Amy Winehouse, the Grammy Award-winning pop singer-songwriter whose sultry and profane compositions reflected - and ultimately were overshadowed by - a turbulent personal life and struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, was found dead Saturday at her apartment in London. She was 27.Police sources confirmed her death, but the cause was not immediately available.
The British-born performer's train-wreck-style public behavior often threatened to eclipse her talent. Although she received high-profile engagements, such as Nelson Mandela's 90th-birthday concert at London's Hyde Park in 2008, she routinely canceled or missed performances, whether from bad health or bad manners.In June, Ms. Winehouse canceled a tour after she shouted "Hello, Athens!" to an audience of 20,000 in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. She appeared to be so inebriated that backup singers had to sing her songs when she proved incapable. She was ultimately booed off the stage.Ms. Winehouse said living dangerously generated her creativity, and she was often photographed half-dressed, wild-eyed and disheveled."It sounds like such a wank thing to say," Ms. Winehouse once said, "but I need to get some headaches goin' to write about."Her reckless life often called to mind the doomed pop stars of earlier generations, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain - all of whom also died at the age of 27.
She had a fondness for jazz-inflected vocals and 1960s pop, but she roughed up the style to include hip-hop slang and an infusion of profanity. Her music often focused on drinking, drug-taking and chronic infidelity.Her song "Rehab" mirrored her life through its defiant lyrics: "They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no, no, no." The bouncy song, styled after the early Motown sound and 1960s girl groups, became a ubiquitous hit in 2007.Amid the chaos and turmoil of her personal life, Ms. Winehouse won five Grammy Awards in 2008, including best new artist.In May 2007, Ms. Winehouse flew to Miami and secretly married her boyfriend, Blake Fielder-Civil, an acknowledged heroin and crack user. As her records jumped up the charts that year, her professional success gave way to a series of personal drug- and alcohol-related mishaps, many also involving her new husband, that were covered relentlessly in the British press.Most explosively, the London Sun newspaper posted a grainy video on its website in January 2008, about a month before she received her Grammy Awards, allegedly showing Ms. Winehouse smoking a crack pipe and talking about taking ecstasy and valium.
