Ten years after Amy…

I’ve never really known how to properly deal with the news of death. Disappointing news, yes - there were elementary teachings for that growing up. Finding out someone else dropped off the presents at Christmas, that the mid-week sleepover my mate and I had planned in the playground wasn’t happening, or simply being eleven and told that I couldn’t dye my hair like Becks.

Even then, this sort of news was only ever casually delivered and therefore subconsciously processed. I allowed it to wash over me without it really dampening my spirits too much. I may have felt rubbish for a bit, done a bit of crying in my room, maybe even refused to eat dinner on some nights, but then I’d be back at school in the morning and ready to go again.

Death is different. It lingers. Uncomfortably as well.

I’ve never understood the theory that you can’t mourn a celebrity in the same way as a loved one. What if you loved them? And not in an “I’m going to bid five and a half grand on eBay for Scarlett Johansson’s snotty tissue” kind of way.

Their presence is just as constant in daily life, be it through a screen, radio or tabloid. They’re creature comforts but also canvases on which we decide to scribble our own problems. They offer portals into make-believe worlds of glamour and gold that more often than not, those close to us can’t.

But this over-reliance on “celebrity” is part of the problem and why we lose people like Amy Winehouse too early. It’s a consequence of us mere mortals needing to scratch an itch, to give us something to dream about during the perfunctory time either spent queuing up in the Co-op for the third time that week or submitting another job application.

I can remember where I was when the news came through about Amy Winehouse. I was at a wedding reception. She died on a day when a new life was being forged.

Two people stood in a countryside garden after four decades of life, four kids and two previous marriages, ready to keep living, while eighty miles away a twenty-seven-year-old woman was being wheeled away from her Camden townhouse in a body bag.

It’s always disconcerting when sad news seeps into a happy day. It sneaks in round the back while everyone’s too busy smiling and laughing. It can reach you at any moment - while you’re walking the dog, taking the bus, chopping an onion or celebrating the union of two lovers.

There’s something completely surreal, almost dreamlike about trying to marry two such conflicting emotions. Somehow you’ve got to leave enough room for the gloom to filter through the small gaps in a day that’s otherwise bursting with joy. It’s often too difficult to know where to start so in the end you’re left in a haze.

When Winehouse died, it felt like a seismic shift in popular culture. It touched people of all ages.

As is always the case with the greats, she was that heartbreaking amalgamation of genius and deep distress.

In front of a microphone, she drifted seamlessly between poise and furious conviction like it was almost too easy for her to summon a character within those three and a half minutes.

We all knew the voice. We were sure it was human because it left the crimson lips of a girl from Enfield, but the more attention you paid to it, the more you questioned its place on earth. It felt like a gateway to a black and white era of jazz and smokey clubs, but even then it sounded mightier than Fitzgerald and at times, even Simone.

There’s a number of reasons why Amy Winehouse continues to feel so frozen in time, unable to be thawed from classic reminiscence or chipped away from cult status.

One was how crazily in love she was with Jazz (and not in the pretend, croc-wearing, fine art student sort of way). She was moulded by it. An old soul in a young body.

At 16 she was singing with The National Youth Jazz Orchestra and gaining an introduction to a cloak-and-dagger scene laced with Diana Washington, Sarah Vaughan and Tony Bennett (who would later become one of her greatest admirers and a future collaborator).

But it wasn’t just singers she was learning from. She would build melodies through listening to soloists hidden with the bands. This was someone always searching for a deeper understanding of Jazz.

The voice, the Brigitte Bardot beehive and the Cleopatra eyes are all things she’ll also be remembered for, unmistakably serving as intrinsic links to a bygone era before the internet. But Winehouse existing in those short post-Millenium years also represented a time before Youtubers and Love Island, before fake apologies and fake tans. Chewing gum for the brain.

It now feels like a time when pure artistry was celebrated and real people were in the limelight. Watered-down pop was swept aside as a fag-chewing Jewish girl scurried past on her way to the podium to collect another Brit Award or her fifth Grammy.

But was it really so much better back then?

That’s the thing about nostalgia, it’s often just a denial of the present, a misplaced interpretation of a different time period. It’s not always better over there. It’s romantic thinking most of the time.

Brexit and “Cancel culture” were yet to rear their ugly heads but there’s no denying that the media circus was well underway. It had already claimed one victim four years previous to Amy - an outspoken TV personality. Jade Goody was ultimately taken by cancer but her vilification across the papers can’t have made her battle any easier. Her death was perhaps the first indication that constant surveillance and incessant poking aren’t healthy and Amy’s death demonstrated it could chase someone vulnerable enough to an early grave.

Shortly after the success of her first album, “Frank”, Winehouse was interviewed by MTV News and quizzed on her methods for dealing with fame and all of its trimmings. “The more people see of me, the more they’ll realise that all I’m good for is making tunes so leave me alone and I’ll do the music…I just need time to do the music”.

She had some time and more success, but nowhere near enough of it in the end.

Fame came and the media followed as it always does, snarling at her bony ankles. The drink and the drugs had begun to tighten their grip.

There could be any reason for someone choosing to fall into the trap but it doesn’t seem a coincidence that as the scrutiny increased, so did the consumption.

This was someone with an addiction problem but instead of being helped, she was pointed at and ridiculed. Suddenly it was becoming cool for TV hosts and Journalists to crack jokes about bulimia.

Within hours of her leaving rehab, the circus restarted. The Sun, The Mirror and the News of the World booked into every room at her hotel, hacking conversations and stealing pictures of her in her weakest state.

Ten years after Amy, the problem still persists but to what feels like a more terrifying degree. Back then the media could be easily identified - a pack of wolves roaming the streets of Camden with cameras and voice recorders. Nowadays there is no single media.

Social Media has rapidly grown into something more hideous and spiteful and online news scours every corner of society from up high, waiting to scoop up another tragedy and spoon-feed it into the nation’s gaping mouths.

The media is now a complex machine operated by millions. After years of botched attempts, it finally ground down someone as cheerful and effervescent as Caroline Flack.

Perhaps they’re working through a list? Maybe they’re trying to snatch one young woman from each corner of showbiz?

A decade on and although it continues to shock, upon reflection, maybe the most heartbreaking aspect of Amy Winehouse's death was the inevitability of it all. That someone so seemingly normal would eventually be broken to that degree, that they felt the need to turn so inward and incubate this eventual disaster.

Until public values change and we discontinue our subscription with inhumane instincts unhelpfully sold to us by corrupt politicians in power, then sadly it’s a trend that won’t be bucked. Amy couldn’t avert her gaze from our prying public eye and now she’s gone.

I’ve been trying to work out what characteristics she possessed that others didn’t and consequently what has enabled her death to have such a lasting effect on me.

I think she was the first girl I saw with a normal accent on prime time telly. She was definitely the first to use wit. She had a warmth that could quickly turn bratty, reminding me of so many girls I grew up with. She felt like all those older sisters of your mates’ that you were too scared to talk to but secretly in love with.

Because of all of this, it felt like a personal loss. Like so many others I was completely engulfed by her charm and as a result, left more upset than I ought to be.

Listening to her songs still to this day feels a bit like taking down the tree at the end of Christmas. You know you need to do it but you’re sad it’s all over.