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Talent in a Previous Life

Because It's Never Just About the Music

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

10 Things We State About... 

Amy Winehouse, who’s so determined to avoid fading away that she’s bypassing burning out and going straight to exploding like a flaming whisky barrel instead, is getting it from both sides at the moment, and we don’t just mean she’s taken to using both nostrils to simultaneously hoover up two lines of cocaine. No, instead we’re referring to the fact that both her dad and her mum-in-law have decided to weigh in and offer their opinions on what the ‘troubled’ - and there’s a euphemism if ever we heard one - star should do to sort her life out.

Her dad reckons that it’s no-one elses fault but her own, unsurprisingly taking a stance apart from the more conservative view that in situations like this the parents are to blame, and feels that until she accepts she’s got a problem there’s to a lot that can be done. It seems unlikely, however, that this will happen any time soon. She’s unable to accept there’s a problem with her teeth, let alone with the slightly more serious issues of her excessive intake. Her mum-in-law, however, takes a different view. And, obviously the best person to give advice is your mother in law, who is rarely, if ever, seen as a meddling influence in peoples’ lives. Her opinion is that it’s not Amy’s fault whatsoever, and is in fact the fault of those of us who have bought her records. Now, while many, many things can be blamed on people who have bought her records, mainly awful dinner parties, it seems somewhat churlish to blame Amy’s copious drug habit on the casual HMV customer. It’s a bit like the spurious arguments which blame the entirety of global terrorism on one customer buying a shonky DVD from a bloke at work. And besides, even if it were true, the mum in law’s solution, for everyone to stop buying Amy’s CDs so that she no longer has the cash to buy her drugs, doesn’t even work as every person who wants a copy of her album already has one! There are, at most, five people who are still considering purchasing it, and the only reason they haven’t as yet are because they spent Bank Holiday Monday watching the Dirty Pretty Things gig so haven’t exactly had the opportunity.

Amy herself has yet to comment on these things - not intelligently, anyway - but there are other ways which you could, if you’re so inclined, help Amy kick the habit. Here’s ten of them:-
  1. Wait until a rare moment of sobriety and hit her with the revelation that she’s been so monged out of her brain that she’s married someone called Blake Civil-Fielder.
  2. Play her Just Say No, No, No. A bootleg of her hit Rehab mixed with The Kids from Grange Hill.
  3. Speak to her in a language she understands. Yiddish, perhaps.
  4. Give all her local drug dealers copies of her CDs. Not so that they’ll recognise her and know not to sell to her, but in the hope they’ll try and make a bit of cash by flogging them off down the local pub instead.
  5. Lock her in a studio with no outside influences and let her go cold turkey. Of course, the downside of this is that she’ll likely record another album while she’s there.
  6. Point out that drugs aren’t cool. Use the examples of Justin Hawkins and Blokey From Keane if she needs convincing.
  7. Cut her coke with washing powder, which will clean up her insides if nothing else.
  8. Help her work her way up to kicking the habit by giving her some small things to kick to start with, before slowly working up to bigger, more difficult things. We’d start with kittens ourselves.
  9. Instead of giving her awards, give her shots of methadone instead.
  10. Demand she goes to rehab, and to hell with whatever response she gives.

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