I’ve always believed this too.
It’s grossly inaccurate to put self-harm and attention getting in the same sentence, imo. Yeah attention getting itself is a warning sign for something else going on, but I don’t believe that’s why people start self-harming…it’s much deeper than that.
@amylove I know a few people that refuse to show their scars because they don’t want to bring attention to it at all. But I know what you mean
interesting article, with new insights into amys life.
i really thought mitch had been quite a bit more involved during her teenage years.
well, that explains a LOT and it answers a lot of my questions about why their relationship was the way it was.
as for the 27 number, i believe there are no coincidences, call it a club? whatever. a lot of common threads are in the group.
i dont believe amy wanted to die. i believe she wanted to grow old, have a family and someday become a grandmother. then fame got in the way. so she had a premonition. i believe cynthia knew this, being that she read the tarot, but who knows what she told amy.
I didn’t know that, wow. Makes it sound even worse. Like she was treated for something but no one really knew what it was exactly, there was never a clear statement on what she actually had? Considering every little detail about her has always been leaked to the press.
If her doctor suspected she had bipolar disorder at the time, they would not have prescribed antidepressants. Many people with bipolar first seek help when they’re in a depressive episode, and either have not experienced mania before or their mania was not bad enough for them to have needed treatment, so they do not see it as part of the illness and don’t tell their doctor about it. So they get prescribed antidepressants, which can trigger mania, which can lead to a correct diagnosis. Or just utter, utter chaos.
I think Amy mentioned her mum suggested she might have bipolar at some point. She also said in an interview she was not an alcoholic, but drank because she was manic depressive, but in a subsequent interview she said she’d made the part about being manic depressive up. It’s pretty much impossible to diagnose an addict correctly until they stop using and have been clean for a while, because addiction and withdrawal mimic symptoms of several mental illnesses. The problem is of course that often addiction is a symptom of an underlying mental illness which needs addressing. It’s a difficult situation.
Coming back to the article, I don’t like the overly intimate style it’s written in, as though the author knew what was going on amy’s mind and personal life, while he clearly wasn’t there.
Yeah, it always came off to me that she was sort of self-diagnosed from those interviews, to be honest. Addressing it seems to have been the hardest part and as you say, she wouldn’t have received proper help if that element was missing. Selfishly though, and I feel bad for admitting this because it sounds so insensitive, it does make me wonder what direction her music would have taken if she had her personality altered like that from the beginnings of her adulthood.
Good article, besides the 27 stuff.
For me the most interesting thing is, that Mitch always said, Amy was happy just before she died…if you read Janice interview in the sun last week and some parts of that one, there was not much happiness in Amys last years, months and days…very sad.
I’ve merged the two threads about Amy 27 as the Daily Mail article is basically the author plugging the book.
Has anyone here actually read the book yet? Any thoughts?
Here’s another review I found today:
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/unlucky-number-216259491.html
I also felt that too. I have friends who throw these terms around without relation to the acual medical diagnosis, meaning something along the lines of “I drink a lot and one minute Im the life of the party, the next crying on the floor about some heartbreak”. I always felt she was describing her problems with alcohol more than any diagnosed mental illness…
Also, we shouldn’t forget she was pretty fucking young. We shouldn’t believe every word she uttered. I remember talking bullshit at that age, and thinking I had the whole figured out. Luckily I didn’t have an audience and a camera in my face!..
Yes, a lot of people seem to equate mental disorders to normal behaviour sometimes and that doesn’t really help ease the stigma imo. I agree with what you said, which does not mean I don’t think she had any mental health problems… but she had none that we know of for sure.
Exactly, I’m not implying she didn’t have mental health issues, just that in the interview where she mentions it so non-chalantly, she might have meantsomething else…
An excerpt from the book
Amy moved into her new house in February, 2011, after lengthy refurbishment. She loved the house, delighting in showing it off to friends, as Kurt Cobain had shown off his Seattle mansion. “She seemed happiest at home,” says [her drummer] Troy Miller. “I’d go round there [and] she’d always cook this meatball dish. That was her favourite. Very domestic. She was always making tea for people. Very welcoming …very friendly.” Amy told her father she couldn’t see herself ever leaving Camden Square. She didn’t.
There were renewed concerns within the family that in returning to Camden Town Amy might be tempted into bad habits. It was always easy to score drugs in Camden and Amy could walk to [her favourite pubs] the Hawley Arms or the Good Mixer from her house. But she seemed to have lost interest in drugs, and sympathetic landlords chose to stop serving her alcohol, in agreement with friends, like Amy’s stylist Naomi Parry, who sometimes stayed with Amy at Camden Square.
“Naomi was in tears a lot, saying, ‘My friend’s drinking herself to death. If she comes [in], just don’t serve her booze,’” says Doug Charles-Ridler, landlord of the Hawley Arms. Amy didn’t stop drinking, though. “It was very rare I’d see her sober,” says John Hurley, who helped his wife run the Good Mixer. As a reformed drinker, John saw the damage Amy had done to herself during the years she’d frequented their pub. “She went from rosy cheeks – she looked great – to gaunt … Although she went the way that she did via drugs, and the alcohol and that, it didn’t change her personality. She was always still, right up until the end, a real sweet woman … She was like a lot of us: she got lost with all the drinking.”
Amy was accompanied by minders everywhere she went – huge men, like Andrew Morris, who kept the paparazzi and drug-dealers at bay, and just as importantly kept Amy from going to dealers during her drug period. “Part of the agreement was that [if the minders saw] her enter any premises which was known to sell drugs [they] would go back to the record company, and they would give her a big fine,” says John Hurley, but he notes that the heavies didn’t stop Amy drinking if she was in the mood. Sometimes all they could do was help her home.
One evening a couple of months before she died local people saw Amy in just such a state. “You could see she was drunk,” says Rozh, a Kurdish worker in the dry-cleaner’s on Murray Street at the bottom of Camden Square. He watched Amy being helped past the shop by two of her minders, on their way back to the house. “They carried her home.”
When she was on the wagon Amy would impose rules on herself, including no booze in the house, but she broke her rules. “There was never booze in the ’ouse, unless she wanted to have a drink,” explains [her last boyfriend] Reg Traviss, “and then she would nip out and get it.” As with many hardened alcoholics, Amy now favoured vodka, which she drank neat, and it wasn’t always clear whether she was telling the truth about her drinking. Alcoholics drink vodka in preference to other spirits because it is colourless and virtually odourless and therefore easy to conceal. There is evidence that she lied on occasion about her drinking, such as when she told her father she hadn’t had a drink in Brazil. Reg says that Amy would typically get up before him, when he stayed over, and go downstairs to make breakfast. It is possible that she used this opportunity to have a furtive nip of vodka to settle her stomach. It is what alcoholics do … Reg encouraged Amy to look ahead, beyond her music, to what else she might do with her life. “I said, ‘Look, you’re [27]. You can do anything. You’re a young gel. You can do anything you like.’”
Outside music, Amy had been offered opportunities to design clothing for the Fred Perry company, and to appear in the TV show Mad Men. Reg says a part had been written for her, which would seem to have been an ideal fit, though her lack of a U.S. visa might have ruled the project out. He gave her a pep talk that sounds remarkably similar to the advice given to Kurt Cobain shortly before his death. “I said, ‘Take a step back, have a look around and then maybe come up with something you haven’t even thought about and do it … Even if you just do it for a year, six months, two weeks, whatever. The point is you can do anything. You haven’t gotta just think, I’ve gotta go out and sing these songs all the time.’
“And she could. The world was her oyster, and she was very talented in a lot of other things that I don’t think she gets credit for. I spent time discussing all that with her, and reminding her – not that she ever forgot, I don’t think – just sort of reminding her that there was so many possibilities in life, particularly for someone so young who’s in the fortunate position that [they] haven’t got to go out and work every day.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/the-ties-that-bind-the-27-club/article13347103/
Another review, from the same site who published the excerpt:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/casting-a-critical-eye-on-the-27-club/article13457322/
Another excerpt from the book, talking about her final days …
Howard Sounes tells of Amy Winehouse’s final days and her admission to the 27 Club
AMY discharged herself from the Priory on May 31, 2011, angry with those people who had persuaded her to go to the clinic.
Neither her brief stay at the Priory, nor her doctor’s written warning, altered her behaviour. Amy joked about Dr Cristina Romete’s warning that her drinking was putting her life in danger.
"She would constantly joke about it and she would laugh about it,‘’ says Amy’s drummer, Troy Miller. "(And) we would all laugh, not in a sinister way, because she was genuinely joking about it. It’s not that she knew it was going to happen, but she was ill. She was sick.‘’
By which he means that Amy had psychological problems. "She had a dark sense of humour.‘’
One might think that Amy was in no state to sing at a family bar mitzvah, let alone give a concert, yet there were plans afoot for a European tour starting in Belgrade, Serbia, on June 18, continuing through another 11 equally out-of-the-way places.
Mitch Winehouse writes that Amy herself wanted to tour, despite the misgivings of her manager. She ordered stage suits for her band and arranged to give a private warm-up show at the 100 Club in London on June 12. It was at this club appearance that she betrayed warning signs of the disaster that was to follow.
Amy had been sober for several days, some say weeks, before the 100 Club gig. But on the day of the performance she was gripped with stage fright, craved a drink and became bad-tempered.
Finally she was able to perform and the show went tolerably well. But if Amy had got herself into this state at a club gig in front of family and friends, what would she be like on tour?
Five days later, on the eve of the east-European tour, Amy told her father that she did not want to perform. Mitch asked her why, but he couldn’t get a lucid explanation. The next day she apparently changed her mind and boarded the private plane leased for the tour.
The first show, on the evening of Saturday, June 18, was an open-air event in the grounds of the Kalemegdan Fortress, in Belgrade. On a hot summer night Amy and a cast of support acts drew an audience of 20,000 from across Serbia and neighbouring east-European states. Once again Amy was gripped with stage fright.
Mitch, who wasn’t present, writes that she became agitated before the concert and asked her manager for a drink, "so Raye (Cosbert) had allowed her one glass of wine to calm her down’'.
Unless this glass was as big as a bucket it would not account for the state Amy was in before going onstage. Either she drank a great deal more than one glass, or she mixed alcohol with medication, or both.
She was out of her head by show time and, by this time, did not want to perform. But 20,000 people were yelling Amy’s name, with 11 more dates to follow.
Finally the band was given the signal to start.
Amy let the audience sing most of the first verse of Tears Dry on Their Own while she danced with backing vocalist Zalon Thompson, shouting the occasional line. The song was about ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil and therefore was one of the songs she found difficult.
She roused herself to sing a couple of the most vivid lines about their doomed love and then gave up.
The next moment she seemed to nod off, stumbled and grabbed the microphone stand for support. People were laughing now. Throughout the show Amy alternated between inebriation, pathos and schoolgirl cheek. The stage manager got Amy off as the crowd howled and booed, furious they had paid to see a fiasco. There were no encores.
Amy’s career ended in Belgrade.
The tour party left that night for Istanbul where the next concert was due to take place. But the show was cancelled, along with the rest of the tour. Amy would never perform again. As with Jimi Hendrix, despite creating glorious music and giving some extraordinary concerts, Amy was booed offstage at the last, at an obscure open-air gig in a foreign land.
Amy checked into the W Hotel in Istanbul, where she was joined by her boyfriend Reg Traviss. By the time Reg arrived, his girlfriend was sober and contrite.
"She was taking it quite seriously. She was like, ‘Aw, f—, what did I do?’‘’
Amy and Reg returned to London on June 22.
She looked on YouTube to see amateur footage taken by fans in Belgrade with their phones. It was unusual for Amy to look at herself online, though she did so more than once during her final days.
Amy was sober for several days after Belgrade. Then she started drinking again, possibly triggered by news that Blake had been given 32 months for burglary and possession of an imitation firearm.
Reg spent Tuesday night (July 19) at Camden Square, leaving for work the following morning around the time Amy’s bodyguard, Andrew Morris, returned to work after a break.
He says Amy was sober when he left the house, though she had got up early to go downstairs to make breakfast.
This is significant because Andrew told the police that when he arrived at 10am he realised that Amy had been drinking, "because of the way she was speaking to me’‘. He wouldn’t say she was "drunk’'. He had seen Amy drunk too many times to use that word lightly.
Amy was going out that evening. She was going to hear Dionne Bromfield sing at the Roundhouse, which turned out to be the scene of her last public appearance.
Dionne, still only 15, but a confident performer with a strong voice, introduced her "godmother’’ to the audience.
Amy bounded onstage wearing a Fred Perry top and jeans. She was chewing gum and looked edgy. Dionne gave the signal for the band to play Mama Said. She appeared to want Amy to join her in a duet, but Amy merely danced around the stage, looking evasive and high. Still, she hugged Dionne at the end of the song and exhorted the crowd to cheer.
Mitch called by Amy’s house the next day, Thursday, July 21, and found his daughter looking at family photographs. He was flying to New York in the morning and didn’t see Amy alive again.
Amy spoke to Reg on the phone. He was busy at work and would not come over that evening. As we have seen, she disliked being alone, but several people she would normally count on for company were unavailable.
Janis Winehouse visited at lunchtime on Friday, with her partner Richard Collins. "When we left, she hugged me and said, ‘I love you, Mummy’. She was always calling me that and telling me she loved me. Amy never really grew up. She was like a little girl, permanently fixed in time as a kiddie.‘’
Amy drank throughout the rest of the day.
In her eternal search for company Amy had been Skyping Ricardo Canadinhas. He was appearing in drag, as Miss Mince Meat, at the nightclub Heaven.
"When she was on Skype it was because no one was there,‘’ says Ricardo, providing an insight into how lonely Amy had become. “She was, like, ‘talk to me, talk to me’.” The loneliness was almost palpable, reminiscent of Janis Joplin’s.
Attempts to reach other friends failed.
"A lot of people had missed phone calls. Basically everyone was out,‘’ says Doug Charles-Ridler. "I think Kelly (Osbourne) said she tried to Skype. Naomi (Parry) had missed calls. Everyone, like, had missed calls from her. No one picked up and she was alone.‘’
To comfort herself Amy drank. She drank vodka more or less constantly during the last three days of her life. But her GP was satisfied that Amy was not suicidal.
"She specifically said she did not want to die,‘’ Dr Romete told the police, adding that Amy said there were things she wanted to do.
Most of the principal 27s died at night. Similar to several others, Amy was alone at the end. Andrew was in the house, but Amy was alone in her bedroom suite. As a result it is not known for certain what she did at the last, or what she consumed, other than that she probably drank more vodka, judging by the post-mortem evidence and the empty bottles found in her room.
So she drank to forget herself and her problems, as drunkards do.
She drank herself into a stupor in the early hours. Then she curled up to sleep as the sky lightened with the dawn. She may not have meant to die. But, like the other 27s, she had lived dangerously for a long time.
Death had been shadowing her for years, sometimes coming close, sometimes retreating. We can imagine Death materialising at the foot of her bed as the vodka bottle slipped from her grasp and the last grains of sand ran through the hourglass.
This is an edited extract of Amy, 27, by Howard Sounes (Hodder &Stoughton, $29.99), in stores on Tuesday.
Anyone read the book yet? I just borrowed it from my local library…
I second this. I’m really kind of eager to read it from the excerpts I’ve been reading.
However…I’m also really cheap when it comes to stuff like this, so I’d rather hear a good personal review first 
You might be able to find a PDF. That’s how I read AMD
My local library has the book as well, but there’s a waiting list to take it out as they only got one copy and plenty of people already reserved it. Have you finished reading it yet @Tara?
In the mean time, here’s an interview with the author from the Montreal Gazette:
The numbered days of Amy Winehouse and the 27 Club
Biographer Howard Sounes dispels ill-informed mythology surrounding the doomed stars
By Ian McGillis, Gazette Literary Critic
MONTREAL - As one of the most acclaimed and respected pop culture biographers — definitive books on Charles Bukowski, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Tiger Woods are among his credits — and as a writer with a keen instinct for the timely subject, Howard Sounes naturally found himself thinking along certain lines two years ago when Amy Winehouse died after an awful decline in the public eye.
“(A biography) was in my mind, yes,” the 47-year-old says by phone from his home in England. “But as it turned out, there isn’t much of a life there to write about. She was very young, there was really only one significant album (Back to Black), there weren’t many tours … she spent most of her time at home drunk or stoned, to be frank.”
Instead, Sounes expanded a close examination of Winehouse’s life and demise to dovetail with something first articulated by Kurt Cobain’s grieving mother in 1994 and since solidified into iconography: the 27 Club, specifically the six major rock stars (among many lesser-known figures) who have died at age 27 since 1969. Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Cobain and Winehouse are the members, and Sounes is in no doubt as to Winehouse’s artistic worthiness to join the company.
“I think she was a great songwriter, at her best on a par with Joni Mitchell and Carole King. If you study the lyrics of Back to Black, she has a wonderfully poetic and unusual turn of phrase. And she was also a great singer. Amy was very smart, very talented, but to use a vulgarity, she was very f—ed up, and it’s interesting to try and figure out why that was.”
Without stinting on the uniqueness of each of the six narratives in Amy, 27: Amy Winehouse and the 27 Club, Sounes found some common threads.
“They weren’t happy, well-balanced people. They were very unhappy, mentally ill people for much of their lives. They couldn’t cope with success, they had difficult family backgrounds, often they took up with the most unsuitable partners. They were surrounded by people who weren’t very helpful toward them, and life became too much. You also get the sense, certainly with Amy and with Jim Morrison, that they felt trapped by an image they had created. And this all happens in a very short space of time. They all get famous around age 23, then it takes about four years for them to destroy themselves.”
Amy, 27, despite what a cynical cursory glance might indicate, is not a book that feeds into the live-fast-die-young exploitation engine. If anything, it’s the opposite — a meticulously researched corrective that spares none of the often squalid truth and should, if there’s any justice, put paid to decades of ill-informed mythologizing. “I hope the book dispels a lot of the nonsense that’s been written about these people over the years,” Sounes says, and it does.
Sounes clearly has no patience with those who have fashioned quasi-careers around the kind of conspiracy theories that crumble under proper examination. The Brian-was-murdered canard — the contention that the ex-Rolling Stone was forcibly drowned in his home swimming pool by the builder Frank Thorogood — is a case in point.
“There’s been whole books along those lines, even a feature film, Stoned. But if you read the inquest, that’s all the most obvious nonsense. This stupid man, Brian Jones, who was a drunk and a drug abuser, who when he was stoned in the middle of the night went for a swim … well, anyone knows that you don’t go swimming when you’re drunk and high. It’s a good way to die. Poor old Thorogood has been defamed simply because he’s not alive to sue.”
Often, as Sounes points out, wrong-headed decades-long death narratives have sprung up and grown wild simply because of who happened to be on the scene.
“I think it’s very interesting that the girl who was with Jimi Hendrix when he died, and the guy who was with Janis Joplin, and the girl who was with Jim Morrison — they were all flaky people, often dishonest people, to be frank. A lot of the mystery around Hendrix and Morrison’s deaths is down to the fact that their partners, the people who were with them on the last night of their life, were liars. All this industry around the myth of the death of Jim Morrison is all bunkum, based on the fact that he had a junkie wife who lied to the police.”
It doesn’t take long for these things to form; it’s as if they have a life of their own, Sounes says.
“Misconceptions have already grown up around Amy’s death, namely that she didn’t drink herself to death, or that she wasn’t an alcoholic, and I hope that the book makes the facts quite plain.”
Mitch Winehouse, Amy’s father, doesn’t emerge from the book looking good, his love of the media stage scoring few points with Sounes. “I think it’s rather curious that he has chosen to put himself in the public eye to the extent he has. You have to ask yourself: Why? Most parents of celebrities don’t thrust themselves into the spotlight as he has, and when they do, it’s not very edifying.”
As for accusations that his book is effectively part of the exploitation industry it decries, Sounes is dismissive. “Of course I do this to make money. I’m in business, it’s my living, I’m not a charity case. One tries to write a book that is commercial. But in our day and age, so many people are too lazy to take the time to read something before they pass judgment on it. It’s the culture we live in.”
Ultimately, Sounes found his project transcending the bounds of a standard music book and entering broader philosophical realms.
“It’s a book about death, really, which actually is a great subject, an enthralling subject. You can get into some quite deep water. It’s intellectually interesting and satisfying. And I’m a rather gloomy person. Like Woody Allen said of himself, I’m somebody who enjoys being depressed.”
Source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/numbered+days+Winehouse+Club/8754647/story.html
I’ve just finished reading it. It was quite refreshing to read something that isn’t ‘official’, but isn’t tabloid either. It’s not a great book, but it’s better than some. I put it on a par with Nick Johnstone’s Amy Amy Amy, which I quite liked, rather than Chazz Newkey-Burden’s book which is more popular, but I hated it.
Sounes is quite critical of Mitch, which some may not like. He implies that Janis wasn’t strong enough to keep Amy out of trouble, and that Mitch was too fond of the limelight. He also suggests that a lot of people around Amy were in denial about her addiction and the risk to her life, and that nobody really challenged her on it. That may be true, though I don’t know if anyone could have got through to her really.
The parallels between her and other rock stars were interesting, but I still don’t buy into the whole 27 Club thing. Overall, I think that a great biography of Amy has yet to be written - but in the meantime, this is a decent read.
Well my local library have bought a second copy as it’s proving to be popular, so it should be available fairly soon. I may borrow it when it becomes available and see what I think, that way I won’t have spent money on another irritating Amy biography if I don’t like it. There was a review in the Guardian a few days ago, and from the excerpts of the book I’ve read I got the same feeling as the author of the review about the links between Amy and the other “members of the 27 club” being pretty tenuous and generalized. To be honest, from the bits posted here I thought each time Howard Sounes mentioned Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain it seemed really forced… But I’ll see when I read the whole book.
Here’s the Guardian article:
Amy, 27: Amy Winehouse and the 27 Club by Howard Sounes – review
Howard Sounes’s biography of Amy Winehouse loses its way when its shoehorns other dead rock stars into the mix
In the acknowledgements section of his strange new group biography of six famous musicians who died at the age of 27, Howard Sounes writes about setting out “to see what, if anything, the 27 Club amounts to apart from a series of coincidental and tragic deaths”. That “if anything” would be tantalising in an introduction but, after 300 inconclusive pages, it feels rather like an admission of defeat.
Sounes, who has written admired biographies of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Charles Bukowski, is a tenacious researcher. If you want someone to expose the chequered financial history of Winehouse’s father Mitch or stack up air miles visiting stars’ old acquaintances, then he’s your man. But his belief that Amy Winehouse’s two-album career couldn’t sustain a proper biography leads him on a treacherous detour through the equally short, albeit more productive lives of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and Kurt Cobain. The “27 Club” (Cobain’s grief-stricken mother famously referred to “that stupid club”) is such a shaky concept that Sounes ends up dismantling it from within.
So there are really two books here and the good one, the Winehouse one, puts the existing cut-and-paste biographies to shame. Despite resistance from the singer’s inner circle, numerous friends and colleagues are interviewed, including her notorious ex-boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil, myths debunked and facts unearthed, including her final boyfriend’s surprising claim that she’d been offered a role in Mad Men. It’s a painfully thorough tale of wasted potential: she fell out of love with her own talent.
Winehouse’s story is broken up by well-researched potted biographies of the other five musicians, connected only by generalisations that apply to hundreds of performers. Great pain can inspire great art. Drug addicts are often self-loathing. Success doesn’t make you happy. When Janis Joplin writes to a fellow heroin addict, “I want to be happy so fucking bad,” Sounes adds: “One can imagine Amy saying the same.” One can imagine every addict in the world saying the same. He quotes Al Alvarez’s description of drug addiction as “gradual, chronic suicide” in a chapter on Brian Jones despite the example of many long-term drug-users, including Jones’s bandmate Keith Richards, who proved themselves loth to die. For every possible pattern, you can concoct an equally convincing opposing theory; for every victim, there are countless survivors.
So, why 27? It remains a mystery. If there is any scientific research to explain why it’s a particularly volatile age, then it is not included here among all the broad-brush quotations from the likes of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Sounes painstakingly demolishes conspiracy theories and other forms of magical thinking but offers no persuasive alternative. It simply seems that some gifted musicians are unhappy, some of the unhappy ones become addicts, some of the addicts die, and some of those do so at 27. The longlist of 27 Club members in the appendix sinks the concept for good. Grunge musician Mia Zapata was raped and murdered and Big Star’s Chris Bell crashed into a telegraph pole, yet Iggy Pop is alive and well and selling car insurance. The terrifying randomness of life is enough to make misty notions of echoes, premonitions and the movement of Saturn seem comforting.
You could imagine a Greil Marcus or Paul Morley feeling energised, rather than embarrassed, by so much chance and uncertainty, happy to extend florid tendrils of prose down rabbit holes of coincidence and myth. But Sounes is too diligent to trade facts for fancy, so he has produced a bizarrely self-thwarting book that represents the gradual, chronic suicide of an author’s own premise.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/aug/18/amy-27-howard-sounes-review