Kevin Gilmartin

I find myself quite unexpectedly fighting the corner of someone I never knew, never met and have never been a fan of.

I’m quite disgusted by some of the sentiments expressed by people over Amy Winehouse. Dismissing someone as a junkie and therefore being undeserving of sympathy is just cruel. I have personally known junkies, and I have known alcoholics, all of whom wonderful people with some extraordinary problems.

Addiction is an illness, physical and psychological; it isn’t something you can throw money at to make it all go away.

It doesn’t matter if Winehouse had access to “better” support and treatment than your average guy on the street. It’s not like a mole that you can pay some surgeon to cut out and graft over.

One commenter said Winehouse knew what she was getting in to when she started drinking. Ok, that’s probably true. But does that mean her death should be met with a storm of barbs and apathy? I have no problem with genuine indifference; there are many people to whom she meant nothing. It’s the “one more dead junkie” comments that have annoyed me, and some of those have come from people I thought were above that.

Maybe she was a junkie, I don’t know the specifics of her problems. I know she struggled with drink and took some other drugs, but I don’t know what they were.

No matter what she was, she was still someone’s friend, and someone’s daughter. Her parents were in the paper today, openly weeping and grieveing the loss of their baby girl. I feel for her father, Mitch Winehouse. I have a daughter – I cannot fathom losing her under any circumstances; I’m not about to cruelly dismiss somebody else’s loss.

The death of anyone, by any means, at the age of 27 is always a tragedy. When it happens so publicly it seems more so.

Despite what you may be inferring from this post I wasn’t a huge fan of Amy Winehouse – I’m a metal and grunge kinda guy.  In fact some of her songs I thought were downright rubbish. But I saw her on TV singing acapella once; it may have been Jools Holland, or possibly Jonathan Ross, I can’t remember and I can’t find the clip, but when I saw it I got goosebumps.

This video is the closest I could find; she’s accompanied by an acoustic guitar, but it’s so subtle. She really did have an amazing voice. Such a waste of a talent.

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