Ian Winwood Interview
Ian Winwood is an author and journalist. His new book is Bodies: Life and Death in Music, which “explores the music industry's many failures, from addiction and mental health issues to its ongoing exploitation of artists.” He’s freelanced for the Guardian, London Times, Telegraph, Kerrang!, and many more.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I’ve wanted to be a music journalist since I was 14-years old, but at age 20 I read in a music magazine that the San Francisco group Exodus were in London recording an album at Battery Studios in London. Fresh out of journalism school, I grabbed a tape recorder and headed to the recording studio at which two members of the group granted me an hour of their time for an interview that I explained would, I hoped, help me break into the world of music magazines. After writing up my story that very day, the following morning I hit the streets of the English capital to hand-deliver the piece to the six or seven rock publications in the city at the time. Looking back, I struggle to believe that I was quite this proactive. Anyway, by the end of the week I’d been offered paid work by two national magazines.
Really, though, I don’t consider my career to have properly begun until eight years later when I joined Kerrang!, in 2000. I’m not sure I had much to do with this, but within two years the magazine had become the best-selling music weekly in the world. Because K! stood equidistant between the specialist rock press and the mainstream, its writers would be dispatched all over the world to interview a truly broad range of artists whose only unifying characteristic was that they played loud music. So over the past two decades or so I’ve been lucky to have interviewed people such as Green Day, Beastie Boys, White Stripes, Metallica, Muse, Rammstein, Foo Fighters, Offspring, and so many more. I’ve been even luckier to do this in a variety of lavish and distant locations. But over the years I’ve asked questions of many hundreds of artists. Anyone who makes a racket, basically.