Amy Winehouse's Reach to Rescue by Richard Bamford

Amy Winehouse on stage in Belgrade. Photograph: Rex Features

Amy Winehouse is seemingly drowning in her own personality and insecurity. Can anyone reach out to rescue her?




Let’s not all get too opinionated and sanctimonious about the recent Amy-gate performance scandal in Belgrade, shall we. Addiction is a disease and fame is generally vacuous and shallow. Those in possession of a broader opinion might be better suited to question why the girl’s team continue to let her perform like this; the label and management team will doubtless survive and continue to strive but she, on this current self assassination course probably won’t.

She’ll not be the first or the last wasted talent.

Meanwhile, glass-house living, Daily Nazi readers will continue to line the pockets of the likes of Katie Price and Kerry Katona.



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Countless artistes have fallen fowl to the evils of drug and alcohol addiction. None more relevant than fellow Jazz singer, Billie Holliday.

Here’s the closing snippets from Billie Holliday’s biography:


On May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York suffering from liver and heart disease. Police officers were stationed at the door to her room. She was arrested for drug possession as she lay dying, and her hospital room was raided by authorities. Holiday remained under police guard at the hospital until she died from cirrhosis of the liver on July 17, 1959. In the final years of her life, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank and $750 (a tabloid fee) on her person. Her funeral mass was held at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in New York City.

Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times, who had been the narrator at Billie Holiday's 1956 Carnegie Hall concerts and had partly written the sleeve notes for the album The Essential Billie Holiday (see above), described her death in these same 1961-dated sleeve notes:

Billie Holiday died in the Metropolitan Hospital, New York, on Friday, July 17, 1959, in the bed in which she had been arrested for illegal possession of narcotics a little more than a month before, as she lay mortally ill; in the room from which a police guard had been removed – by court order – only a few hours before her death, which, like her life, was disorderly and pitiful. She had been strikingly beautiful, but she was wasted physically to a small, grotesque caricature of herself. The worms of every kind of excess – drugs were only one – had eaten her ... The likelihood exists that among the last thoughts of this cynical, sentimental, profane, generous and greatly talented woman of 44 was the belief that she was to be arraigned the following morning. She would have been, eventually, although possibly not that quickly. In any case, she removed herself finally from the jurisdiction of any court here below.



Here’s my favourite Billie moment:


And here’s my favourite Amy moment: