Post by beth on May 11, 2010 10:30:42 GMT -5
Winwood is preparing to tour with Eric Clapton. This is a kind of retrospect, plus interview. Very readable.
Steve Winwood on his 45-year career
Asleep at the feet of his master, Steve Winwood’s dachshund is a picture of docility and contentment. Further down the hill from where we sit, soaking up the first miraculous rays of spring sunshine, new-born lambs teeter and frolic in a field. Rather like his owner, the dog appears untroubled by events going on around him in the wider world. Whiling away an afternoon in the Cotswolds, on a terrace outside the converted barn Winwood uses as a recording studio, you could be forgiven for thinking that life is always like this for the 61-year-old musician.
He bought the sprawling manor house down the road, and some land, in 1969 for £35,000, a sum of which he says: “Even then, I thought that was what we call the rock star’s discount, which is about 100% over and above what I should have been paying.” In the four decades since, Winwood has been, as he puts it, “adding little bits” — houses in the village, more land. Probably the lambs, too. Nearby is another studio, where he recorded two of the solo albums — Arc of a Diver and Talking Back to the Night — that propelled him, belatedly, into highly remunerated American stardom in the early 1980s. His tour manager mentions finding an old photo of the Spencer Davis Group, with whom Winwood broke through as a teenager, being presented with a television. “In lieu,” Winwood mutters, “of royalties, no doubt.”
That was then. These days, the chart hits may no longer come, but Winwood is enjoying a career that allows him to dip in and out of the cauldron when it suits him: he is about to tour the world with his former Blind Faith partner, Eric Clapton; and, next month, a four-CD best-of, Revolutions, compiles the key tracks from a 45-year journey that includes his most recent album, 2008’s Nine Lives, and began when the British music scene was introduced to a callow white teen opening his mouth and promising, in a voice that seemed to belong to someone else entirely (Ray Charles being the name most often cited), to “keep on running”.
Running is pushing it as a description of the pace of Winwood’s life nowadays, but he still goes on the sort of hikes he first enjoyed as a boy scout, recently climbing the highest point in each of the adjoining counties in the company of friends from his childhood in the Birmingham suburb of Great Barr. On a hike last year, he went into a local Spar to “buy some stuff for a packed lunch for the next day”, and got into an argument with the shopkeeper about there being only South African apples on sale. He laughs as he relates this, further evidence of his being the antithesis of the “rock star moves to the countryside” cliché.
“I’m not really a pop star,” Winwood muses. “Do I play rock? I suppose so, yes. But I play at jazz festivals, folk festivals, so I don’t think I’m the archetypal rock star. Dear old John Entwistle lived up the road. He was a great bloke, but he’d get up at four in the afternoon and wander around Stow-on-the-Wold in his black-leather stage outfit.”
Winwood’s accent, despite his owning a home in Nashville and those years of American success, remains rooted in his former and current habitats: there are occasional Brum twangs, but, for the most part, his vowels sing with local notes. (The word “years” comes out as “yurs”.) His clothing speaks of a lack of airs and graces, too. What appear to be at least two buttoned shirts are worn beneath a mottled, faded fleece, the whole assembly looking flung-on, willy-nilly. What is apparent, for all that Winwood may attempt to conceal it, is a marked streak of cussedness: you detect it in the way he describes choosing to retreat from the excesses of late-1960s London for a life of relative rural anonymity; in his decision to take up pipe-smoking, simply because “these days you can’t smoke bloody anywhere”. It’s there, too, in his career choices: walking out of the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 to form Traffic, in which Winwood’s musical polymathy — blues, soul, pop, folk, jazz, liturgical — first bore glorious fruit; abandoning Traffic two years later, without so much as a glance over his shoulder, for the fleeting temptation of Blind Faith, one of the first supergroups; and doing so again in the mid-1970s, after Traffic had enjoyed a bizarre second wind as purveyors, by then, of what Winwood calls “20-minute tracks, with jazz, folk, rock, elements of world music in them, and us not really caring if there was an audience for it”. Then there was the huge catalogue of sometimes needs-must, pays-the-bills session work, which a more up-himself musician might have considered beneath him, but which Winwood had no such problems with.
Being boxed seems, still, to hold terror for him. He talks with scorn of being labelled, as a result of his support for the Countryside Alliance, a “hunting, shooting, fishing type”. But the subject that, even now, rouses him to real passion is music: of any type, from any period. Given his upbringing as a choirboy and a prodigiously gifted multi-instrumentalist, it would be miraculous if he hadn’t wanted to pursue a career in music. What does seem remarkable is that, all these years on, the fire remains. He sings in the local church choir and plays the organ there.
“I wrote an anthem for them last Christmas,” Winwood says proudly. “Church music had a big influence on me as a child. But at the same time, my dad played 1930s dance music. That was a time when every function — every birthday party, wedding, funeral — had a band playing, and from about the age of nine, I’d go and do the odd gig with them, on guitar. So I had to learn to play those standards, which was at the absolute opposite end of the spectrum. But it never seemed that I couldn’t do one because I was doing the other. There are two kinds of music, good and bad. I spend most time, and get most enjoyment from, trying to link them all up. It’s endlessly fascinating.”
An early sign of his tendency to bridle came when Winwood was summoned before the headteacher of the Birmingham School of Music, where the then 13-year-old was studying harmony and composition part-time, while also earning pocket money — and invaluable experience — in pick-up bands on the local folk and blues circuits by night. “He said, ‘What sort of music do you really like?’ ” Winwood remembers. “And I said, ‘Look, I do like Hindemith and Stravinsky’ — which is true — ‘but I also like Little Richard and Ray Charles.’ You’ve got to remember, this was 1961. And he went, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve either got to forget that music or leave this establishment.’” With characteristic bloody-mindedness, Winwood didn’t hesitate, and contemporary classical music’s loss was pop’s infinite gain.
The even tenor of the interview is disturbed only when talk turns to his 1980s albums, which many regard as so freighted with period production techniques (what Winwood himself describes with pre-emptive dismissiveness as “Hollywood sheen”) as to be unlistenable. That’s surely unfair, although you need to hear tracks such as Higher Love, While You See a Chance and Valerie live to locate the in fact very strong links that exist to Winwood’s earlier work.
“I do think,” he begins warily, “one of my problems is that I can be easily led. Sometimes in the wrong directions; that’s happened a few times, especially in the mid-1980s. People can have a strong influence on me — like label executives, who, rightly or wrongly, from their perspective see me as a product, and go, ‘You should make records like so-and-so, because they’re selling millions, and you’re not.’ ” At its worst, this impressionability led Winwood to make glossy pop videos surrounded by models. Yet he got out — characteristically, again — before the machine swallowed him whole.
“I’ve always tried to remember,” he concludes, “that whatever I did, it had to be driven by the music. That always came first: the consideration of what would be the most resonant for people — not the most commercial, or what moved the most units, or whatever silly phrase they used at the time, but music-driven, music that reaches people, that moves them. Music is not a commodity, it’s not merchandise.” You’re fleet of foot, I suggest. And, almost with relief, he lets out a mischievous, bang-to-rights guffaw.
As if on cue, the dog (also) stirs. It turns out the mutt is adept at sleight of paw and elusiveness. He often, Winwood reveals, trots off up the drive in the direction of the lane, only to double back, concealed by the dry-stone wall, and reappear in the field, where he harries the lambs before withdrawing, victorious. Revolutions may document, unanswerably, the trajectory of a formidably experimental, inquisitive, shape-shifting singer, guitarist, keyboardist and songwriter. But I can’t help feeling that it also describes, to adapt the title of Steve Winwood’s second, breakthrough solo album, the arc of a ducker and diver.
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7110766.ece
Steve Winwood on his 45-year career
Asleep at the feet of his master, Steve Winwood’s dachshund is a picture of docility and contentment. Further down the hill from where we sit, soaking up the first miraculous rays of spring sunshine, new-born lambs teeter and frolic in a field. Rather like his owner, the dog appears untroubled by events going on around him in the wider world. Whiling away an afternoon in the Cotswolds, on a terrace outside the converted barn Winwood uses as a recording studio, you could be forgiven for thinking that life is always like this for the 61-year-old musician.
He bought the sprawling manor house down the road, and some land, in 1969 for £35,000, a sum of which he says: “Even then, I thought that was what we call the rock star’s discount, which is about 100% over and above what I should have been paying.” In the four decades since, Winwood has been, as he puts it, “adding little bits” — houses in the village, more land. Probably the lambs, too. Nearby is another studio, where he recorded two of the solo albums — Arc of a Diver and Talking Back to the Night — that propelled him, belatedly, into highly remunerated American stardom in the early 1980s. His tour manager mentions finding an old photo of the Spencer Davis Group, with whom Winwood broke through as a teenager, being presented with a television. “In lieu,” Winwood mutters, “of royalties, no doubt.”
That was then. These days, the chart hits may no longer come, but Winwood is enjoying a career that allows him to dip in and out of the cauldron when it suits him: he is about to tour the world with his former Blind Faith partner, Eric Clapton; and, next month, a four-CD best-of, Revolutions, compiles the key tracks from a 45-year journey that includes his most recent album, 2008’s Nine Lives, and began when the British music scene was introduced to a callow white teen opening his mouth and promising, in a voice that seemed to belong to someone else entirely (Ray Charles being the name most often cited), to “keep on running”.
Running is pushing it as a description of the pace of Winwood’s life nowadays, but he still goes on the sort of hikes he first enjoyed as a boy scout, recently climbing the highest point in each of the adjoining counties in the company of friends from his childhood in the Birmingham suburb of Great Barr. On a hike last year, he went into a local Spar to “buy some stuff for a packed lunch for the next day”, and got into an argument with the shopkeeper about there being only South African apples on sale. He laughs as he relates this, further evidence of his being the antithesis of the “rock star moves to the countryside” cliché.
“I’m not really a pop star,” Winwood muses. “Do I play rock? I suppose so, yes. But I play at jazz festivals, folk festivals, so I don’t think I’m the archetypal rock star. Dear old John Entwistle lived up the road. He was a great bloke, but he’d get up at four in the afternoon and wander around Stow-on-the-Wold in his black-leather stage outfit.”
Winwood’s accent, despite his owning a home in Nashville and those years of American success, remains rooted in his former and current habitats: there are occasional Brum twangs, but, for the most part, his vowels sing with local notes. (The word “years” comes out as “yurs”.) His clothing speaks of a lack of airs and graces, too. What appear to be at least two buttoned shirts are worn beneath a mottled, faded fleece, the whole assembly looking flung-on, willy-nilly. What is apparent, for all that Winwood may attempt to conceal it, is a marked streak of cussedness: you detect it in the way he describes choosing to retreat from the excesses of late-1960s London for a life of relative rural anonymity; in his decision to take up pipe-smoking, simply because “these days you can’t smoke bloody anywhere”. It’s there, too, in his career choices: walking out of the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 to form Traffic, in which Winwood’s musical polymathy — blues, soul, pop, folk, jazz, liturgical — first bore glorious fruit; abandoning Traffic two years later, without so much as a glance over his shoulder, for the fleeting temptation of Blind Faith, one of the first supergroups; and doing so again in the mid-1970s, after Traffic had enjoyed a bizarre second wind as purveyors, by then, of what Winwood calls “20-minute tracks, with jazz, folk, rock, elements of world music in them, and us not really caring if there was an audience for it”. Then there was the huge catalogue of sometimes needs-must, pays-the-bills session work, which a more up-himself musician might have considered beneath him, but which Winwood had no such problems with.
Being boxed seems, still, to hold terror for him. He talks with scorn of being labelled, as a result of his support for the Countryside Alliance, a “hunting, shooting, fishing type”. But the subject that, even now, rouses him to real passion is music: of any type, from any period. Given his upbringing as a choirboy and a prodigiously gifted multi-instrumentalist, it would be miraculous if he hadn’t wanted to pursue a career in music. What does seem remarkable is that, all these years on, the fire remains. He sings in the local church choir and plays the organ there.
“I wrote an anthem for them last Christmas,” Winwood says proudly. “Church music had a big influence on me as a child. But at the same time, my dad played 1930s dance music. That was a time when every function — every birthday party, wedding, funeral — had a band playing, and from about the age of nine, I’d go and do the odd gig with them, on guitar. So I had to learn to play those standards, which was at the absolute opposite end of the spectrum. But it never seemed that I couldn’t do one because I was doing the other. There are two kinds of music, good and bad. I spend most time, and get most enjoyment from, trying to link them all up. It’s endlessly fascinating.”
An early sign of his tendency to bridle came when Winwood was summoned before the headteacher of the Birmingham School of Music, where the then 13-year-old was studying harmony and composition part-time, while also earning pocket money — and invaluable experience — in pick-up bands on the local folk and blues circuits by night. “He said, ‘What sort of music do you really like?’ ” Winwood remembers. “And I said, ‘Look, I do like Hindemith and Stravinsky’ — which is true — ‘but I also like Little Richard and Ray Charles.’ You’ve got to remember, this was 1961. And he went, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve either got to forget that music or leave this establishment.’” With characteristic bloody-mindedness, Winwood didn’t hesitate, and contemporary classical music’s loss was pop’s infinite gain.
The even tenor of the interview is disturbed only when talk turns to his 1980s albums, which many regard as so freighted with period production techniques (what Winwood himself describes with pre-emptive dismissiveness as “Hollywood sheen”) as to be unlistenable. That’s surely unfair, although you need to hear tracks such as Higher Love, While You See a Chance and Valerie live to locate the in fact very strong links that exist to Winwood’s earlier work.
“I do think,” he begins warily, “one of my problems is that I can be easily led. Sometimes in the wrong directions; that’s happened a few times, especially in the mid-1980s. People can have a strong influence on me — like label executives, who, rightly or wrongly, from their perspective see me as a product, and go, ‘You should make records like so-and-so, because they’re selling millions, and you’re not.’ ” At its worst, this impressionability led Winwood to make glossy pop videos surrounded by models. Yet he got out — characteristically, again — before the machine swallowed him whole.
“I’ve always tried to remember,” he concludes, “that whatever I did, it had to be driven by the music. That always came first: the consideration of what would be the most resonant for people — not the most commercial, or what moved the most units, or whatever silly phrase they used at the time, but music-driven, music that reaches people, that moves them. Music is not a commodity, it’s not merchandise.” You’re fleet of foot, I suggest. And, almost with relief, he lets out a mischievous, bang-to-rights guffaw.
As if on cue, the dog (also) stirs. It turns out the mutt is adept at sleight of paw and elusiveness. He often, Winwood reveals, trots off up the drive in the direction of the lane, only to double back, concealed by the dry-stone wall, and reappear in the field, where he harries the lambs before withdrawing, victorious. Revolutions may document, unanswerably, the trajectory of a formidably experimental, inquisitive, shape-shifting singer, guitarist, keyboardist and songwriter. But I can’t help feeling that it also describes, to adapt the title of Steve Winwood’s second, breakthrough solo album, the arc of a ducker and diver.
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7110766.ece