Considering how much I hate celebrity, it really is odd to find myself writing this. I’m aware that just by writing this, I’m paying into something horrible that is working akin to an international ‘Wicker Man’, painfully aware. Yet I find myself forced, if only because, out of sheer curiosity, I clicked the comments on an article the Daily Mail website about Amy Winehouse.

Forgive me.

I know I am joining in.

Forgive me.

I just can’t help it anymore. Not after I’ve seen the line of puerile, infantile and hypocritical comments being made. Much of which amounts to simple crass lines about a young woman having dirty fingernails.

Since Byron and before, we’ve wanted our artists to be “Mad, bad and dangerous to know”. That’s the given line – we widely accept that to create you must be straddling some sort of line with genius. Just as we accept genius is often very difficult to discern between insanity. That’s the way we’ve wanted them for centuries.

If only because; if you can create things of such horror and beauty, then there must be something pushing you, some tick, some eccentricity, some addiction. Often, only because, we, the nowhere league, fervently need there to be.

We needed Byron to be a drug addled sex fiend. Not because he was living life what he saw was the fullest of experience. But, because if Byron hadn’t been in those ways addled (as we, the nowheres see it) well then his genius would have been super-human and would have just put the rest of us who can barely read even more to shame.

The only thing is, we never wanted Byron to die and that is the only underlying current I get from all these pernicious comments. At the end of the day, they just want Amy Winehouse to wither up and die. The concern seems false, put on; so relative nobodies can aggrandize themselves by, at the very least, having thrown their two cents in. When it comes to articles like this, I would dearly like it to be a stipulation that you can only comment if you post a full picture of yourself. As I wonder just how many of these people are overweight, smokers, heavy lean-ers on the booze or want to soothe themselves by meaningless unprotected sex. Crack smoking aside, just how many of these people are destroying themselves as well, if only in the small ways.

Now, I’m not actively saying Winehouse has the same level of genius as Byron; I am just using another creative traveler of intoxicant paths as an example. I’ll use others as I run along this railroad.

When it comes to the creative breed, we seem to prefer them if they’re just a little bit crazy. Those of us who are crazy but not creative are given heroes to look up to. Those of us who are neither just get the schadenfreude delight of watching them build the house as they burn it down at the same time.

Perhaps, I find those people discussing her basic hygiene the most offensive. I have no way of evaluating the hygiene of the people telling her to take a bath. Not a single iota as to whether these people smell or have greasy hair.

I write, but I’m not half the writer I wish I was, yet I smoke, drink and partake the odd substance occasionally. I have smoke stained fingers with dirty nails, my clothes are rags, hole filled and my hair unkempt. I’m aware of it, freely admit it. Very few of the people I admire creatively were clean. Some of the painters always had the tools of their trade under their nails. Writers with ink stained hands and sleepless worn faces. Actors with the raffish wear of the night before on their sweaty faces.

Funnily enough, I probably share most of my creative heroes with the wider populace. Creativity though, is the crux. The old agony and ecstasy, the power and the passion. The fire is there, but how do you keep it burning. The door was opened once yet the key keeps changing. Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, Hunter S. Thompson, Janis Joplin, Miles Davis, Raymond Revuebar, William Burroughs, Keith Richards. The list is perhaps countless, some burnt out fast, snuffed by their creativity and the angels and demons they fed into its furnace to keep it driving. Others lived to a ripe old age and some are still living.

A smash of glass, the shaking fist and snarled mouth. Wild eyes, sweating, lost in the act or catharsis of the aftermath. That’s how we want them. It shouldn’t appear too easy; it’s better to know it wasn’t. There is a perverse delight in living vicariously through their bombastic appetites, knowing we will never have the bravery, stupidity or means to indulge our pleasures and failings as they do. We’ll keep them Promethean, and then on the slightest whim damn their vices as if we’ve never made mistakes.

I am not advocating the abuse of substances as the gateway to creativity. Nor am I excusing the fact that the reliance on and addiction to substances has led to the pitifully short existences of some of the greatest talents we’ve ever produced as a species. I am, however, saying we have no right to damn them at the same time as we hunger for stories of their excesses. The temptation to cut this up with quotes from the comments on that Daily Mail ( thinly disguised racist rag that it is) piece. But, I figure it would be giving too much space to intellectually malnourished lampreys that appear to illicit far too much pleasure from the turmoil that is another human’s painful existence.

I will say however that, those who talk of her spluttering through some of her sets. They seem to have forgotten the girl has early emphysema (apparently) and that it is a sign of her sheer bullheaded determination and underlying strength that she is still performing for her public. Who really cares if it was exacerbated by smoking cigarettes and drugs. They don’t seem to care that their Beatles albums were the product of acid and heroin. Rather they appear to laud them for it.

I can’t help but burn a clean line between Winehouse and Billie Holiday. Music historians say that she (Holiday) changed the face of pop vocals forever. That while drugs weakened the sheer power of her voice; within that narrowing of ability she found the strength to bring the emotional delivery of her songs to the forefront. Thus rewriting the book for everyone after. It is clear she has a supportive family behind her, but to those who keep repeating why won’t they do something for her. They do nothing but show their ignorance. A simple search of the Internet will bring up countless stories of parents and family despairing on just how they can help their substance-addled child. Maybe Winehouse is on the short creative road, destined to burn bright but short, maybe she is on the long road, filled with potholes and collisions. I just hope, that unlike Holiday, she doesn’t get swindled out of the profits and rights to what she has created by the vampires around her.

We seem content to throw “shambolic” gigs at her, as if no other recording artist has performed poorly live. I’ve seen most of the musicians I love, at one time or another, stumble and fumble through their sets for one reason or another. Bad sound, faulty electrics, a cold or sore throat, drunkenness, being high. Bar electrics and bad sound, those paying to the frailty of being human have never really bothered me. Try waiting hours for Mark E. Smith to arrive at a gig, amidst an angry crowd whose rage suddenly subsists as the man thunders through a startling set.

I’m content to allow Winehouse good gigs, mediocre gigs, bad gigs and shameful gigs, because if for nothing else, it makes it interesting, because when she does pull it out of the bag, she really does. There is a sense of the unknown and adventure to that. I am also content to put concerts on the back foot and allow her albums speak for themselves. Just as I can ignore the dross people like Ozzy Osbourne put out, as long as he continues to be the performer he always has been.

The sorry truth of the matter for us, the nowheres, is if something is gloriously talented, many of us need to watch them die at the exact same time we watch them shine. If only because it makes us feel just a little bit better. It is a terrible thing that one search of youtube for Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ video, shows a comment of someone hoping she “Ods”. You have to wonder how empty someone’s life is that they spend some of their energy wishing death on someone whose main desire is to perform for others and bring them some sort of happiness. It’s not exactly something I can fathom; it is not like Winehouse is a Scientologist or a bigot and therefore the ill feeling justified. Do they need her to die so they can sit about coffee shops and forums online smugly telling people “I told you so” and “Good riddance”? To me, that seems eminently more empty and pathetic than the junkies they claim to despise.

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Wherein the Daily Mail and its readers offer their constructive criticism upon a young performer