Amy Winehouse And Me: A Singer’s Entertaining Death (Photos)
AMY Winehouse is dead. The pop star – the first British singer to win five Grammy awards – was only 27.
The news is full of how she has joined the “27 Club” of musicians who have died: Rolling Stone Brian Jones (drowned in a swimming pool in 1969); Jimi Hendrix (choked to death in 1970 after mixing wine with sleeping pills); singer Janis Joplin (suffered a suspected heroin overdose the same year); Doors star Jim Morrison (heart failure in 1971); Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain (shot himself in 1994); and Orish Grinstead (Kidney failure). Grinstead was a member of ’90s R&B group 702. But you knew that.
The rush to turn Amy Winehouse into a neat icon that fits into a narrative is underway. The individual ceases to be so. Her death and not her music cement the legend. The media present her as a star on a mission to self-destruct. But beneath the beehive and the shambling frame was a person not too different from the rest of us.
Her death is “unexplained”. It is rumoured one of her bodyguards – oh, the irony -may have discovered her body at her home in Camden Town.
A neighbour tell the Sunday Times:
“I heard crazy noises. Like someone in pain. I just made a joke to my son that maybe she had taken some bad drugs.”
Maybe. Maybe he never heard her at all.
Image: Floral tributes left outside the home of singer Amy Winehouse, at Camden Square in north London, where the singer was found dead.
On Twitter, the stars and celebs gather to say who they knew Amy Winehouse best and it they who are most affected. Is the grandstanding a way to venting genuine hurt or the means to muscle in on a story of the cool singer who now ranks with Hendrix, Joplin, Jim Morrison…and Orish Grinstead?
The pick of the showbiz set keen to talk about ‘Wino And Me’ is the Daily Star’s Joe Mott. Says he:
JUST days before she died, Amy Winehouse – my close friend of more than ten years – told me she was in agonising pain.
So. You did what?
Tragic Amy, 27, last night lost her long battle against drink and drugs after a “marathon binge” and a suspected overdose.
The police say her death is “unexplained”. Why does Mott speculate?
And her spiritual and physical ¬distress was obvious when she spoke to me recently.
A young woman’s mental illness is now an anecdote. Forget the music and the talent – get a load of those drugs and pain.
Mott then goes on to see who can die next:
Georgette Fielder-Civil, mother of Amy’s former husband Blake, said: “I can’t believe it. I could cry. Blake will kill himself. He won’t make it without her. He’ll go straight back to self- harming. I’ll have to ring the prison and he will be put on watch.”
Mott sees little irony in this next vox pop:
In her favourite pub, Camden’s ¬Hawley Arms, drinkers were stunned. Steve McCann said: “She had bad people around her. No support from anyone. People think it’s cool to be like that at such a young age but it’s tragic. It’s very sad news.”
Hey, Steve – Amy’s graduated from the Camden boozer to the 27 Club. It’s exclusive. Otis Redding never made it – dying just short at 26. Tim Buckley (Wings) was 28. In her pomp – as in her death – Winehouse had good timing.
Mott adds:
Daily Star Sunday Rehab editor James Ingham said: “I saw her on stage on Wednesday night. She was a shambling wreck, stumbling around the stage and could not even sing a word. It is a tragic loss – but the way she lived her life it did not come as a ¬surprise.”
The Sunday Star has a Rehab editor? And – get his – Rehab was one of Winehouse’s most famous songs. Call us cynical, but what are the odds on that, readers? Spooky stuff.
And as for being no surprise that Winehouse died… Well, try telling that to her dad Mitch who was in New York to sing jazz, her mum Janis or her brother – people who actually did know her.
Keith Richards has been known to partake of drugs, so too Paul McCartney, Debbie Harry, Elton John, Chuck Berry, David Bowie, Boy George, George Michael, Whitney Houston … They did not die aged 27.
Winehouse’s death is a tragedy for those who knew her and entertainment for the rest of us. As the Sunday Times’s Maurice Chittenden and Kate Mansey write:
Crime-scene tape surrounded her home in a scene resembling a late-night detective series.
It;s not real. It’s all just entertainment. Come see the show. Look. Look. Look!
Better to listen…
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Posted: 24th, July 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
