Whilst not being a huge Amy Winehouse anorak, I did think she had a perfect voice for the style she produced and I have enjoyed her songs over the 7 or 8 years that she was able to be part of popular music culture.
With her death will come outpourings of love and appreciation, as there should be, but the fact that she was a drug addict will be glossed over with just the phrase, a bit like saying she was a Virgo. Why aren’t we taking the ruinous plague of drug addiction far more seriously?
It is also a strange fact that 27 is the age a lot of drug addicts get to and then die. In fact, rock’n’roll historians have morbidly named this the “27 Club”.
Alongside Amy in the “27 Club” are Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Alan Wilson and plenty of others, including a number of rappers who were shot to death.
So why is 27 the age that so many die? I recall being 27, and I had already lived a very full, exhausting and disturbing adult life. Yet, I felt so alive. I felt I had so much more life to live. And indeed, I did and whilst not dismissing my years up to 27, my years after 27 have had some fantastic things happen within them.
That’s why I find it very hard to comprehend wanting to end it all at 27. But then, it’s not about me, and I’m not a junkie.
A junkie has no control over their mind. All emotions, all feelings, all experiences are within the confusion and haze of the drugs that are controlling the body. The ‘person’, if there ever was a ‘person’, is either permanently asleep within the confusion and haze, or the drug will have actually killed them years before, leaving behind not much beyond a zombie for us to watch and cruelly laugh at.
If the zombie somehow manages to get to 27 and then dies, I guess it can be nothing but a blessed relief for the remains of the human that is trapped inside. I wonder if this was the case for Amy Winehouse.
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