Graham Reid considers Steve Winwood's career from teenage soul-boy to mainstream man.
When the salty bluesman Howlin' Wolf growled "the men don't know, but the little girls understand" on the 1961 Willie Dixon-penned Back Door Man we know he was talking about something more earthy and sexual than pop singers like Justin Bieber.
When Bieberfever arrived to the surprise of anyone over 16, there were many music writers bewailing his youth. But the little girls understand - and hasn't pop music always belonged to the young, and young at heart?
You can trace a line back from Bieber through Tiffany and Debbie Gibson (16 when they broke in the late 80s) to Frankie Lymon who was 13 when Why Do Fools Fall in Love went top 10 in the US in 1956.
Of course, some of the young don't last the distance. Lymon overdosed on heroin at 25 and Tiffany's story makes strange reading. But two names in the 60s stood out, both of them young Stevies.
Little Stevie Wonder was 13 when he scored his first hit, Fingertips Part 2 in 1963, and Stevie Winwood (quickly becoming the more mature "Steve") was 17 when he leaped to attention as the soulful singer in the Spencer Davis Group with the hits Keep on Running, Somebody Help Me, Gimme Some Lovin' (co-written with Davis and his older brother Muff Winwood, also in the group) and I'm A Man (co-written with producer Jimmy Miller who later produced the Rolling Stones).
And like Wonder, Winwood - 14 when he started in singer-guitarist Davis' band - quickly established himself as a preternaturally gifted singer and writer. And moving fast.
Winwood left Davis' band to join the first rock supergroup, the short-lived Blind Faith (alongside Eric Clapton, drummer Ginger Baker and violinist/bass player Ric Grech) for whom he wrote some fine songs, and was then in the more trippy and sometimes pastoral-sounding Traffic.
By 1977 - after seven acclaimed studio albums with Traffic - Winwood embarked on a solo career which took flight with his 1980 album Arc of a Diver on which he played every instrument and from which sprung the adult-rock radio hit While You See A Chance.
Over the years the desperate vocal edge of the Davis Group era was smoothed out and during the 80s his albums were, as was common, bedded with synthesizers. But his singles - Chance, Higher Love, Roll With It and One and Only Man - were massive on the mainstream US charts.
One of the ironies of his solo career is he enjoyed greater success in America than in Britain, where he still lives.
Higher Love (which won two Grammys) and Roll With It both topped the US mainstream charts but Higher Love remained just under the British and New Zealand top 10s, and Roll With It didn't even go top 50 in Britain. (It peaked at 30 here.)
Perhaps that was because British audiences - and New Zealanders who heard the Davis Group hits all over radio - preferred to remember him as that gifted soulful kid.
This 16 track non-chronological collection offers an overview of Winwood's changing career and kicks off with the four Davis Group classics, then dives into Traffic for four songs (including the trippy soul-pop Paper Sun, but not the odd Hole in My Shoe which Winwood always disliked for its acid-infused lyrics). It drops back for the quietly yearning original Can't Find My Way Back Home from Blind Faith's sole album. Thereafter are those popular solo singles as well as Back in the High Life (and others) and it closes with Dirty City of 2008 which found him back with his old pal from Blind Faith, Eric Clapton ... and was another adult mainstream number one. He started young but Steve Winwood, who turned 63 on Thursday, proved to be that rarity, a survivor.
Stars: 4/5
Verdict: The shorthand, but an effective distillation of Winwood's 45-year career
- TimeOut / elsewhere.co.nz
