Steve Winwood

Since shooting to fame as a teenager with the Spencer Davis Group in the 1960s, the former frontman of Traffic and Blind Faith, Steve Winwood, has enjoyed a remarkably varied career, and is now happy to be making the music he wants, when he wants.

It’s over 20 years since he last had a multi-million selling album, and more than 40 years since he first emerged fronting the Spencer Davis Group, yet Steve Winwood is just as passionate about music as he ever was. “We’ve only got 12 notes, but you can create a whole universe out of them; it never ceases to amaze me,” he tells Performing Musician. “Music is my life. It’s running through my blood.”

Long before the multi-million selling solo career and the hippie rock & roll roar of Traffic and Blind Faith, Steve Winwood was thrust blinking into the spotlight at the age of 15 as the lead singer of the Spencer Davis Group. They were spotted by Chris Blackwell, who volunteered his services as manager and signed them to his fledgling label, Island Records. Although their first couple of singles failed to capture the airwaves, with Winwood’s stirring, soulful voice and distinctive Hammond organ sound at their core, the band hit their stride with ‘Keep On Running’, ‘Somebody Help Me’ and ‘Gimme Some Lovin’’, three of the most memorable songs of the ‘60s.

“I missed out on a lot of what other kids do when they’re growing up, but I had an alternative growing up, I suppose. We had a residency at the Star Club in Hamburg when I was 16, so you know... I saw and learned other things,” Steve recalls with a mischievous grin, sitting on a luxurious leather sofa in the boardroom of his publicist’s plush North London offices. “Before that, we used to play in jazz bands in the pubs in Birmingham, and I used to sometimes go straight from school in my uniform and they’d have to hide me behind the piano.”

Steve Winwood: “Well, because we started off copying blues music — which was relatively little-known at the time — we felt we were bringing it to a wider audience. But I was a good few years younger than everybody else in the band, and I wanted to get together with some people that were more my own age and create our own music, rather than reinterpreting someone else’s.”

SW: “The gap between Nine Lives and the last album is basically because I don’t have a record deal as such. The last one, About Time [2003], was through an independent label, and this one is just a one-album deal with Sony, so I’m not exactly signed to them. That gives me a lot of freedom. I just make an album when I really want to make an album these days, rather than when I’m contractually obliged to make one.

“I have been pushed around at various times by companies in the past and I’ve found myself jostled into a corner, and that meant it compromised my music, unfortunately. I put out an album in 1997 called Junction Seven, which was produced by Narada Michael Walden, because the label insisted I needed a producer, although I didn’t actually think I did. But I’m big enough to stand a bit of criticism, and maybe I did need someone.”

SW: “In the ‘60s, there wasn’t that corporate pressure from labels. They were mostly small independents or boutique record companies, which were run by one person who would oversee everything and who shared a vision with the artist. There was no pressure to make a record to conform to what was already successful, and that’s a big mistake that record companies make now.”

SW: “Narada is a great bloke, and I’d originally met him when he played drums when we did a benefit gig for Curtis Mayfield, but we had different agendas. He wanted a Top 20 hit, maybe because that was his brief from the record company. I just wanted to make a good record, and I wanted to use him as a drummer as well, because he’s an amazing drummer. But he just wanted to program this little drum machine. I said, “Why do you want to do that?” and he pinned a list of the Top 10 in America up on the wall and said, ‘Well, none of these records have a real drummer on them.’”

SW: “That’s right [chuckles], but hindsight is a great thing, isn’t it? It’s great to know exactly what you want, but there is a fine line between that and being blinkered to other people’s ideas. Although you can go through life sacking people who don’t agree with you, sometimes it may be to your advantage to give them a bit of a listen, as they may actually have a point. I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve things, so you do have to keep an open mind.”

PM: After your disappointment with Junction Seven, for your 2003 album, About Time, you reverted to a more organic live sound of a group of musicians playing together, vibing and vamping in the studio. How did you approach your latest album, Nine Lives?

SW: “This album was kind of intended to be a continuation of the last one, and in fact I was going to call it ‘About Time Too’, because of the long gaps between albums in the last few years. It’s got a mixture of Latin, Brazilian and rock and all of those sort of elements. We cut it pretty much live in the studio, and it’s the same band that I use on stage. The music on Nine Lives was very much based on what we actually play when we’re jamming. We record everything we do during soundchecks or jams, so songs would just evolve. You can tell musicians exactly what to play, but if you ask them to play things that they played in the first place, then you’ve got a much more natural and organic feel.”

SW: “Yes. I did that with About Time as well. At that point I changed the format of the band. I’ve used a Hammond organ sound without a bass player, and it’s really a development of the kind of organ jazz trio with percussion and a sax player. It gives the music a different flavour, and that kind of organ sound has never really been used with Latin or Brazilian music, so to add those elements gave it something that you just don’t hear. Hammond organs don’t survive very well in hot climates, so they were never really part of that music.”

SW: “I suppose I’ve been through quite a few. Actually, I’ve started collecting them again over the last 10 years, because they stopped making them in 1970. I pick them up all over the place and I own quite a few. I have a different set of gear that I keep in a lock-up in a rehearsal studio in Nashville so I don’t have to keep transporting it all back and forth. You can now get this thing they call the XB3 for about £20,000. It’s got a few other bells and whistles, but they’re all sampled sounds. An original probably costs about £10,000.”

PM: Nine Lives was recorded at your country estate in Gloucestershire, which you bought during the early days of Traffic. How did this idea of rock stars getting it together in the country come about?

SW: “Well, you would probably think that rock music is an urban phenomenon really, but the main reason for doing it in ’68 was so that we could play music and make a row any time of the day or night without getting complaints from the neighbours, which we did constantly when we were living in a flat in West London. So we moved out to this place where we got water out of the well and it had no electricity. We could play whenever we wanted, which was really something very special at the time. I still do it now and it is a fantastic luxury to have. Back then, Traffic all lived together — no girlfriends allowed [laughs]. When I want to play now, I have to ring people up and say, ‘Are you available the week after next?’”

SW: “I suppose that album was what came out of living and working at the cottage. Time seemed to move so slowly when I was 18 compared to the way it goes when you’re 60, so I’ve got no idea how long we spent making Mr. Fantasy. We worked very hard and all we wanted to do was make music, but we had a great time doing it.

“A lot of musicians like Stephen Stills, Hendrix, Townshend and Clapton used to come down there all the time just to hang out. There were a fair amount of drugs around in those days, but we were musicians first and foremost. The ‘60s were massive times of social change, and unless you lived in the ‘50s you would probably never really understand that the late ‘60s was the same planet as the late ‘50s. There was a revolution and there were systems in place that all broke down, and I was there when they broke down. In people’s minds, because the music was going on, it gave them the perception that music caused it, but here was a change that was waiting to happen. It would have happened anyway. Other people came into it because they wanted to change the world, politically and socially, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to perhaps make the music that went along with changing the world.

“Here we were supposedly changing the world for the better in the ‘60s, but as we get 30 or 40 years further down the line, we realise that some of those changes such as the drugs probably weren’t all that great or sensible. I was very lucky that, for whatever reason, I didn’t end up going down the same road as Eric Clapton, for instance. He went down a very heavy road, although he managed to pull himself out of that a long way afterwards.”

SW: “I was in New York at the time, and Jimi asked me to come down to the studio and play on this song. We talked it through and played one take. Then we went to do another and he broke a string, and the third take was the one. I was only there for a couple of hours. There was Mitch Mitchell, Jimi and me. Jimi was an amazing, agile musician, and he was a man of humility as well, but I really wasn’t sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, gosh, we’re all gonna be millionaires’”

SW: “Well, you can’t really say best. I mean, Hendrix was so different to Clapton. They had different things going on, but they’re both incredibly exciting, fantastic players. It’s a very difficult question because I played with T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, BB King, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters You can’t say Hendrix was a better guitarist than T-Bone Walker; they’re just different.”

The set list from Clapton and Winwood’s reunion concert in 2008 — they played a mix of Blind Faith, Traffic and Cream hits.

SW: “I’d known Eric for a while. We’d gone through the discovery of blues together when I first moved down to London when I was 16. We would meet up and talk about guitars, amplifiers and records, and he introduced me to his friends. He was almost like a big brother he’s still a bit like that to me now. I thought, ‘With all this liberated world that was supposed to have been created in the ‘60s, shouldn’t I be free to leave Traffic and play with other musicians if I want to?’ So I did, and we decided to put Blind Faith together.”

PM: The hype surrounding Blind Faith was such that, even before releasing your first (and only) album, you found yourselves playing your first concert in London’s Hyde Park in front of 100,000 people. So why was the band so short-lived?

SW: “It was unfortunate that it didn’t last, because the record stands the test of time reasonably well. But because we were bringing quite subtle, delicate elements to the music, once there was big money involved and corporate thinking, people started hovering around after the first show. They had an agenda to get us playing big arenas and stadiums in Europe and the States. Those places lent themselves to big rock music. And, of course, Blind Faith wasn’t Led Zeppelin or Cream; it was a lot of fiddling and twiddling around on acoustic guitars, and people wanted heavy rock music. So a certain amount of disillusionment set in, and that was that.”

PM: John Barleycorn Must Die [1970] was originally intended to be your first solo record, but turned into Traffic’s comeback album and is now widely considered to be their definitive statement. Do you agree with that?

SW: “In many ways John Barleycorn is the core of what Traffic is, and it could be the most definitive album we did. But Traffic went through a lot of different chapters, so it’s slightly unfair to compare the different phases. Most of the Traffic stuff stands the test of time pretty well.”

SW: “Well, punk was really a reaction against people like me, wasn’t it? But it didn’t affect me that badly, because it was more based on social change than on music, so it didn’t bother me much. It wasn’t really a musical threat. That first album had some good things about it, but perhaps some of it was probably ill-timed.”

PM: In return for your help on Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, Viv Stanshall, of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, provided the lyrics for your Arc Of A Diver (1980) album. What was it like working with him?

SW: “He was an incredible wordsmith and a wonderful technical writer, so because the rhythmic scansion of the stuff is so great, it made it easy to write music for his lyrics. I’m not sure whether it’s fair to call him a clown, but he was an English eccentric and he was pretty out there. But I think people probably sometimes say that about me. I have a lot of quirks going on as well.”

SW: “Well, Talking Back To The Night was a bit of a continuation of Arc Of A Diver. In a way, Arc Of A Diver can possibly be seen as a better album, but I think it should have been a double album. There were things happening with the technology that I was slightly playing with. I did both albums completely by myself, and that’s what I meant when I said I’m possibly a bit nuts. The record company asked me whether I needed an engineer or a producer and I said I didn’t need anyone, so they certainly thought I was nuts when I was doing that. I don’t know why. There are some great songs on those albums, so that shows you what do the record company know?”

SW: “Although I think there was a perceived change in direction, in fact I was still doing what I’d always done — trying to incorporate elements of jazz, rock, folk and ethnic stuff into the music. I think it’s the production that was different, as opposed to the music or the songs.

“Sometimes it’s just timing, but there was this huge corporate formula, which was put in place by record companies, radio stations and the media in the ‘80s. They were all kind of in each other’s pockets and so they were able to make massive hits out of things, a lot of which weren’t even very good anyway. Things like Arc Of A Diver were number one in America, so although things seemed to shift up a gear, it wasn’t actually that much of a shock for me.

“Back In The High Life did sell millions, but, of course, in those days people were selling a lot more records than they sell now anyway. My record sales are definitely down since then, but it’s not just me; everyone’s record sales are down. Christina Aguilera may have just sold four million copies of her latest album, but her previous one probably sold eight million, so that could still be considered to be a disappointment for her.”

PM: Would you agree that mainly because of the hi-tech, high-gloss production values of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, some of the music you made during that period is perhaps not as timeless as a lot of the stuff you released in the ‘60s and ‘70s?

SW: “The ‘60s had its sound, and things are often influenced by the time, but I would hope that through it all there’s a common thread of what I’m doing now, which would be the same as what I was doing before. The ‘80s and ‘90s was just another phase for me. In the ‘80s, record companies were just much more corporate in the way they did things and the way they sold records, and the production had a certain sound. Those things are beyond my control, really, so there’s no point in me regretting anything.

“I’ve always pretty much tried to do the same thing, and I didn’t come from a background of trying to change the world socially or trying to change the world with fashion statements; I was trying to make a mark on the world with music. The way music is recorded changes and the way it’s perceived changes, but the actual craft of music doesn’t really change at all. I would like to think that what I’ve done hasn’t really changed much over the years.

“People often say that spirituality is something that goes through my work, and I really just think that music should lift spirits rather than dampen them. Rock & roll can be very dark, and there’s a lot of songs about drugs and suicide, but I’ve always tried to make my music more positive, basically because rock & roll was something that was kind of put on me. I came from a jazz background and then Spencer Davis Group was a blues band, so rock & roll was never quite where I came from or where I was going, and I didn’t really have a name for where I was going either. I probably still don’t.”

SW: “Since the early Traffic days, there was a definite decision to try and combine folk, jazz and rock, and I think that has gone on throughout my career. I’ve actually brought that back even more strongly over the last 10 years, probably adding one or two flavours like world music — although, of course, there was no such thing back in the ‘60s. I’ve hopefully tried to progress it a little further, but it’s always been there.”

SW: “Sometimes I start with a title or a piece of music, sometimes just an idea or a groove. The thing is not to formularise it, so you have to be open to try any way of working. Sometimes ideas come to me randomly when I’m walking around, and then I usually try and hum something into my phone or something. I used to think it was harder for me to write the lyrics, but I actually think I can do both. I usually write on a guitar or a keyboard, but I’ll sometimes use drums or a bass, although I do sometimes just write a melody in my head. I don’t really notice writing being any harder as I get older. Songwriting is hard and always was hard.

“Writing, for me, always came out of the necessity of being a musician, so it became a vehicle for us to play music, particularly in Traffic, and that’s how I developed in terms of writing songs with Jim Capaldi. Jim was a drummer, but he was also a great lyricist. Playing music was really what we wanted to do. Because we had to come up with 10 songs or whatever it was for an album, we realised we had to write 10 songs, because if we were going to play and jam, we had to write songs to have something to play and jam on. I suppose necessity is the mother of invention. I really miss Jim a lot, but I think I generally try and look forwards.

“If my music means something to people, I’m very proud of that. It’s nice to make a mark, but I wouldn’t have set out in 1965 saying, ‘Right, now for the next 50 years I’m going to create a legacy.’ The time really has slipped by. I’ve been very lucky to be able to spend my life doing something that I love and to actually make a living out of it.”

SW: “Yes, and I often write notation. I think you are limiting yourself as a songwriter if you don’t read music. It’s like being a storyteller if you don’t read books — you can do it, but you’re missing out on a lot of other things. A lot of musicians don’t read, although in America they tend to read more, because in rock bands over there people have often got degrees in music, but you don’t find that so much over here.”

SW: “Well, I think we’re undergoing a kind of industrial revolution in the music world right now. You don’t even have to sign to a label and you can still have a hit, and I think that’s great for music, because the music will always find a way of coming through and the cream will always rise to the top. Sometimes it misses the boat or the timing is a bit wrong, and I can think of lots of slightly more obscure stuff that nobody has ever heard of, even though it’s great, but at least it rises to somebody’s top, although maybe not in the mainstream marketplace.

“I wouldn’t say I’m so enthusiastic about the music business itself, but I would say that I am still incredibly excited by music. It’s such a fascinating subject, so nobody can ever really know everything. There’s always new things to discover, and so you’ll always be excited by music. I’m still learning, and it never really ceases, and I think that’s why I still have such an interest in it at the age of 60. I still want to make records, and I still want to go and play live.

“Music still intrigues me. I still haven’t cracked it, and you can never know all there is to know, so if you’re interested in learning, then you’ll always be excited by music and there will always be new things to discover. There is no such thing as formula in music and there is no such thing as perfection, and that’s what keeps me going. The minute you start to try to make the perfect album, you’re looking for a formula, and music doesn’t work to formula.”

Steve Winwood

Singer-songwriter & multi-instrumentalist