Russell Brand knew Amy Winehouse when she was just Amy, before she was famous. As news of the death of his friend has traveled worldwide, he took to his website to blog about her amazing talent and addiction.
Brand wrote of his first encounters with Amy, who he always called Winehouse: “I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction.”
He fondly remembered when he realized her talent: “From her oddly dainty presence was that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond…from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine…She was a genius.”
For Brand, now eight years sober, the death of his friend is a sad reminder of the life he used to lead and the terrible reality of her being gone: “Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticized, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It was not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease.”
He ends his tribute with a call to action, “Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.”
Full Brand blog tribute HERE.
Photo: WENN