Ian Winwood - Bodies: Life and Death in Music

I used to speak to my dad whenever I was at an airport. Standing on the pavement outside Heathrow or Gatwick, Stansted or City, Id place a call to his small office just outside our hometown of Barnsley, in South Yorkshire.

Hello, Triple Engineering, hed say.

To which Id always reply, Hello, Triple Engineering.

Eyup, pal.

How we doing?

Fine. Fine.

Another customary call from the airport, Dad.

Thats what we called these brief exchanges of ours a customarycall from the airport. While Eric Winwood sat at his desk (in his slippers) estimating the cost of steelwork on construction projects tall and wide, down in the beautiful south his son was off to interview musicians on behalf of a national publication that paid him todo so. My father wasnt much interested in the bands and artists to whom I spoke, or, as far as I could tell, in the stories I wrote about them. 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? hed 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.

From my father, good stuff was the highest praise.

Pacific Northwest, Dad. All the way to Seattle.

Get in. Jet City.

Eric knew the nickname of every place I went. San Francisco was the City by the Bay. New Orleans was the Big Easy. Milwaukee was Brew City. I sometimes wondered just how deep this seam of knowledge ran. If Id have phoned him from Gatwick with the news that I was headed to Pilot Butte, Saskatchewan, would he have said, Now then, nar then the Sand Capital of Canada?

One Friday in summer I was bound for California with a record company press officer and an insufferable photographer. Like me, the pair were well used to spending vast swathes of the early twenty-first century in mid-air; unlike me, they seemed to regard this bounty of complimentary trans-global travel as a matter of cheerless mundanity. It gets worse. At Heathrow I learned that my companions had been gifted an upgrade to business class, while I Muggins here, Mr Chopped Liver remained at the rear of the plane. Estimating the scale of this injustice, with typical equanimity I judged it to be the worst thing that had ever happened.

Hello, Triple Engineering.

Hello, Triple Engineering.

Eyup, pal.

A customary call from the airport.

Ooh

Los Angeles.

City of Angels. A pause. I must say, you dont sound particularly happy about it

He didnt miss much, my dad. A man of economical horizons, after leaving secondary modern at fifteen he inevitably followed his own father down the pit. Man and boy, a dawn chorus at Houghton Main. I remember him telling me that he hated every minute of his time underground. At a loss for a response, I asked for how long hed stuck it out. Seven years, he said. Seven years? I dont think Id have made it to elevenses. To be honest with you, Im not sure miners take elevenses.

In the hope of learning something new, each day after work he took a paperback to a quiet corner of a traditional pub on the outskirts of Barnsley. Widely respected as an erudite arbiter of alehouse disputes a shout across the bar: Eric! Who was it that wrote The Gang That Couldnt Shoot Straight? he carried himself with an authoritative intelligence that was rarely impatient and never unkind. When he and my mother divorced he would send letters to my new home in the south of England. Deprived of the conventional bulwarks of physical comedy gesture, intonation, facial expression I used to marvel at his ability to bring forth laughter using only the words on the page.

Beneath a headstone that reads Eric Ian Winwood: Son, Father, Brother, Friend Mined from the Good Stuff, these days my dad is buried in a plot at Ardsley Cemetery. As well as giving me the gift of reading for pleasure, he bequeathed me a talent for placing words in an order that earns me my living.

Sometimes this living takes me to Los Angeles.

Well, Im not very happy about it, Dad, to be honest with you.

Oh. Right. Why on earth not?

So I told Eric of the egregious assault on my human rights. Eleven hours cocooned with hundreds of other common-or-garden arse-scratchers in the cheap seats of an airborne dildo. Im right at the back, I told him. Right next to the toilets. Therell be coming and going and faffing about and bad smells and bad food and all of that. And I wouldnt mind, Dad, I really wouldnt, but the people Im travelling with have been upgraded, and, I mean, Im not being funny or nothing but, well well they dont evendeserve it.

A moments silence. A question dangling on a hook. Do you know what Im doing tonight, pal?

I had no idea. The last film Eric saw at the pictures was IndianaJones and the Temple of Doom (1984). A visit to a restaurant in town was by now an annual event.

Okay, Ill play. Dad, what are you doing tonight?

Funny you should ask, son, he says. Oh, God, hes starting hisengines. Im heading into Barnsley for a couple of pints. And when Im there, Ian, youll be in Los Angeles.

Right.

Right. So shut the fuck up.

*

There were a number of things I didnt share with my dad. I didnt tell him that the music business tolerates celebrates terrifying behaviour. I didnt divulge that after three days at the Reading Festival, his own stepson had remarked that the open-all-hours tomfoolery of me and my friends would have us sacked from any other line of work. When he asked me how things were going, I failed to mention that