Why I’ll Never Stop Missing Amy Winehouse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMO5Ko_77Hk

At the age of 30, I have scaled down my drinking a little. I used to be a 0–60 drunk, fine, fine, fine, ‘whoops, I’m vomming in a taxi,’ able to recall every single moment until midnight, and nothing that happened a second afterwards. Now I’m two drinks, then chips, then I should definitely switch to water for a bit or go home. I know that I’ll probably start to feel the effects of the last glass of the evening as I open the door of the Uber, and if I don’t want to have a hangover I need to stop before I want to. However, at the top end of the scale, past the point of no return, I know I’m beyond help when I start crying because I miss Amy Winehouse.

I didn’t know Amy, or any of her friends or family. It’s fraudulent for me to claim any kind of connection with her beyond her music, and the way it made me feel. But her voice and words have the power to turn me inside out. She filled my head for most of my twenties, and she helped me to make sense of the blackest parts of my brain, and find comfort in the dark. I was trying to explain this in the pub last week. I put it to my friend Caroline like this. ’Amy was our Lady Di.’ Both women had a weird power that was bigger than beauty, talent or fame. Both had a way of making millions of us feel whole in our own brokenness — damaged, but defiant. Both are adored by girls and gays. I have yet to meet a het boy who gets Amy, though I live in hope of being proved wrong.

As soon as I heard her music, I made Amy my adult imaginary friend. Back To Black came out just before I graduated and moved to London. As I stomped about her hometown, Camden, feet filthy in flip flops, spilling red wine down a dress too cheap and bright to conceal my boobs and bum at the same time, I thought of her, and the idea of her kept me warm when everything felt cold and frightening. At the time, I worked in an office with a couple of older women who were deliciously vocal in their disapproval of Amy and me. Initially I was desperate to please, and be accepted as part of the team, but I gave up after they came back from a Winehouse gig cackling and crowing. ‘As I expected, she was shit — she was clearly off her head, couldn’t remember the words. I’m going to ask for my money back,’ said one. What kind of monster goes to a gig as a fan, and expects their idol to fail and fall over? Eventually I asked myself What Would Amy Do? and quit, but not before I switched water and shampoo for Baptiste and backcombing, and fetched a lot of skinny lattes that had been made with full fat milk.

Channeling Amy made me brave when I felt scared, but her work and words came into their own when tragedy struck — tragedy being a personal and relative term. I loved a boy, and he didn’t love me back. No-one was hurt. No bones broken. But I remember walking up a hill in the rain, thinking ‘I might die from this. This could be the thing that kills me,’ as I listened to Wake Up Alone. Her words were a balm to the violence of my feelings. She wasn’t running from her sadness, but standing within it. Predictably, within the week I was listening to her break up sex anthem In My Bed on repeat, connecting with every word.

We see shards of Amy through our personal prisms, and most of us can’t properly remember the singer herself — just the way she made us feel, and the impact she had on our lives. But it tells you everything you need to know when you realise that so many strangers saw her as a mate as much as an icon, a person who seemed so in touch with her own soul, whose insight and experiences chimed with that of the millions of lost girls and boys who found her. Of course her career was heartbreakingly short, of course it’s unbearable that this stunning, startling presence isn’t here any more. But how many artists can say they inspired half the tenderness and loyalty that Amy did, even when they have plugged away at it for five times as long?

When I saw a trailer for the new film at the cinema, I overheard a couple of ladies muttering ‘What a waste’ — as if she didn’t lead a full life, and she should still be trotting around after Jools Holland or opening for Take That at some televised Tory ball. Critics are quick to separate Amy from her talent, as if it were a National Trust property that we were all entitled to visit, and we can’t quite forgive her for being unable to look after it, and razing it to the ground. But we love Amy — we will always love Amy — because we believe that, like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington before her, she meant every single word. It was her voice, to do exactly as she wanted with, but somehow she spoke for all of us.

DB