5 – now the MC50 – who went to prison for selling cocaine. I described a “rock doc” doling out drugs to a plane full of musicians en route to a festival. I touched upon the doomed junkie love affair of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen that left both of them dead. I spoke to Chuck D, from Public Enemy, whose bandmate Flavor Flav claims to have spent six million dollars on
drugs. I talked to Tony Iommi, from Black Sabbath, a band who used to travel on private planes furnished with vacuum-packed bags of uncut blow. I wrote about how Eddie Van Halen once kept a drug seller on call, ready to fly anywhere.
In the past, if I considered the matter at all, I guess I used to think that the bloodstains on the otherwise exquisitely woven tapestry of music were mere spillages. But the closer I looked, the more I saw them as being part of the fabric.
“[The] rock ’n’ roll clichés [are] the things that are supposed to bring you happiness, aren’t they?” as Jarvis Cocker once said. “You make it, and you’re bathing in champagne and you can snort as much cocaine as you want and f--as many beautiful women as you want. Then you find you can do those things, but they don’t actually make you very happy.”
In the small hours of April 2 2011, Eric Winwood smashed his head open and bled to death. He’d come to London with my mother to see me on the weekend before my birthday. At the end of a night out, he fell over.
It was supposed to be the day that everything came together. Only that morning he’d taken early retirement. I could tell from the off that he had on his shooting boots. After a few pints in the afternoon sun, I accompanied him to Sainsbury’s to buy a bottle of whisky “for later”. When my mother went to bed, we retired to the balcony of his room. Drinking Scotch, by now we were both drunk.
The last words I said to him were, “I love you, Dad.” Believe me or not, I did say that. “Same goes, pal,” he replied.
Nine hours later, he isn’t at the pub where he said he would be. Straightaway, I know something is wrong. Handing me the receiver, at the Holiday Inn a receptionist dials his room. No answer. A maid with a pass key escorts me up to the fourth floor. Bent at the middle like a sack of grain, there he is, slumped by the bed, naked and still. Lifeless. Straightaway, I realise I’m in the company of a dead man. My father’s scalp, face, hands, knuckles, fingers, nails and forearms are caked in blood. The bed is a sacrificial altar. A red handprint – how did that get there? – stains the wall near the toilet.
The hotel employee at my side starts to scream. If the Holiday Inn has a protocol for opening the door on a corpse, I don’t think she’s following it. A scalpel of noise: it is the kind of sound an establishment such as this will do anything to avoid. Determined not to be outperformed, I join in. “Dad!” I shout. “Dad! Dad! Dad!”
This is now a matter for the authorities. I was the last person to see my father alive; the following morning, I was the one who found him dead. Legally speaking, this is not a winning combination.
An officer takes me to one side. “And have you ever been in trouble with the police?” he asks. Astonishingly, I have not. Despite the effort and money I have invested in breaking the law, my permanent record is as white as a wedding dress.
Over the course of the day, I am not at liberty to leave the hotel room. My police guard will monitor my every move. I am to be prohibited from eating any food or drinking liquids of any kind, including water.
Did I kill my dad?
It’s just a thought. I can recall the goodnight hug. I can remember telling him that I loved him. But after that, things are missing.
If you must know, I do have an angle. (“Sir, let me ask you this. Were you aware of your father’s sixfigure retirement nest egg?” “Um. I was, yes.”)
Deep breath. “Kev, am I going to prison?” “Ian, I don’t honestly know for sure what’s going to happen next,” says PC Kevin Onlow. “But I can tell you that I’d be amazed if you spent the night in the nick. I’ve been a copper for almost 20 years. In that time I’ve met people who have done things you wouldn’t believe. I’ve known murderers.” A gravid pause. “So, this is between me and you. Right?” “Of course.”
“If you’re one of them, then you’re a f---ing good liar.”
After due consideration, the Metropolitan Police decide that I probably didn’t kill my father.
In the wake of Eric’s death, there are times when I can sense that things are speeding up.
I am drinking beer on the Las Vegas Strip. Click. I’m two miles north of our hotel. Click. Suddenly, I’m bouncing into strangers. Listing sideways, I crash into a wall. Click. Thrill rides and attractions on the platform roof. Let’s go up