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(Credits: Far Out / Matt Crockett)
The difference between musicians who get into the industry for fame and those who do it for the love of the music is pretty clear to see. In fact, The X Factor helped make the distinction upon its arrival in the early 2000s.
It was an era where pop stars were being manufactured, and so the career of an artist was being confused with one of fame. Covers of Jeff Beck’s ‘Hallelujah’ were awash, as these irreverent pop action figures stormed the charts, threatening the very make-up of music as a career.
But this attitude brought with it collateral damage. Red top newspapers and the gossip columns that populated thought the likes of Amy Winehouse and Noel Gallagher wanted their private lives openly discussed as much as a man named Chico, with a depressingly successful hit named ‘Chico Time’.
The lines of what was acceptable in media and music became truly blurred in that decade, and we as a society feasted on the sensationalist underbelly of the entire thing. In the case of Oasis, it was relatively fine, given the durability of the Gallagher brothers and their willingness to give as good as they got.
Their entire musical and personal persona was based on sticking two fingers up to the world, and so when they were given one back, it fuelled the flames of their anti-establishment sentiment.
But, perhaps more crucially than all of that, they were a band. Sure, they found more internally than any other outfit in musical history, but at the end of the day, they had each other, and so when faced with unwavering public abuse, it was a safety net to fall back on.
Amy Winehouse, on the other hand, was not afforded quite the same luxury. Supremely talented to a point where it became a burden, she was thrust into the limelight with little to no protection. Facing the sharp teeth of hungry tabloid journalists, every painful foot she stepped wrong wasn’t given the space to be funnelled into her music; instead, it was use to fuel an agenda of intense scrutiny that ultimately had tragic consequences.
So Noel Gallagher, who effectively passed the baton on to Winehouse and her generation, looked on with sympathy. But while he had the safety of the band to fall back on, it wasn’t what he thought would save her. In fact, it was isolation.
“It smashed that girl to pieces. She could not fucking deal with it,” he said. “Because she wasn’t a sole writer, she relied on other people. She was writing, of course, but she was a co-writer. Whereas I could always lock myself in a room, and it was just me and a guitar. Not even a fucking tape recorder. Just me and a guitar. And while the storm was going on outside, I was always working my way through it.”
Ultimately, the solace of a bedroom and a guitar wouldn’t have saved Winehouse, and it drastically overlooks the nuance of the situation. She was a tortured artist who, no matter her methodology, would have been the subject of intense attention because she was simply once in a generation.
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