Amy, Amy, Amy.

I remember turning Tears Dry On Their Own up so loud the speakers almost broke in the old ford ka I used to traipse around in. Back to Black – we only said goodbye in words, I died a hundred times – a phrase I understood from my first one night stand. I knew what she was talking about – I don’t want to be with you, I don’t need you, but this is more than words – let’s respect each other and what happened here. Can you let me have that? I want to see this a new way.


I went to see Amy this week.


There’s something about Amy’s assumed strength that is galling in ALL THAT footage. Her loneliness was excused, her drug habit her own problem to pull herself out of, she’s gobby and witty and she can handle herself. So she CAN handle herself. What if she couldn’t? What if the loneliness and the need for a overruling strength was too much. The push pull with her husband, family and drugs definitely says that. It’s clear her girlfriends from school adored her and fought hard to rescue her.


I see why the family are upset by how they come across – I can’t imagine how they couldn’t be. But they come across ok. Dealing with a soul that strong isn’t straight forward, we are taught to respect strength and let it soldier on. My strength was batted back into a box – or you’re labeled as gobby, try hard, forward, bossy, alpha. It’s different for men. It is – we’re still taught to be scared of a strong women. Amy had strength in spades. That sings through the whole 90 minutes. An unfaltering honesty and magic that only the most brilliant people can pull off at seventeen.


When life hurts – and it does for us all in so many ways – when life is skipping from giddying highs to pathetic lows – when we don’t have a schedule that repeats repeats repeats, a structure, but rather when we know our friends are waiting at a distance to mop us up, we feel invincible. I’ve lost friendships to drugs. You just wait it out. Some you get back, some you can’t repair.


It’s very difficult not to be cynical about Amy. Or presume there’s a dark art in peeling back so much and showing so much very personal footage. A young woman off her face, out of her mind on crack and smack - downing Jack Daniels like JD have said there are only four barrels left and they need drinking today. But we all have our vices and our dark moments – we post only the good online. We aren’t supposed to share those dark moments with wit or honesty and a wry smile as we’re only supposed to be performing the right kind of role.


We’re not supposed to grow up behind a lens. We all do now, but we self-curate. Amy didn’t have the curate option. The force stronger than her in her life was the mob waiting for her, her management’s bank balance, her voice, her fierceness, her strength was also her most dangerous vice as everyone presumed she was ok.


I spoke to an ex-paparazzi friend of mine about the film this weekend. He said ‘we stopped sending people to Amy, or selling Amy pix, the scrum was so big they weren’t exclusives and only worth £50’ – he was genuinely saddened by the whole thing.


It’s tough being a strong woman. It’s tough being a woman. It’s tough being in a world where all anything counts for is money. I would love to hear what Amy was going to write next, we all would. But I think as a log of her tenacity and talent, Amy goes a long way to sharing what she had achieved in too few years. And I’m pretty sure she would fucking hate it. Which makes me smile. RIP lil’ lady.



The title of this blog is a reference to a Frank album track, Amy, Amy, Amy.