Being a past heroin addict, Russell Brand has a gentle spot for Amy Winehouse. In a Sunday morning blog article, the 36-year-old Arthur star — who continues to be sober since 2002 — reflects around the existence of the British soul singer, who was discovered lifeless in her London apartment Saturday at the age of 27. Brand — who married American pop celebrity Katy Perry in October 2010 — had not witnessed Winehouse’s undeniable talent until he noticed her open for Paul Weller at the Roundhouse. Winehouse is survived by her mother and father, Mitch and Janis, as well as her older brother, Alex.
Here are some of the excerpts of his post from his blog:
“I’ve known Amy Winehouse for years. When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma,” Brand writes. “Carl Barrat told me that ‘Winehouse’ (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it’s kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as a bizarrely anomalous in that crowd. To me, with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; ‘Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric,’ I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable.”
“I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50 pence for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his ‘speedboat,’ there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anesthetize the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.”
“From time to time I’d bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh, she was ‘a character’ but that world was riddled with half cut, doped up chancers, I was one of them, even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks didn