Bad beehive-iour: Amy Winehouse at the Camden Crawl in April. Photograph: Martin Godwin
How do you make an alleged drug addict seek help? Amy Winehouse's father-in-law thinks that boycotting her records would do the trick. Giles Fielder-Civil's extraordinary interview on Radio 5Live yesterday, which has been widely reported in today's press, vividly made the point that Winehouse and husband Blake's drug problems are affecting not just the couple but their family. Part of the solution, he suggested, would be for fans not to buy her records: "By doing that, that affects the record company and the record company may take notice."
It might seem to follow that if her sales dropped, Winehouse's label, Island, would step in and somehow effect a cure for their wayward artist, whose life appears to have unravelled since her overdose three weeks ago. But it wouldn't work. Firstly, when has a singer being a drug user ever stopped anyone from buying their albums? Secondly, Island is limited in the help it can offer, unless Winehouse specifically requests it. Which isn't likely to happen - as someone at her label told me yesterday, Winehouse maintains an arms'-length relationship with the company and wouldn't be inclined to do anything she didn't want to do..
Moreover, despite her father-in-law's allusion to the label having "vested interests" in allowing her to lose control, Island would gain nothing by encouraging its prodigiously-talented singer to become a casualty. If she died - poignantly, Fielder-Civil fears that one of the couple will, and the other would consequently commit suicide - there would be a brief spike in album sales, followed by ... well, what? Nothing, is the answer - whereas a recovered and healthy Winehouse would have a long career ahead of her. Suggestions elsewhere that Island is complicit in keeping her on drugs - because druugs make her more "compliant" - are ludicrous.
The industry undeniably turns a blind eye to drugs as long as they don't stop an artist working, but so do the City banks that don't care how much cocaine their traders consume in their free time. And labels aren't above signing hopeless addicts. But to presume that Winehouse's label either doesn't care about her plight, or engineered it to increase sales (her Back to Black album was already doing extremely well before her troubles came to light) is wrong.
What is really odd is how much is publicly known about Winehouse and her husband's problem. While they haven't exactly been keeping it secret, with Winehouse even contacting gossip blogger Perez Hilton with a lurid update, their families have been equally unguarded. So the public has been privy to things that should have stayed private. Is this a very 2007 way of going about things, or an indication of the families' despair? Whichever it is, it's hard not to care about Winehouse, one of the best pop singers this country has produced this decade.
