Camilla Long

Amy Winehouse became more helpless with every photograph

Amy Winehouse was found dead at home at 3.54 p.m.

Amy Winehouse was found dead at home at 3.54 p.m. last Saturday afternoon. A day earlier, a Norwegian gunman had let off a bomb in central Oslo, shooting youth workers and teens in a national horror-show that was still ongoing. For a couple of hours, editors deliberated who they should ‘go with’ as the top story. In the ‘hierarchy of death’, as one commentator grimly put it, was Anders Behring Breivik bigger than the sadly predictable demise of the dark star of British pop?

Not for the tabloids, who hungrily ‘went’ with the 27-year-old singer. They splashed her across the front pages, the Star, the Mirror, the Sun, the Express, reliving the drink and the drugs and desolate divadom: mawkish, hawk-like tributes complete with commemorative posters and pictures of the flowers and beer cans outside her ‘£2 million mansion’ in Camden, north London. Breivik was the bigger scoop, but the tabloids always ‘went’ with Amy. I wish they’d gone with her slightly less. I wish I’d never seen the pictures of her disastrous performance in Serbia last month, knock-kneed and tottering like a broken hooker as her band wheezed, aghast, to a stop. I’d wish I’d never seen her coughing into a crack pipe, rampaging down the street, half nude and screaming, face a smudge of mascara and dirt. I wish I’d never seen her lash out at the paps, blood-shod, delirious, stuttering and stumbling drunk, that hot, horrid summer when the sudden shriek of her celebrity illness shocked us all. If pictures steal your soul, they stole Amy’s whole, shredded it and stamped on it and covered it in soot.

I can’t imagine the pain she felt seeing pictures the next day, the shame and raw self-loathing as yet another instalment of her beggar’s soap opera hit the stands.

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