Amy Winehouse gets them in at the Dublin Castle, Camden. Photograph: Martin Godwin
My job as a record producer is to get the best out of an artist - for their benefit, not mine. Sometimes that means you've got to curb your own enthusiasms, and sometimes it also means you've got to control the artist's excesses. Certainly in the Amy Winehouse situation, there's no question this girl's talented, but part of her persona is her outrageousness. That's great as long as you don't self-destruct, but you're already seeing her self-destruct.
There's this unfortunate myth that's even more prevalent since the death of Kurt Cobain: that a good rock star's got to be a dead rock star, and it's a very sad indictment of human beings. There are a lot of people out there who changed the history of pop who did it with talent, not by killing themselves. It's a shame when people believe that you have to be self-destructive to be a true artist.
Let's not glorify tragedy - let's help people who are tragic. I'm sure if you gave Marilyn Monroe the actual choice between life and death, she would have picked life. James Dean liked fast cars. He happened to have picked a Porsche that had a fuel tank at the front. If you'd pointed out that if he hit something it probably would have exploded into a fireball, he would have picked a different car - he would have probably never seen it unless someone pointed it out to him. And nobody did.
I've always tried with my own artists to act almost like a father figure. And we've worked with some very self-destructive people. Pete Burns is a classic example. He's still alive. He's slowly getting himself back together - and I've always had time for him. Pete knows where to come if he's got a problem. He knows I'll tell him the truth, because right from the start we've always had a very blunt and frank relationship. Pete's an extraordinarily talented human being, and he's been all over the place. But you look at where he could have gone, and he never went there. The plastic surgery in itself is an amazing story, but death, heroin, booze...
Everybody forgets booze is a real problem. I've watched it happen too many times. I remember one Christmas I went home and my housekeeper had got six quarts of gin. I asked: "Who've you got all that gin for?" and she said "You're home for a week. How much do you think you drink? You'll go through a litre of gin a night."
Shit! So I went into the borough, went into the pub, I said "how much gin do I drink a night?" "Not far off a litre." "Every night?!" "Every night, Pete. Every time you come in here, every gin you have is a double gin, and you'll have six or seven of them."
When you can drink a litre of gin and not notice, then it's time to stop. I'll still have a drink on special occasion, but I've never drunk like that again. That was it for me.
