Having written about Tragedy in general, I realise, almost guiltily, that there's plenty of specific material for me to write about in the countless tragedies of rock'n'roll.
So, I'm going to write about Amy Winehouse, and I'm going to do so in a way which might almost be exploitative, while also containing some fairly blatant virtue-signifying. I'm turning into one of the cunts, I'm quite sure.
I watched the film, 'Amy'. I wasn't sure about watching it, for reasons that will become clear, but I watched it, and it was, naturally, a fine piece of work.
There was a lot to be uneasy about, but I'm not sure I was uneasy about what I was supposed to be uneasy about. The surrounding publicity material from the director and various interested journalists broadly suggested that the film, in harrowing detail, showed us how we were all a little complicit in this girl's tragedy, that we watched fascinated as she fell apart.
Hell, no, I said to myself, I am not complicit. Speak for yourselves.
Here's my Amy Winehouse story. It's not a great one but it serves my purpose.
Persuaded by critical gushing, I'd bought 'Frank', the debut album by someone being described as a prodigious vocal and lyrical talent. I found it not to be so. I found it one of my least favourite albums for a long time - annoying, crass, show-offy in both sound and words. Amy Winehouse would later not think too highly of it herself, of course.
My friend Alex and I, in 2006, had, I think, been to see 'The Departed' at the cinema in Camden around Sunday lunchtime, and then shuffled off to the nearest pub, which happened to be the famous Dublin Castle. We settled over our pints in the corner, a bit away from the pool table.
There were various indie tourists, looking for the scene in there, desperate in Coldplay and Razorlight t-shirts. Anyway, the scene did arrive. Or rather, a spectacularly annoying girl arrived with a dapper, somewhat bashful gent in tow, and proceeded to dominate the pub for the next couple of hours.
We sat, chest tightened, as she flounced and swore and threatened and posed and shouted, praying she wouldn't look at us, disturb us, speak to us, looking deep into our pints and trying to talk about anything else.
I knew she was Amy Winehouse, Alex didn't. He knew the name Amy Winehouse, but Amy Winehouse wasn't yet wholly known to look like this and be like this. To place this in time - 'Rehab' was already on the radio, but 'Back to Black' had not come out yet. She wasn't yet the most famous fuck-up in Britain, nor the most enormous musical success. But it was just about to happen. She had a classic single on the radio and she had the look and she had the exhibitionism.
This bashful gent, putting two and two together retrospectively, was not the notorious Blake Fielder-Civil, but the inbetween boyfriend who might have brought a bit more normality back into her life.
That's it. We left her to it after a couple of pints, I remember Alex saying "gosh, she was annoying", me going "that was Amy Winehouse", and him going "ah, right".That's my Amy Winehouse story. It serves my purpose of telling you that I was not complicit. Because I averted my eyes and wished she'd go away.
I took that attitude to her songs, too. To me, she remained the hypejob of 'Frank' and the annoying girl in the pub. So I registered that, in turn, 'Rehab', 'You Know I'm No Good', 'Back to Black', 'Tears Dry On Their Own' and 'Lose is a Losing Game' were fabulous singles. However, despite these anomalies, I remained adamant that the album 'Back to Black' would not be for me. I was not an Amy Winehouse fan. Her fame annoyed me. Her acclaim and success annoyed me.
She was unavoidable to an extent. This was the era of London Lite. Free London papers every day with Amy Winehouse on the cover, not in a good way. I couldn't stay entirely out of her tragedy, though I think I did try. I saw her singing on telly, often very badly, and told myself that I was right, that those great songs, beautifully sung, were exceptions, and that Amy Winehouse was no great talent.
Maybe, by some small chance, I'm right. Either way, that one album, which I did eventually get round to listening to in its entirety, is, by hook or by crook, obviously, a truly great album. And her death was a tragedy, a modern, hideous tragedy. It happened the same weekend as the Anders Breivik incident in Norway, as grave a weekend of horror, outrage, catastrophe and tragedy as can be.
OK, how do I round this off? By making it all about myself, of course. I find myself, these days, constantly, I mean constantly, haunted by snippets of my own verse from the long period of my life when I wrote prolifically, splenetically, badly, privately, internally. Lines, segments, couplets, burst into my brain for every occasion. Usually unwelcome. Throughout those books and books, there is almost nothing I'm wholly proud of, but the painful aspect is those half-formed ideas which sometimes hint at something that could have been something, somewhere I could have gone if I'd followed it up, some hint that I was a person with some ideas who didn't know how to implement them.
When I watched 'Amy' and saw the sections where the paparazzi surrounded her, an attack on the cinemagoer as a smidgen of the extent to which it must have been a horrific attack on her dizzied, addled senses as an everyday reality, I felt a pang of pride.
Because I wrote this in either 2005, 2006 or 2007 (it took me ages and ages to find it today - usually I can place my words fairly accurately, but in this case it could have been anywhere in a 6 or 7 year period, yet I still remembered the first four lines). I think I wrote it in reaction to some story about Britney Spears, rather than Amy Winehouse. It's a fragment of a nothing, but I felt proud of myself that I at least had this thought. And a little disgusted with myself at how I fail to live by this thought now.
Sometimes it's kinder not to care
as the cameras blare and flash
Indifference is respect -
to disregard the crash.
It's kinder not to care about
every last ebbing ideal
Not to feel a thing
if you don't know what to feel.
I can confirm every word of the above story. If it counts as a story.
ReplyDeleteWeirdly, it's almost exactly the same details that stick in my head, too, cheifly the pool table and the inde T-shirts. Perhaps those two youths have written of the same afternoon on a parallel blog.