Throughout most of her life, I wished Amy Winehouse would just hurry up and die already. For nearly three years she dominated local and international tabloids, every image of her somehow looking worse than the last.
It was like one of those wildlife documentaries where the film makers follow some poor, sick animal that’s dying in the wild and instead of helping it, they just film it getting weaker and weaker until it croaks.
It was clear to me that there was absolutely no hope for her. Her life degenerated to the point where all she seemed capable of doing was getting totally wasted and babbling incoherently like a bergie on a tik binge.
Was I surprised that she died on the weekend? Not in the slightest. I don’t think anyone was, in fact I think people were a lot more focussed on the tragedy that happened in Norway and rightly so.
But her death did make me stop and think about her for a minute, which was all it took to make me realise that I have no idea who Amy Winehouse was.
I honestly can’t remember ever seeing any proper interviews with her or ever hearing her speak when she wasn’t clearly off her face so I did a little digging online and found some early interviews with her and a couple of pictures of her before she got stuck into the drugs and the person I found couldn’t have been more different from the monster the media portrayed her to be.
Amy Winehouse had a wicked sense of humour and she was as feisty as they come. She had a gorgeous voice and was a truly talented performer and songwriter and back before she got strung out on crack she was a seriously beautiful woman.
I also realised that we’re the same age, give or take about a month, which kinda brought her death and life into focus for me because what the hell have I achieved at 27? How many Brit Awards have I won? How many Grammys? How many MTV VMAs?
I’d like to remember her as the person I met today. Not the fiend she became. We take for granted how easy it is for celebrities to fall into drugs and how fucking difficult it is to get out of that dark, dark hole.
So RIP Amy, wherever you might be, and thank you for the music, may it live on for longer than your brief stop-over on this crazy, beautiful, fucked up world.
-ST
