Amy Dead.

Curiously we were driving up Kentish Town Road at 330pm last Saturday as a manic car ambulance sped Camden-bound past us. I’m in no doubt this vehicle was heading for Camden Square and the bottle-strewn, junkie-chic squalor of Amy’s house, and the owner’s still warm corpse. The Sunday papers are full of ill-informed tripe about her. Listing “celeb tweets” – vomit-making self-important psychobabble from the likes of Rhianna. And lazy prog-rock hacks lumping her with the deeply uninteresting Forever 27 group. When I catch myself I do a 180. Indeed. So I take a look again at the poem I wrote when I first heard Back To Black http://martinode.com/amy.php and the introduction. Perhaps I’m too harsh on journalists .. in truth its love/hate with a little envy tossed in .. but I like the line in my intro “And i knew the British press would deify her, briefly, then, less briefly and inexorably, degrade her.” And she was inexorably degraded. How many people point to her meltdown on stage in Belgrade last month rather than marvel, for instance,  at her performance at Glastonbury in 2007? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msWLGTlsX3A

Billy Bragg said it wasn’t being 27 that killed her. It was drugs. No shit Sherlock. Yes, kids, its true. But therein lies the conundrum. The elephant in the room. The pain of heartache and the self-loathing, the momentary bliss of an addiction satisfied,  are powerful creative forces. Love is the drug And Drug is the love. In my Amy intro I referred to the depravity of yearning. Yes, that stands up.

So the 3rd album will never be. Or perhaps Blake and his sophisticated entourage will get some material out. If anything surfaces I’ll down load it. I know I’ll love whatever she sings. Even the YouTube vids of her singing pissed have a dissolute beauty. 

We move on, poorer for her loss.

MS 25th July 2011