Tony Earnshaw: Amy Winehouse and the tragic truth about living fast and dying young

They call it “The 27 Club”. And its membership is made up of those stars who burned too brightly for life and died aged 27: Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kurt Cobain, Richey Edwards and now Amy Winehouse.

The curse or myth of the club was apparently given credence by Cobain’s mother, Wendy O’Connor when, on learning of her son’s suicide, uttered the phrase “I told him not to join that stupid club”.

There are those who believe she was referring to her son’s drug addiction – she had urged him to clean up for the sake of his daughter. Was that why Cobain chose death by shotgun? Who knows? But Cobain’s sister has said he often spoke as a youngster of joining the 27 Club.

Certainly addiction and drug/alcohol use played a significant part in the final days of Jones, Joplin, Hendrix and Morrison. And now many are pointing to Amy Winehouse’s well-catalogued battles with booze and other substances. Of course the formula doesn’t always provide the correct answer. Keith Moon and John Bonham were both 32 when they expired. Heath Ledger was 28. James Dean was 24. River Phoenix was 23. Sid Vicious was just 21. And dinosaurs like Mick Jagger (who turned 68 this week), Iggy Pop (64) and Johnny Rotten (55) keep growling on.

Tragedy is tragedy. All of the people listed here were artists – musically, cinematically or, in Basquiat’s case, on the walls of buildings in New York. At the end, none of them could cope with life’s travails. They had money and fame but many were also isolated and terribly lonely. In those circumstances heroin and booze are often the only companions one desires.

Fame is a fickle mistress, and she’s pernicious. Who knows what horrors some of these people endured? In the case of James Dean, destroyed in a high-speed collision between his Porsche and another car, life was snuffed out without the need for drink or drugs. Yet Dean, like his contemporary Montgomery Clift, was a tortured young man who most likely would have fulfilled his own prophecy in any case: “Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.” Except the dead in these cases are rarely pretty to behold.

And so the devotees mourn. In a heartbeat Amy Winehouse passes from pitiful figure to lost diva – leaving behind a legacy of songs and a towering voice that belonged to another age. Last Wednesday she danced with her goddaughter Dionne Bromfield on stage at the Camden Roundhouse. Watching the footage reminded me of James Mason joining Judy Garland on stage in A Star is Born. There’s a horrible inevitability about it – that something awful is being played out. Three days later Winehouse was dead. What a terrible shame.