A great talent who lost everything far too soon.
28
MARCH, 2016
Amy Winehouse represented so much that is messed up about contemporary life, music and media. Her life was short, messy and her artistic output relatively small – two studio albums, one live album. It was a life played out to its sadly inevitable premature conclusion and was documented all the way downhill by a voracious tabloid media.
As her bright debut and natural radiance and talent gave way to drink, drugs, dubious company and a body turned into a human doodle pad of tattoos, the tabloids gleefully reported her every faltering step, forgotten lyric, hedonistic escapade and ultimately referred to Amy Winehouse as simply ‘Wino’.
The music industry seemed keen to keep her on stage and performing even when she was clearly in no state to do so.
And then the girl from Southgate, London died. She was 27.
What followed in the very same press was an outpouring of sorrow, sympathy and admiration – the genuine sincerity of which seemed debatable. She sold their papers in life, now they were going to ensure she sold them in death too.
Then came the veneration and iconification.
Whatever the facts, Amy Winehouse was a young London girl with a great talent who lost everything far too soon. Her record career and output might not have been very extensive (but neither was Nirvana’s or Sex Pistols or Stone Roses) but she shifted upwards of 12 million albums worldwide and, despite everything (maybe because of?), generated a huge, caring fanbase.
Many of these fans have made the trip to see her statue at the Stables Market, Camden Town in North London. Even though subjects are generally meant to have been dead for 20 years before their statue can be erected, in a rare act of bureaucratic generosity, the local council gave special dispensation in this case.
The life-size statue is near to her Camden home and was unveiled in 2014 by her friend and giant of the British TV screen Dame Barbara Windsor.
