Britain | Amy Winehouse

A losing game

The tragically predictable end of a fragile star

What a waste

IN A way, Amy Winehouse, who was found dead at her home in north London on July 23rd, lived her career backwards. Barely out of her teens when she released her first album, “Frank”, in 2003, she already had the knowing tone of a performer with a lifetime of heartbreak behind her. Then, in her 20s, she set about acquiring the tragic worldliness that the timbre of her voice conveyed.

Compared with the anodyne, identikit bands churned out by talent shows, Ms Winehouse was an unusual pop idol. She started off close to jazz before switching to soul with her second album, “Back to Black” (2006). Her new sound, tailored by her producer Mark Ronson and nodding to her hero Ray Charles, was out of step with the fashion, but that helped to broaden her appeal. She wrote most of the songs on “Back to Black”, and they made her a global success.

But the writing was already being scrawled on the wall. The refrain of the album's opening track—“They tried to make me go to rehab, I said ‘no no no'” —sounded at once like an ironic comment on celebrity excesses and a straight bit of autobiography. Ms Winehouse had begun her long, terminal spiral of booze, drugs, a bad relationship that became a worse marriage, arrests, overdoses and, despite the famous lyric, occasional bouts of rehab. It was a familiar narrative, this time played out at gruesomely high speed and chronicled remorselessly by the tabloids.

She died of a suspected overdose at 27. Towards the end she was almost unrecognisable from the bouncy, suburban young woman who first rose to fame: stick thin (apart from the surgical enhancements), with an erratic beehive hairdo and multiple tattoos; a cartoon of immoderate loucheness. She hadn't released an album for five years. Her recent comeback tour was cancelled, after an agonisingly shambolic performance in Belgrade.

Her recorded output being so small and her life so short, commentary on Ms Winehouse's death quickly turned to broader issues, such as the relationship between creativity and suffering (“Back to Black” was made during a separation from her dissolute partner), the dangers of drugs and of their open consumption by celebrities (though her habits looked less like hedonism than wilful self-destruction). In Camden Square, where Ms Winehouse lived, beer cans, vodka bottles, cigarettes and photos of her carousing in local hostelries were this week crassly scattered among the usual paraphernalia of public 21st-century mourning: flowers, cards, teddy bears, people taking photos of themselves.

Perhaps above all, her life was a lesson in the dangers of early, overwhelming fame—and an admonition to a popular culture that, like a primitive religion, revels in the destruction of its gods.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "A losing game"

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