OK, so I am as sad to see Amy Winehouse apparently taking horrible drugs as everyone else. I agree with the esteemed Sun columnist Jane Moore that she's probably not going to live to 80 and have 18 grandchildren if she carries on like this; and I am a bit disappointed that one after another our cultural icons (well, alright, Kate Moss and Pete Doherty first, and now this) seem to be weirdly desperate to make home videos of themselves being pathetic - as if they can't quite trust their public notoriety to last.
But nothing on the home video released yesterday by The Sun is really very surprising. Nothing gives me greater understanding of Amy and her life. Except this: has anyone else noticed how very middle class her flat is?
It's not middle class as in cats and pine and floorboards and bookcases; nor middle class as in chintz in a small village outside Oxford. But it's something I remember really well from the flats rented by a good number of my friends immediately after university.
They were - broadly speaking - the cooler people. This is because the look is a very mid-2000s East London one, and that's where people who thought they were too cool for Shepherd's Bush or Clapham went to live. But they were also those with decent enough jobs to pay a reasonable rent - and the flat has been developed by a developer and equipped with all mod cons. Look, for example, at the nice built-in shower with a flashy glass door and faux chrome fittings. This isn't rockstar stuff, it's all mid-range. Probably from Homebase. (She thinks it is cooler than her parents' house).
Then in come the personalised features. Not purchased art - too young and poor and anyway still to rebellious for this; not freaky murals in the inhabitant's own blood, like Pete Doherty went in for. But framed, artily hung black and white photos of mates. It's so young professional it hurts.
When we saw inside Kate Moss's Cotswolds house, it was the home of someone rich, reasonably tasteful and maybe just a tiny bit naff. When we see the opulent palaces of rock stars, and tycoons, it reinforces what we expect of them. When we saw Pete Doherty's horrible hovel, it fitted at least with the rest of his scabby life.
Maybe this is why it's so very wrong to see Amy apparently smoking crack in this setting. You can just imagine her mother dropping off an Ikea carpet, you can imagine her mobile phone bills arriving in the post. You can imagine post-studenty drinking sessions and maybe even a degree of young professional drug use. But the hopeless out-of-control weirdness of Amy Winehouse in so bourgeois a setting is what really sticks out. It's the clash between her home furnishings and her destructive lifestyle. For that matter, it's more the clash between her home furnishings and her singing voice that have got me thinking than between her singing and her drugs.
