Be Excellent To Each Other

Currently reported by Sky News as 'unexplained'. The beeb are yet to pick up the story.

Just to be clear, EBG is talking`about Amy Winehouse...

Malc

Ohh.

How many people had her in the dead poll?

Actually, to save us time: How many people didn't?

Exactly...

(how can they tell, though?)

What a shameful world the music industry is.

I confidently predict Rehab will reenter the charts next week

A very necessary clarification. Wouldn't want you to get confused with all of the other people in the media popularly referred to as 'Wino'...

I've slightly greater issues with the drugs industry.

Oh god, yeah. Her dealer must be devastated.

I dunno, as her husband isn't he likely to inherit a canny few million now?

Can't say I knew that. I thought she'd dropped off the radar years ago anyway.

'Best of' compilation is no doubt already being hastily thrown together, and all the papers putting together their 'tributes' to the woman they harassed and mocked for years on end. I wonder who'll call Elton John first.

An, the Jade Goody effect. Build them up, knock them down, claim they were a hero all along.

Woah, hang on, 27?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club

Yeah, I saw that and mentioned it on Twitter. She's only a year older than I am, yet looking at her you'd swear she was 40.

I've got a 40 year old downstairs looks plenty younger than Winehouse.

It's hard to explain just how much Charlie Brooker has covered everything in this arena already in Newswipe.

If you've never watched it both series are available, complete on YouTube.

http://youtu.be/cuDb9xuCnPg?t=42s

Such a waste of talent. I am very sad to hear this news, no matter what her issues were her music touched me.

Nice to see you all being so pleasant about it.

I hope you let her out for walks and stuff.

When she gets on my nerves, yeah.

I had no idea who you meant, and had to go to the sky news website to find out.

At first I thougt you were parodying the report of the whistleblower in the News International hacking story, and maybe someone else in that maelstrom had died...

So there...

Malc

I say "nooooooooooo, no, no".

I also had no idea her meedja nickname was "wino". I assumed the thread was about the loss of one of our homeless chaps.

I'm kind of similar to you in this. Her music didn't touch me but I thought Back to Black was a great album.

I thought she had a great voice and was a great performer until the drink and drugs really destroyed her.

I think it's a very sad waste of talent.

Mods, please merge with the dead thread. I suspect someone may have won a star prize.

Thank you.

I'm deeply saddened by this, I've always been a big defender of her as I adore her voice, she really was the most phenominal singer. Winehouse sober and live sends chills down your spine - she really was one of the greats and I really find all the media gloating over her ups and downs to be sickning. Only in England do people take such pleasure in ripping apart people with tallent.

Real Shame, a great singer and also to die so young.

Guess a drug OD will be the cause?

The Daily Mail are already calling her a 'troubled genius' - they've obviously got an impressive case of amnesia when it comes to how they've treated her in the past. Doubtless by tomorrow they'll have dropped the 'troubled' modifier.

Whilst I admired her voice I never much cared for her music, but at a basic human level it's very upsetting to see a young woman of such obvious and prodigious talent effectively commit suicide at the age of 27.

I used to watch T4 years ago, just when she was coming on the scene, and she was on that a fair bit before she got famous. She was friends with Simon Amstell I think so she got on even before she had released a single or album.
She was hilarious and a completely different person to how she came across in the media in later years!

If she'd been sober and not falling out of clubs at 4am (in one case holding hands with my ex-boss) she would have just been a great singer.

But she was addicted to drink and drugs. That's the story and why people, including myself, were critical. And nobody should be ashamed of ripping apart some little rich girl who has every opportunity to kick the habit. Yes it's still hard, yes you have different pressures, but you have every resource available that money can buy.

If you want to feel sorry for someone try some of the addicts I met down in Hastings who barely have a penny to their name and want to try and kick the habit so they can live a normal life. They are the people to feel sorry for. They are the people who I genuinely hope managed to kick heroin and other drugs for good.

Winehouse? No sympathy at all.

Ah so the fact that she managed to make some great music and therefore made a lot of money rankles you in some way. That makes a lot of sense.

The poor drug addicts of Hastings most probably feed their habit by committing crime and therefore causing others to suffer. The only people she affected were her family and her self.

Saying that I would feel for one of those people if they lost their lives so young. Any young death is tragic that is a basic human reaction which you seem to be unable to fathom.

That's some cold shit right there Chinny.

It also shows a fundamental if not dangerous misunderstanding of how compulsion, addiction, mental illness and depression can exact an astoundingly heavy toll on any human being, 'little rich girl' or not.

You should be ashamed of that post, and if you can't understand why, you're brutally ignorant as well.

Please do not put words into my mouth to try and twist the argument. My argument is that she will have had more chances than most to turn things around. Chances many people won't get.



Again, please stop twisting things. I am talking about people who are actively seeking to give up drugs and turn their lives around. People who were at least part of the way down the hard path to doing this or had managed to give up. All of them thanks to voluntary work and charities. Oh and willpower. Winehouse with her millions didn't need to find a charity to help her.

I absolutely stand by what I posted and if you can't deal with it I suggest you go and openly weep outside her house along with the rest of her apologists.

[gets out violin]

Easy to preach but it's hard to be an addict and be around users, especially when the drugs are free/you can easily afford them.

Very true. Although in the era of modern record companies who control everything about their artistes life, it's hard to understand how it happens.

Without going into detail, I know someone who's son is now quite well known. Said son developed a major drug problem and it took his manager to take charge of the situation before it was properly dealt with.

Meh, you can't justify your post. I read it several times and my comprehension skills have always been rather good.

I think you have little or no understanding of this area so I will mark you as ignorant rather than downright nasty.

Personally, I couldn't care less about her music (not my cup of tea), but I don't like to see someone succumbing to an addiction - assuming it's a drink/drug thing that led to her death, obviously.

Fine if that makes you feel better. My point stands.

Meanwhile in Norway nearly 100 people have died through no fault of their own. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had no choice and no opportunity to escape (let alone a repeated opportunity to escape). Nothing within their control could have saved them.

Big difference isn't it? Perhaps those people might have liked just one glimmer of a chance to save themselves?

Slipped an fell in the shower I reckon. Tragic and comical

[expert] The thing to remember about addictions of the Winehouse variety is that in what I've found to be a great number of cases, the physical addiction can be addressed over and over if necessary but psychologically if being off your tits on this or that blocks out some emotional trauma or deep unhappiness, it's preferable to being straight. If you want to make a judgement, you really need the whole story and with the dead ones, the truth is frequently that no-one ever got the whole story.

Also consider that Winehouse was on crack and while you can walk into your local any night of the week and find someone who got off heroin, you don't meet that many recovered crack addicts. [/expert]

I appreciate your point Chinny but I don't see what the people of Norway have got to do with anything, that's an entirely different situation. Yes Amy did cause her own death (presumably) through her addiction to drink and drugs (presumably largely the drugs) but addictions can be hard to shift. Some people manage to find the strength to kick them, others don't.

The company Amy kept was never very good so maybe you could say that she brought it on herself in that way too. (That's not in any way an argument against you).

I still think it's sad and unfortunate she's dead and didn't overcome her addictions.

I don't see why I can't feel sorry for Amy and the addicts in Hastings. An addiction's an addiction never easy to deal with, rich or poor.

This is rambling, I'm sorry.

Indeed. It's a serious thing that is out there (and drink is more common than most). But there are ways out. If you are living in a squat with no money and a serious heroin addition (surrounded by other users) it takes balls to drag yourself out of it (especially if you'd been a user since you were 13). And having tried and failed a couple of times it takes even more guts (as well as finding the right support). It's harder because the resources available are meagre. There's no room at the Priory for you with private medical care.

Of course it's weird life some musicians lead (look at Sid Vicious) and you get surrounded by certain types of people. But has there been no lessons learned in the past 30 years? Surely the management and music companies now know how to handle their talent? To my mind the example of ex-bosses son shows that management companies know exactly how to handle their talent otherwise said son wouldn't be inflicting himself on my eyeballs at every opportunity.

No, it's not rambling, it's all good stuff.

The company thing is a good point. Sid Vicious didn't help himself much in that regard. As I understand it from interviews etc, ex-bosses son cut out all contact with the bad influences. That is probably an important part of how he recovered.

Also went back and checked the edit of the interview I did with recovering addict. In her words she was addicted to "crack cocaine and heroin". Which might have explained the brown marks on her hands when I handed her the radio mic. Hope her and the other interviewee made it through as it takes serious courage to appear on camera, let alone go through the recovery process.

Some artists are worth more dead than alive.

There is really no reason why the rehabilitation services available at The Priory are going to be any better than anywhere else, on an average day - good workers in the field are in it for the life-saving, not the money I can promise you that. Maybe a few guys at the top make more sorting out popstars but think about all those that we know go into the priory and aren't sorted afterwards - it's not a miracle cure for the affluent.

And again, I can't stress this enough - an addiction in and of itself can be cured, right enough. It's not even that costly a thing in the grand scheme of medicine... but the aftercare, the networks - they're what sustain recovery and a rich person is far less likely to be able to maintain access to those with their work commitments - the very idea of any of my clients going on tour a fortnight after coming out of detox is hilarious. I know of ONE such celeb who manages it - a world renowned, superstar famous actor who attends AA meetings in South Wales, when he's back in the country. Turns a few heads when he walks in, but he was so powerful he could dictate his schedule. Others can't and the tragedy is they don't often realise the option would be there if they knocked the career on the head for a year or two.

I've worked in promotions, PR and radio, and I've worked for longer in substance misuse and mental health charities, alongside frontline workers, consultant psychiatrists in recovery units... and I'd not say one group of clients has an easier time of it addiction wise than the other. The main difference is that I was on steadier money in the latter and I've never been mithered for drugs by one of my clients in the voluntary sector.

In my experience most 'recovering' addicts who appear on camera aren't recovering at all.

Quoted in full so people can read it for a second time. I would nom it for POTW but it needs some jokes.

The aftercare thing is important. As you identify it's down to the will of the management to make this happen. However I fear in the music industry the artiste is a cash cow who they want to squeeze. And after all, we all know that these people are worth more dead than alive anyway. No doubt the record company will be preparing an "unreleased material" album as soon as a suitable amount of time has past. It's what the public want you understand.

So now you accept that having money has no bearing on your ability to quit drugs. Well that's progress.

All I can say is that I hope they were (one appeared in silhouette only). The charity concerned were OK with it and both seemed fairly far down the road from what I was told.

It seemed to me that many of these people live fairly chaotic lifestyles and it's not just a case of getting them off the drugs but also sorting their lives out. These two seemed like they'd got a grip again through the support structures.

If you want to play a point scoring game I suggest you go to the 8 bit gaming thread. Thanks.

Just want to add that if she had made it for another couple of months this may have been very different. Amy Winehouse was obsessed and convinced (she spoke about it often) that she was going to join the "27 club" For those that don't know Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain all died at 27. The impact this must have had on her already fucked up psychology must have been huge.

Very amusing. 3/10.

Oh and my point still stands.