Do you remember where you were on July 23rd 2011? Probably not. Its not like the Kennedy moment, not even like Spurs beating Inter at the Lane.

We had a barbecue. Ahhhh, nice. Yep, our great mates had popped round, all the way from Toronto just for a burnt sausage and some of my patented minty lamburgers. Ok, not so much patented as condemned, if we’re being accurate.

So we were enjoying a lovely summer evening when Canuck Dave’s phone rang. With some terrible news.

Much as they love a good lamburger, Mr & Mrs Dave had really flown all that way for a family party. Big one. At his cousin Lucian’s house. And that’s big too. The house. Because Lucian is the CEO of Universal Music. And he’d called Dave to say that Amy Winehouse had died. She was due at the party too. Not gonna make it.

And it was a tragedy.

But I’d never fully appreciated the extent of that tragedy and that loss until last night. When we went to see the bio-pic ‘Amy’.

Because it wasn’t that the greatest singer of her and many other generations had been lost, but a true superstar had gone forever.

Lots of people have ‘good voices’, but few can reach right into your heart and squeeze it from the inside. The lyrics she wrote were passionate, intimate and real. She bared her soul, both with her words and her delivery.

She never wanted ‘fame’. That really wasn’t her thing. She just wanted to make music. Sounds clichéed but it was true. She never went on talent shows or karaoke competitions or courted celebrity. Ironically, her ‘hard-to-get-ness’ made her much more alluring to the press than those who ‘turn up for the opening of an envelope’ in their pristine, gelled-up thousands.

The music industry came to her. They found her. Because she was always going to be too good to live under the radar. And her star grew brighter and brighter with every award won, with every new record, with every major sell-out concert in another immense stadium. When all she really wanted was to sing jazz in little clubs.

But she’d become a machine. Really, more a gravy train. So she was pushed more and more by more and more people because they depended on her for their lifestyles. And that train grew large.

Amy was always ‘real’. She never spoke like a princess, she swore, she had zero tolerance to boring questions, interviews or people. She was very funny. And she never changed.

Sadly, she had inner demons. Lots of them. And her death, rather than being attributable to neglect by her father (as the film strongly implies), her manager, he scum-bag husband, was merely an inevitability. That ‘accident waiting to happen’.

And it happened when she was 27. As it did for Jimi Hendrix, Curt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison…

Can you be so talented that you simply can’t cope with it? Or is that level of exceptional giftedness just one manifestation of inner turmoil?

Fuck me, that’s deep for a horribly wet, tennis-free Sunday morning.

Happy Days

A xxxx