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It could be that she does wish to fulfil her vast potential, but she has another wish that conflicts: the wish for oblivion. It’s hard to speak against that wish without sounding like an advertisement for a package holiday. As this world goes, there are ample reasons for wanting to be out of it even if your personal history is a comfort, and I imagine hers has been the opposite. But she knows all this. The proof is in some of her songs. The proof is in her voice. You don’t get to sing like that unless you can give a shape to grief.
Not long before he died last week, Humphrey Lyttelton said that he admired the way Amy Winehouse sang and would have liked to meet her. Some commentators have wondered what he would have said. There’s no telling. He was the prince of joy, and he might have told her that he was glad to have lived out a long life in music. The old Etonian would surely have admitted that he had begun his career in conditions of privilege, as she had not, and that he had always had the gift of happiness, which she plainly hasn’t, or anyway does not have yet.
But he could have added that he only had to listen to a few bars of her singing to realise that she had been given the greatest gift a musician of any kind can have, and that a gift on that scale is not possessed by its owner, but does all the possessing.
Maybe that’s what she’s afraid of. When people say that you have a duty to your talent, they all too often mean that you have a duty to them. But they’re misstating the case. The duty of the greatly talented is to life itself, because what they do is the consecration of life. I could end with something that Pavarotti once told me in his dressing room before I interviewed him. He wouldn’t say it on air, for fear of sounding immodest. He said he knew his gift was from God. But perhaps a better ending would be what Philip Larkin said to the ghost of Sidney Bechet. “On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes”. Come on, kiddo. Give us a song.

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