Amy Winehouse 1983-2011

I missed the inaugural meeting of the Amy Winehouse Appreciation Society; she was on MTV rotation before I’d heard of her. I always feel ashamed when I admit that, like it was remiss of me not to have caught the kernel of her talent, not to have been around to add to the heat that made her pop.

The video was Stronger Than Me. The voice pricked my ears and swung my head and stopped my heart. I sat watching with my jaw on the floor, and as soon as the song stopped and I’d wound my jaw back onto its hinges, I found myself a copy of Frank and became a card-carrying member of that Appreciation Society, with special responsibility for Taking Amy’s Side Against Narrow-Minded Arseholes and Rolling My Eyes At People Whose Favourite Song Was Valerie.

MTV and all, it was a while before the masses got into Amy, and just a while more before the mob started slavering. It was when the once curvy jazz lass was spotted in public looking painfully thin that the media moved in – not interesting as a talented voice, but God, she was fun to gawp at when she looked frail and drawn. Thus began the torture of Amy Winehouse – the building up and knocking down, the attention given for bad behaviour, the strips torn out her, on the most public of stages, for every mistake, both real and magnified. She ceased to be a musician and became tabloid fodder, her struggles with her demons gladiatorial battles that bled across pages of red tops, into gossip segments and panel shows, into the jokes of bad stand-ups eager to swing themselves onto bandwagons to prolong the hoots of those numskulls cheering them on. Amy seemed to react by becoming almost a caricature of her “tabloid” self: sailor tattoos, bedhead make-up, a beehive on a beehive on a beehive. She seemed to be playing along, so I suppose the tabloids and gossip queens and baying masses thought she was fair game.

Anyone who’s listened – actually listened – to one of Amy’s songs will wonder whether she even noticed that she was thought to be playing a role, and that she was expected to amplify the ludicrous cartoon Amy until Cartoon Amy went down in Technicolor flames. Her lyrics are profoundly, uncomfortably personal; her ballads are about obsessive love and damaging relationships, her punchier songs are un-PC and don’t always show her in the best light (Stronger Than Me, though stunning, is particularly cruel). Listening to Amy’s songs, you knew that the brittle, unpredictable girl stumbling around a stage on YouTube, or covered in cuts with mascara running down her cheeks in the tabloids was no character thrown together to keep the media at her doorstep. This was a real person. A damaged person, but, I had hoped, not a broken one. Amy Winehouse didn’t give a fuck who saw her break down; she wore her heart on her sleeve, not just in her lyrics, but in her physical actions. What you saw was what you got, and people despised her for it. Had she no shame? Could she not quietly wither outside of our view? How dare she pitch such disgusting behaviour at the popular media! Yet the media stayed on her back, and the mob kept reading. And the more Amy lost, the more interested they got.

It was rather sudden, actually. There was a long gap between Mercury-nominated Frank and Back To Black, which was massively successful worldwide. As soon as there was Back To Black, there was Shambolic Cartoon Amy, and as Back To Black got bigger, Amy got smaller, more delicate, her behaviour more erratic. There’s little point in rehashing the details here. You already know.

And, at the end of the day, does it really matter? The media attention, and intrusion into a life that really wasn’t stable enough to take scrutiny is a post for another day, and a battle for a stonger me. Today,what Amy Winehouse needs to be remembered for is her music. An instantly recognisable voice, those personal lyrics – not just personal in content, but in style, in the references she made, the facets of her character she threw light on … the two combined gave a strikingly fresh twist to the soul, jazz and 60s pop she was so inspired by. Today we mourn the loss of another life, too short, but also for the loss of the music Amy Winehouse still had inside her, the third album we were waiting for … we mourn that Amy Winehouse couldn’t find the peace she needed to continue doing what she was born to do. Only 27, and only 2 albums, and yet there is no doubt that this girl was one of the greats.

And in the end, the media hounding of Amy Winehouse will be forgotten, as will the cruel jokes and the overblown misdeeds.

But that voice will echo.