Amy Winehouse GONE TOO SOON!

July 25th, 2011 by Hotel Fashionland received 1 Comment »

Amy Winehouse GONE TOO SOON!  It’s been a very sad weekend for those who LOVED Amy Winehouse. Amy was a true talent and her music was strong and haunting. Amy was such a great talent and the work she created was so refreshing. But TRUTH was the thing that Amy sang about and that is why so many people connected with her music and it’s also why so many people loved her.

Russell Brand knew Amy and he also has a unique take on her struggle. We decided to re-print his comments here because it really speaks to the truth that claimed her life in the end…..”When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new.

Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone. Frustratingly it’s not a call you can ever make it must be received. It is impossible to intervene.

I’ve known Amy Winehouse for years. When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma. Carl Barrat told me that “Winehouse” (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it’s kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as a bizarrely anomalous in that crowd.

To me with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; “Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric” I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable.

I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them.

They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his “speedboat” there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be.

And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetize the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief. Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticized, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today.

We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill.”  – Russell Brand


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Posted under: AMY WINEHOUSE, Music


One Response to “Amy Winehouse GONE TOO SOON!”

  1. genie says:

    a great tribute