I was 10 years old when I read a line in music magazine Kerrang! that stayed with me forever. Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott had died of pneumonia and heart failure related to his drug use. The journalist was moved to open the article by breaking the fourth wall: Phil Lynott is dead. I know. I can’t believe it either.

It was effective, but it was also, well, unbelievable that the writer couldn’t believe it. Another Kerrang! journalist, Ian Winwood, has written a book, Bodies, that is so tightly packed with music industry overdoses, suicides and accidental deaths as to be overwhelming. It’s not a gawk at “the 27 club”, but a call to arms. “There is something systemically broken in the world of music,” he writes. “It’s making people ill.”

When Winwood joined Kerrang! in 2000, he took full advantage of the permissive culture, using drugs to power through overseas trips and overnight deadlines. In Ireland, he dabbed speed with Primal Scream. In Vegas, to cover Green Day, he was robbed by a sex worker he recruited to buy cocaine. The tortured artist, he admits, is forever celebrated: “Scenting blood, I have written reams of articles that examine in precise detail the degradation of a hundred lives …”

Winwood’s own addiction was also able to hide in plain sight. After his father died in traumatic circumstances, he was in and out of psych wards. “I’ve taken so much medication that it’s likely I’ll be buried in a coffin with a childproof lid,” he quips. At one point, the features editor banged on his front door, chasing a missing cover story, and found Winwood delirious, naked from the waist down, with cut feet. Even his coke dealer wound up barring him: “Sorry, mate, shop’s closed.”

While Bodies is largely memoir, the publisher has filed the book under “health”. That’s the lens through which Winwood tells his own story, but he also takes the pulse of the industry in general, catching up with old interviewees specifically to talk about mental health and addiction.

Ginger, the frontman of the Wildhearts, tells him, “I used to look at bands and wonder what drugs they took”. The Wildhearts once smashed up the Kerrang! office with baseball bats after a bad review, but that didn’t stop the magazine covering them. Now that the singer is in his late 50s, he’s had his fair share of being helped off stage, and of worrying posts on social media. His bandmate, Danny McCormack, had some of his leg amputated after an injection of heroin caused massive damage.

Another poignant voice is that of Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, who tells Winwood he suffered from survivor’s guilt, having lost so many friends in bands to suicide. That’s by no means a nightmare trend of the ’90s. A recent Australian survey commissioned by the music industry charity Support Act and conducted by the Centre for Social Impact at Swinburne University of Technology found that suicide attempts in live performers rose in the past two years.

If you’re thinking that’s likely largely down to no support during the pandemic, well, a 2018 report from the Canadian East Coast Music Association found that 20 per cent of musicians had contemplated suicide in the month they were consulted, and a 2016 survey by the New Zealand Music Foundation found six out of 10 artists had thought about it.