Sad news today that British singer Amy Winehouse has been found dead at the age of 27.
It seems she lost her battle with addictions since becoming a star in 2007 with Black to Black, winner of five Grammys.
The soul diva follows in the tragic footsteps of similarly troubled artists from Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to Kurt Cobain.
Reuters reported that Winehouse was found dead at her home in Camden, north London, England. Police were called to the address Saturday.
"Inquiries continue into the circumstances of the death at this early stage. It is being treated as unexplained," a police representative said.
Last month, at Winehouse's performance in Serbia, she was jeered by the crowd, struggled to perform her songs and keep her balance as her band gamely played on. On some tunes, the audience did most of the singing.
The performance, which was posted on YouTube, prompted her management to cancel all her scheduled performances and give the performer as long as it took to recover.
The Guardian writes:
Winehouse's music spoke to people so persuasively that her second album, Back to Black, became Britain's bestselling record of 2007 and reached number two in the US, making her one of only a few British female soloists to achieve that level of transatlantic recognition. Its success spurred sales of her initially overlooked first album, Frank (2003), so titled because of the diary-style lyrics that produced songs such as Stronger Than Me, which railed against a "gay ladyboy" ex-boyfriend. The two sold a total of more than 10m copies worldwide.
Born to a Jewish family in north Finchley, north London, Winehouse grew up listening to the jazz albums of her taxi-driver father, Mitch. He and her pharmacist mother, Janis, later divorced.
Amy caught the performing bug so early that by the age of eight she was attending stage school. She spent time at three, including the Sylvia Young theatre school, central London, from which she was expelled for "not applying herself", and the Brit school in Croydon, south London. Rebellious instincts surfaced in her mid-teens: by 16, she had acquired her first tattoo and was smoking cannabis. "My parents pretty much realised that I would do whatever I wanted, and that was it, really," she said later.
RIP Amy Winehouse
