IT’S 2003 I’m listening to a song on the car radio. “You should be stronger than me”. It’s ballsy and brazen and its sassiness is making me smile. Forget metrosexuals, wimpy men and women as victims; it’s telling the truth as seen by a particular 19-year-old from Camden. Berating her bloke for being weak.
‘Feel like a lady and you my lady boy’. Strong and sexy, a welcome antidote to Kylie and Britney and all the other cutey pies, a woman with passion and desire. “I’m not gonna meet your mother anytime, I just want to grip your body over mine” Hurray, I thought, a woman who’s telling us it’s OK to love sex, who knows what she wants. Then I saw her perform, this her debut single, live on Jools Holland, guitar in hand, with her Cleopatra eyes and strong features. Her simmering anger took me back to Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders, but Amy Winehouse had a raw honesty in her lyrics and presentation that was reminiscent of those black blues singers like Billie Holiday. We weren’t in a romantic world of sunshine and lollipops, we were in the real world, where people get hurt and coping can be tough.
And I even loved the message in Rehab, not that she didn’t need to clean up her drug use but that she was still her own woman, making her own decisions. She was still a rebel, the kid that had got thrown out of school because she allegedly had a nose piercing. But now, of course, it has all nose-dived into self-destruct burnout. Living close to the edge, flaunting convention, and surrounded by the cocaine driven media world has pushed her, like many musicians, to the point of no return. She’s gone in. Whether she will survive we don’t know. And even is she does, after the therapy and the zero tolerance expected in a cleanup from drugs and drink will she emerge with the same creative drive?
We’ve seen the pattern so many times before, the “before and after”, how a clean life can mean losing that anger, that passion that can produce such extraordinary results. “Rehab” like the lobotomised characters in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” can save your life but at a cost.
I have known three people who driven by alcohol and drug addiction have gone to the famous “Priory” near Guildford. They have turned their lives around; channelled the energy that drove them to drink and drugs into other obsessions. One now an evangelical Christian, part of the Alpha Project, another a fanatical health conscious lifestyle guru, the third back on drink, against the advice of his counsellor, but so far handling it fine and, to be honest, he is the one whose company I still enjoy.
I understand why Amy Winehouse, with that deep voice of hers, with all the fear of a character in a Dr Who episode faced with a brain reprocessing machine shouted, “NO, NO, NO” to the idea of rehab. As they say, you must be ready to totally relinquish your old lifestyle, to reach rock bottom and want to reform. If you are driven by an amazing creative energy nothing must frighten you more than the thought of losing it. Chrissie Hynde should know, two of the original Pretenders died from drug abuse, but in her fifties she’s still on the road, still smoking, drinking, albeit less, and rocking “I regret every pill I’ve ever taken, every glass of wine I’ve ever drunk, every joint, every fag. It’s crazy when you’re young… sometimes you just have to grow up”. And that’s the real problem on these young stars being catapulted into an exploitative world. Let’s hope rehab works for Amy, and she keeps that passion in her voice, but you can’t but wonder if all she really needed was someone stronger than her there to help.
