Entertainment

Winehouse blues

September 02, 2007 Edition 1

Amy Raphael

Oh Amy, Amy. It doesn't have to be this way. No one wants to see your pale, hollow face staring blankly from the covers of the tabloids, your thread-like body barely able to support the jet black beehive atop your head, your arms - already criss-crossed with tattoos - now branded with cuts.

No one wants to read stories that tell lurid tales of collapse from suspected drugs overdoses, of your new husband dragging you into the emergency room of London's University College Hospital to have your stomach pumped.

Yet we're shocked to read that 23-year-old pop star Amy Winehouse ended up in hospital and rehab.

Now out and supposedly on holiday, she is as infamous for her alcohol and alleged drug abuse as she is for her sultry retro-soul music - perhaps even more so.

In fact, her father-in-law urged fans this week to stop buying her records in an attempt to bring Winehouse and his son to their senses. Both of them are believed to use cocaine, crack cocaine and possibly heroin.

It would be easy to say she doesn't need to indulge in substance abuse to give herself an edge, to make herself seem more interesting, dark, sexy: her voice, unique and arresting, is all she needs.

But for some, it seems, the rock 'n' roll is never enough.

When she manages to turn up to gigs (she has a habit of cancelling or simply failing to show) and if she can keep her cool (some reports say she spat at fans recently), Winehouse has not only the talent but also the charisma to be a huge international star.

Hours before her collapse, she was nominated in three categories at the MTV Video Music Awards. In July, she was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for last year's album, Back to Black, and quickly became the bookmakers' favourite.

Yet I fear Winehouse is in danger of becoming the kind of car-crash pop star that everyone looks at and then forgets to listen to.

She won't, by any means, be the first. I interviewed Courtney Love several times in the early 90s for my book, Grrrls: Viva Rock Divas, and now, in retrospect, I can see she was spending so much time acting out her notion of a rock star - the famous husband, the lifestyle, the drugs and the tabloid headlines - that she seemed to forget about the actual music.

Now, after only two albums - the first, Frank, was released when Winehouse was just 19 and was not only nominated for a Mercury but also an Ivor Novello award - the singer is in danger of losing sight of what made her want to be a star in the first place.

Much is made of her background as a working-class, north-London Jewish girl with a taxi-driving father and a pharmacist mother, but she also has music soaring through her blood: her paternal grandmother dated Ronnie Scott in the 40s, while her father played her all the great American jazz singers when she was a child.

It is unclear exactly when things started to go wrong. Perhaps it was actually when things started to go right.

At 16 she was singing with a jazz band and the National Youth Jazz Orchestra; soon afterwards she was signed up by 19 Entertainment, the company run by Pop Idol's Simon Fuller. Since then her turbulent love life, combined with an addictive personality, has dragged her down.

Around the time of the release of Back to Black, she talked of splitting up with her then-boyfriend, Blake Fielder-Civil, a runner at a production company, and of her life falling apart.

She freely admitted that she started thinking about alcohol the minute she woke up. She smoked too much cannabis. She seemed to think that her broken heart made her excessive behaviour acceptable.

"I've been to a couple of rehabilitation centres before, whether it be for not eating properly or drinking," she said. "Everyone there just wants to talk about themselves all the time."

She told the man in charge that she had admitted herself, "because I'm drinking a lot, but I'm in love, and the drinking is symptomatic of my depression. I'm not an alcoholic."

She is, by her own admission, obsessive; she freely admits to having "an addictive personality". She clearly has weight issues although talk is never of anorexia or bulimia, but of manic gym visits and forgetting to eat.

She is apparently clinically diagnosed as being manic depressive but takes no medication.

Now married to Fielder-Civil - they eloped to Miami in May - Winehouse seems even more unsettled. In the July issue of American music magazine Spin, Winehouse is described as being Sid Vicious to Fielder-Civil's Nancy.

Of course, Winehouse's erratic, self-abusing, self-loathing world is one more familiar to male rock stars.

Pete Doherty's relentless drug abuse has granted him near-legendary status: he can write poetry on the walls in blood and everyone thinks he is cool; he can be in possession of class-A drugs, yet avoid lengthy prison sentences; he can date the UK's hottest model, apparently take drugs with her and only make her more desirable.

He is, apparently, a bona fide pop star, following in the footsteps of other great male pop stars - from Jimi Hendrix to Jim Morrison to Kurt Cobain - whose image has merely been enhanced by seedy tales of drug taking.

Few female rock stars have died from drugs or drink. Apart from Billie Holiday, who was seduced by heroin and alcohol and died of liver trouble and a heart attack in 1959 at the age of 44, the most famous female abuser is Janis Joplin.

She talked of herself as having "the biggest balls" in her all-male band, and accidentally injected a lethal dose of pure heroin in her motel room in 1970, aged 27.

Other women may have addictions - although now claiming to be clean, Courtney Love has endless problems with both heroin and prescription drugs, the latter leading to her losing custody of her daughter in 2005 and being given a court order to go into rehab - but they are rarely on the scale of men's.

Perhaps because of this - and perhaps because it is always easier and somehow more socially acceptable for men to misbehave - women who get seduced by drugs always quickly find themselves centre stage.

When Cerys Matthews, formerly of Welsh pop group Catatonia, tried to make a comeback with a solo album last autumn, she found that journalists were only interested in her drugs hell of the mid-late 90s, during which she took to wearing a necklace in the shape of a penis and a T-shirt that claimed she was a "FASTRISINGLAGERSOAKED RIPROARINGPOPTART".

We might want our female rock stars to be sexy as hell, feisty, charismatic and fearless. But we don't expect them to crash and burn.

We need pop stars like Amy Winehouse. Too many young women are the bland creations of record company executives.

In many senses, Winehouse is the real thing, a true star. She doesn't have to pretend to be anyone else.

She doesn't need drugs, the drama, the death scares.

Amy, we love you just the way you are.