Amy Winehouse Exhausts James Brown’s Stagecraft

AMY Winehouse. Nice Yiddisher girl from north London. She loves to cook for her friends. Amy is the country’s foremost female solo popist. And she’s making news in the Sun.

“Skeletal Amy was dragged into casualty and fell down with a shriek,” runs the headline.

Readers versed in the performance arts will tune their minds to Amy’s look and see traces of the late James Brown. Staged became stagecraft as Brown would push his tiny frame to the limit and drop down into the splits. A yelp. The medics. A stumble from stage. A cape around the shoulders.

And then the miracle recovery as touched by an unseen hand James would explode into life with a vigour reserved for a man who had seen the light at an evangelical exorcism.

And here is Amy Winehouse. Is this shriek her moment of catharsis? “We are praying this is the wake-up call she needs,” says a close friend in the Sun.

If so, Amy has been seeking God in a vial of drugs. As the Sun’s front page screams: “AMY IN DRUGS COLLAPSE.” Oh… “Wild pop star has adrenaline jab and stomach pumped.”

Her career is going well. Amy is up for three gongs at the MTV Video Music Awards. She has cracked America. And she is OK. As her record company Island tells us, Amy is suffering from “exhaustion”.

For any tired readers out there, an eyewitness notes the telltale signs to look for when exhaustion is about to strike. “She was falling over and stumbling around,” says the source. “She didn’t look at all well.”

Amy is with her husband Blake Fielder-Civil. “The bloke was holding her up because she couldn’t really stand on her own… That’s when I realised Amy must have been really ill because although there was a big crowd of people in the waiting area she was rushed straight through.”

Such is the scene at London’s University College Hospital. Such is the drama.

And such is that way of showbusiness that Amy is in a private room. And Amy is being discharged, leaving the hospital by a back entrance, possibly with a cape around her shoulders and the rattle of a tambourine punctuating her every painful step.

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Posted: 9th, August 2007 | In: Tabloids Comments (3) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink