A nephew of Ian Fleming wrote the lyrics for two tracks on Steve Winwood's Arc of a Diver

This blog's hero Steve Winwood has never been a great one for talking to journalists, so I was pleased to come across a 10-minute interview from a 2010 edition of Front Row on BBC Sounds.

Winwood discusses his career and casts a little light on the remarkable period when, as a young teenager, he was playing guitar to back some of the blues greats when they toured Britain.

I've also discovered a bit of Winwood trivia. 

There are seven tracks on Arc of Diver, the 1980 album that relaunched his career. The lyrics for four of them are by Will Jennings, the university English lecturer turned top rock lyricist, and those on the title track are by the great Viv Stanshall.

That leaves two - Second-Hand Woman and Dust - and they both have lyrics by someone called George Fleming.

He turns out to be a friend of Winwood's and the son of Richard Fleming, who was a younger brother of Ian Fleming, the inventor of James Bond. Richard Fleming owned an estate near Winwood's own in the Cotswolds.

George Fleming's words for Second-Hand Woman would have been turned down by Spinal Tap as too sexist, but Winwood manages to make those for Dust sound a little mysterious and rather better than they are.