We live in a hard, spiteful world that gorges on gossip and outrage and tramples on talent. As the tributes pour in for Amy Winehouse, who died on 23 July at the age of 27, we should remember that throughout her short career, the young singer was bullied by the press for the same vulnerability that made her music so powerful.
Winehouse was always more than an amazing voice. Her songs are as remarkable for their emotional authenticity as they are for the raw, precocious power of her singing. Her breakthrough album, Back to Black, is one of the great records of the early 21st century, and it is sublime precisely because it is about suffering: the ugly intimacies of addiction, the untidy angst of being young and lovesick and desperately unhappy, distilled into something rich, bitter and fine.
In a music industry that seems set on a trajectory of icy, impenetrable perfection, of inoffensive singer-songwriters with cookie-cutter good looks making coffee-table records for the curtain-twitchers of Middle England, Winehouse wore her flaws as brazenly as her 13 tattoos. And she was hounded for it to the point of breakdown.
The gossip press loves nothing better than to watch a young woman fall to pieces. The tabloids scented blood long before Winehouse appeared in public with flecks of it spattered on her ballet pumps, and began to hunt her through the streets of London and New York. Her song lyrics were quoted back at her in endless dissections of her obvious distress, mocking her refusal to “go to rehab” when she eventually did just that. In 2009, she had to take out a court order to stop press photographers from camping outside her house.
With the ethics of the tabloid press under scrutiny, it is worth asking why hacks felt the need, as the science writer Martin Robbins observed, “to pursue so aggressively and mercilessly a talented, but vulnerable, young woman”. The day before the Sunday Mirror broke the news of her death, its sister paper sneered about Winehouse’s appearance at a gig “like the embarrassing auntie you don’t want at a family reunion”. The same papers that gloated over Winehouse’s deteriorating health and published grisly pictures of the car crash that was her personal life now carry solemn tributes to her achievements. The same papers that called Winehouse fat when she arrived as a fresh young talent in 2003, then gloated over her emaciated appearance as she succumbed to the pressures of fame, are saying how worried they always were about her weight.
A recurring motif of the many articles taunting Winehouse as her addictions lurched out of control was her failure to be “a good role model”. Photographs of the “troubled singer” were regularly used to illustrate hand-wringing pieces about how young women everywhere were spiralling into a moral soup of loose-knickered, hard-drinking degeneracy.
Part of the joy of Winehouse as a pop phenomenon, however, was that she was never interested in the normal rules of female celebrity. When asked in 2007 why Amy Winehouse meant so much to me, I wrote that she was the only woman singer who you could never imagine releasing her own perfume – and if she did, you wouldn’t want it near your pressure points any more than you’d dab yourself with Essence of Keith Richards.
It should not be the job of every female who achieves success through her own talents to be a model of ladylike good behaviour. Pete Doherty, whose substance misuse has likewise furnished the gossip papers with almost a decade of slobbering disapprobation, was never asked to be a role model. Young women need role models, but we also need artists and icons.
Winehouse was consistently iconic, from her trademark scruffy beehive and eyeliner to the raw soul of her voice. It is one of the many ways in which she never, ever let us down.
Much has been made of how her premature passing places her in the macabre coterie of musicians, from Morrison and Hendrix to Joplin and Cobain, who died suddenly at the age of 27. The superstition surrounding the so-called 27 Club is no more than a tasteless attempt to attach meaning and order to the senseless waste of young talent. Yet perhaps the association will allow Winehouse to be remembered not as a frail addict, but as the damn fine music star that she was.
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