In Love and Death

At the weekend I was speaking to my friend about our favourite Amy Winehouse appearance on British music quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks. We spoke about her jokes, how funny she was; in general just her overall wit and happiness. At that point she was in the height of her addiction and somehow she still had charm that could take over an entire show – I don’t even remember who the other guests were. I don’t often get upset about celebrity deaths or well, anything to do with celebrities. I’m interested in their lives (I can’t deny it), but there just always seemed something so extra sad about Amy’s demise.

It seemed quite random that we discussed her as it is almost a year since her death. (I remember reading a tweet just as I was switching off my phone for a flight to New York to join Caleb on Warped Tour , that said she had died.) Two weeks before I had said to a friend (after Winehouse’s disastrous performance in Belgrade) that she would probably die soon – I didn’t expect it to actually come true. Today I read an interview with her dad about her death and the foundation that he has set up since to help people. What struck me most about the interview is that he professes that she was at her happiest in her whole life the 18months before she died, but with it there were some quotes that didn’t quite match that view.


 I never knew Amy, but something about her struggle just made me think of desperation. Not for drugs, but for someone, a man, who she clearly was so deeply infatuated with that she could never escape the hold that was over her heart. Clearly visible in her song lyrics, the pain was always very evident. Love is the most powerful thing a person can go through, and to experience the loss of it, of something so all consuming must have been such a devastating thing. One, she clearly did not cope with well.

I saw an interview with Mark Ronson, where he spoke of her lyrics on her album Back to Black and discussed that they came from actual things that had happened in her life. “I cried for you on the kitchen floor” was written after a week of literally crying on the kitchen floor and her brother having to step over her as she sobbed, and in the end physically remove her and put her in bed. These things happened after her first break up with her then future husband.  Imagine the joy and then utter despair which would have been felt after their marriage broke up years later.

“On bad days she would wake up, drink a bottle of wine, then go straight back to bed. It’s true she was drinking to seek oblivion. I don’t know what she was trying to escape from. I mean, everything was going better...” If everything truly was better than I would think that she wouldn't have had to escape from anything. Could it not surely have been that even though she had a ‘wonderful new boyfriend’ and was seemingly happy, inside she was a wreck? Even up until the end, she was clearly still obsessed with the love that she had, had with her now ex-husband. Struggling to come to terms with life without the over-the-top can’t live without each other obsession that they clearly had. It can’t have helped that she would have just found out he was expecting a baby with another woman. The last few strands of hope, gone.

In truth no-one will ever know, except her. Not people who knew her and certainly not me, a complete stranger. But as a human I can see where the compulsion to never be away from one person comes from.  The need to have this person in your life at all times, at all costs. Infatuation is such a dangerous feeling - an all consuming one, that when rejected does not do well. It was certainly the wrong emotion to mix with her addictive personality, and ultimately was probably the main addiction that cost her, her life.