DEATH OF AMY WINEHOUSE:BY JOINING the macabre "27 Club" Amy Winehouse takes her place alongside a long list of gifted yet personally troubled musical stars. The 27 Club refers to the early, mostly drug-related deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, who all died at the age of 27.
While the general reaction across the music industry to Winehouse’s death in her 27th year was one of shock at the loss of such a thrillingly original and bountifully talented singer-songwriter, the sentiment was tempered with a certain sense of inevitability. Amy Winehouse had been drinking in the last chance saloon for many a year.
While her death is still being treated as “unexplained”, it would appear likely that a major contributory factor has been years of drug abuse.
Sadly, the best singer of her generation – who had even elicited comparisons to legends such as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald – had become a byword for boozy and drug-fuelled excess since her breakthrough Back to Blackalbum in 2006.
Her last public performance – at an ill-advised comeback show in Belgrade last month – showed a clearly disoriented and troubled presence who slurred her lines, had memory losses and prematurely finished her set by flinging her microphone to the ground.
As with most tragic early ends of rock icons though, once the dust settles on the events surrounding her death, there will be a clearer appraisal of just what a major and significant talent she was.
Those at her record label, Universal, who worked closely with her since 2002, describe an almost painfully shy presence who was shockingly skinny due to a teenage eating disorder.
From a modest Jewish family in the London suburbs (her father was a taxi driver), she was brought up in jazz music-loving household, but her first foray into the music world was through the medium of hip-hop.
Talent spotters persuaded her to drop the rap and go for a more soul/r ‘n’ b vocal styling.
Although just 20 when her debut album, Frank, was released, what impressed most about the collection was how "lived in" her voice sounded. In an era of reality TV pop stars, Winehouse was a throwback to the torch singer of old, someone who appeared to have lived the life detailed in her songs of heartbreak and emotional drama.
With her trademark beehive hair, cat-eye makeup and plethora of tattoos she cut a distinctive figure on the music scene, but early tales of her falling over at shows and behaving in an “exuberant” manner when out in public were put down to “high spirits”.
With 2006's Back to Blackalbum (an all-time classic), she achieved major international success and picked up five prestigious Grammy awards.
Hit songs such as Rehabsignalled her as having an extraordinary grasp of rhythm, melody and delivery.
In a world of almost soft-porn-like female singers doing choreographed dance routines while lip-synching their vocals, Winehouse was welcomed as the “real deal” – an authentic white soul voice and an “artistically interesting” presence.
The runaway success of Back to Blackmade her not just the toast of the music world on both sides of the Atlantic but also a multi-millionaire.
Never straying far from her beloved Camden area of north London, she was a “party girl” who hid her shyness at the bottom of a bottle. It was well known that, like many of her peers, she dabbled in drugs – cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana. Powder and pills are one thing, but her addiction to heroin was the beginning of her death sentence.
Since the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994, the music industry has put in place a team of mental health professionals and addiction counsellors, etc, to helps artists with what are euphemistically termed “lifestyle problems”.
I know some of the label/ management team around her personally, and they have been almost reduced to tears in my presence as they detailed the lengths they went to get thorough and intensive long-term professional help for a young woman who clearly still had an eating disorder and was both a drink and drug addict. She was also, at the very height of her glittering success, self-harming.
Amy was sternly lectured about how any drug prosecution in the UK would mean that she wouldn’t get a work visa for the US (the biggest music market in the world). It was also explained to her in some detail about how the smoking of a crack cocaine pipe would ruin her vocal chords. A few years ago she was diagnosed with a form of emphysema.
While she promised to clean herself up and start working on the long-overdue follow-up to Back to Black, she became almost a tabloid freak show, as pictures of her emerged with heavy bruising on her body and a crack pipe hanging out of her handbag.
Her 2007 marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil – a video production assistant – was a fraught affair and the couple divorced in 2009.
Fielder-Civil had been imprisoned for two years during the marriage for beating up a pub landlord and interfering with the course of justice.
However, the pair had reportedly got back together earlier this year, but just last month Fielder-Civil was jailed for 2½ years on a burglary charge.
Since the second imprisonment, Winehouse had been – according to those around her – on a colossal drink and drug bender. A neighbour in Camden reported hearing Amy sobbing hysterically on the night before she was found dead.
Her early death (even allowing for the fact that there is no huge sense of surprise at such a tragic denouement) will prompt the music industry to look again at how it deals with troubled stars and addictive behaviour.
It’s a problematic area not least because we, the public, have always expressed a preference for a Keith Richards, not a Cliff Richard, type.
The music industry is predicated on a “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” image and, artistically speaking, the more bruised and battered the star the more authentic and resonant the music is – or so the thinking goes.
Compare and contrast how the figures of Pete Doherty and James Blunt are weighed up in the press. The former is viewed as “dangerous” and “exciting”, while the latter is dismissed as “boring”.
But Pete Doherty is currently serving a prison term for drug offences and there are serious questions about his role in the deaths of people who have been in his company.
James Blunt busies himself doing benefit concerts for “Help For Heroes” – the charity that aims to provide better facilities for wounded service people returning from Iraq/Afghanistan.
But as the music industry looks afresh (as they will have to) at how they manage troubled talent, there needs to be an explosion of the dangerous rock ‘n’ roll myth that truly great music can only arise from “damaged” and “tortured” artists. Amy Winehouse was an addict. The complex dynamics of the addiction process exist in every walk of life and are quite definitely not the exclusive preserve of the artistic community.
Amy’s music was beautiful and resplendent. Her troubled behaviour less so.
The myth-making that has already begun around her needs to separate these two strands.
