Why isn't Steve Winwood more celebrated in Birmingham?

Embed from Getty Images

Jon Neale pays tribute to this blog hero Steve Winwood in the Birmingham newsletter The Dispatch...

Sometime in the mid-1960s, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell was staying overnight in Birmingham. He’d managed to turn teenage Jamaican singer Millie Small into a star with the single ‘My Boy Lollipop’ — the first ska track to go mainstream. She was filming for Thank Your Lucky Stars, the teatime pop show that preceded Top of The Pops, at the Alpha Studios in Aston.

Later that night, Blackwell was taken to see an early version of the band The Move, called Carl Wayne & the Vikings. Unimpressed with the group’s sharp suits, and polished, ‘showbiz’ performance, Blackwell headed to another venue: the Golden Eagle pub on Hill Street. He was warned that the band playing might not be to his taste, that they might be “a bit different.” This would be Blackwell’s introduction to a remarkable teenage prodigy, perhaps the greatest musical talent Birmingham has ever produced. It would be an encounter that would shape Britain’s music scene for the following decade.

As Blackwell climbed the Golden Eagle’s stairs, he heard a voice which could only be described as “Ray Charles on helium”. He was immediately absorbed by the “incredible” musicianship on display. “On this stage was this skinny white kid with floppy hair, about 16, the same age as Millie Small, playing guitar and sometimes amazing keyboards as well, like it was second nature… I’d never heard anything like it — white boys playing the blues like it meant the world to them,” he would later recall.

The skinny white kid in question was Stephen (Steve) Lawrence Winwood, of Atlantic Road, Kingstanding. He became one of the most celebrated musicians of the 1960s and 1970s: moving between the worlds of R&B, blues, psychedelia, jazz and folk — playing on albums such as Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland and Lou Reed’s Berlin. Winwood topped the charts with the Spencer Davis Group and defined the shape of the 1970s rock album with his band Traffic, before reinventing himself as a very different sort of pop star in the 1980s.

YouTube is a good place to appreciate how startling seeing the teenage Winwood must have been, in particular the clip of the Spencer Davis Group performing the song ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ It seems almost impossible that an 18-year-old is making that sound, especially while executing a virtuoso Hammond organ performance.  

...and then asks why he isn't more celebrated in is home city.

But what is equally remarkable, aside from his precocious musical talents, is how little Birmingham, his native city, remembers him. There is no Steve Winwood bridge or Traffic-related sculpture in Victoria Square. Asked in the street, older Brummies would probably mention a few other artists before getting to him. 

This indifference from Brummies might be understandable if Winwood had left early on to pursue fame in London. But his musical roots are entirely in the city, from Perry Barr choirboy to stoned hippie performing at Erdington’s legendary Mothers. Both his major bands were formed, and had their debut gigs, locally: featuring either Birmingham natives or those long-immersed in the city’s vibrant scene. And it’s not as if he is forgotten globally either: ‘Dear Mr Fantasy’ was heard by millions a few years ago at the start of the film Avengers Endgame.

One reason he comes up with is that heavy metal has come to be seen as the musical genre that defines Birmingham:

There’s something about Heavy Metal and Black Sabbath in particular — its working-class associations, its unsubtle sound, its honesty and directness and the disdain it used to generate among the cognoscenti — that appeals to a working-class, industrial city that always wants to make itself out to be rougher and tougher than it is, or was (see the TV shows Peaky Blinders and This Town). 

But Winwood represents another, underacknowledged and awkward, Birmingham: one that is softly spoken, self-effacing and self-deprecating, one that ploughs its furrow regardless of what the world thinks, constantly reinventing itself, with sometimes questionable results. In some ways, that’s a more honest identity. It’s time to celebrate that legacy and reclaim one of Britain’s finest musicians as our own.