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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. The sheer scale of intrusion was breathtaking and unprecedented: we’d seen Britney shaving her head at a hairdresser’s in Hollywood, Nicole Richie on the beach in a baggy bikini that draped her thin ribs, Lindsay Lohan scratching at the paps, Paris Hilton parading out of jail, but with Amy things seemed ten times worse, unrelenting, endless, all-encompassing, all day, every day, ad infinitum, for real. She downed bottles of vodka and was drinking herself ‘to death’. She ‘didn’t give a fuck’; she lurched, hair wild, from pub to pub. Because of her wry, dry humour and tendency to say, ‘yeah, whatever’, she seemed curiously in on the joke, up for a laugh, except she never was, never should have been, never should have been that exposed, that photographed, filmed that way or that terribly betrayed, because in the end, she died.
A few hours after the news broke, the singer Mica Paris said the fact she had been allowed on stage in Belgrade was a ‘disgrace’. ‘The feeling of being rejected by the very people that brought you to where you wanted to be all your life, that’s massive. She was very fragile after that, I’m sure she was. I’m an artist. I could not imagine people booing me. She was broken.’
At one point, her boss at Island Records recognised the extent of the problem and reportedly shocked her into rehab by presenting her with copies of all the negative press. She went, but only for a couple of weeks: a quick hit that steadied her for the Grammys and a tour of the States. I met her about then, at a fashion party in Shoreditch: a tiny jet-black bead of a thing with a swaying termite heap of hair, delicate as a child, full of flirty, fluttering pecks on the cheek for the drag queen who introduced us. I had expected to dislike her, find her full of attitude and brash self-possession, but she was wholly different from her paparazzi persona, warm and quiet and hearty, a pub chanteuse, oddly shy, if anything, hesitant and restless among the Blade Runner models packing the bar, even though she was by far the most talented and famous of everyone present: up for five Grammys, and still only 24.
She was, at last, away from Blake, the etiolated droog she had married in 2006, who introduced her to crack and smack, and who is now safely in jail for burglary and the curiously impotent crime of carrying a fake handgun. She was plumper and pink-cheeked. A few weeks after that, she appeared on Letterman, belting out ‘Rehab’ in that deep, evocative voice, marbles gargled with gin: a US debut that was, breathed the host, ‘byuddiful’.
I wrote to her for a bit, tried to get her to give me an interview, but only ever seemed to land time with Mitch, her jazz-singing cab-driving father. At one point a friend went round with a gift as a bribe, but all she did was cackle and snatch the bag with a salty ‘fangs very much’.
Eventually, inevitably, she slid away, disappeared, left England for St Lucia, but soon enough the pictures started bouncing back, the bruises and burns, long-lens shots of her downing booze on the beach. Her death was only ‘a matter of time’, and yet no one seemed to be able to help her or to stop it. They just stood there and took pictures; with every shot, she became more unreachable, more helpless, more otherworldly, unreal. You could hear it when she sang, when she said she was living the wrong life altogether: ‘I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mum and look after my family.’ All she wanted was to live in the black and white Sixties nostalgia of her own music videos: the only images that did her justice.
Camilla Long writes for the Sunday Times.
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