Our straight talking Lancashire lass takes a sideways look at the daily news.
Whitney Houston: Another icon bites the dust
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Whitney Houston has died. Everyone in the world will now be aware of this. The Princess of Power Ballads is rumoured to have been found submerged in a bathtub after a wild weekend of booze and prescription drugs.
According to reports, members of her entourage discovered her body in her hotel en suite bathroom, merely hours before she was set to perform at the Grammy Award ceremony. In a macabre twist, Whitney’s hotel room was in the same building as the Grammys, which went ahead, even as her corpse was being removed from the scene.
Of course this is sad. Tragic, actually. Her voice was remarkable, but years of drug abuse and smoking had strip-mined her vocal chords and left her sounding like Tom Waits’ grandma. In her youth she was extremely beautiful, and was the height of elegance – you never saw any crotch-grabbing or boob spilling, just effortlessly acrobatic vocals.
But she went from classy lady to a dead eyed nut-job who famously told US presenter Diane Sawyer that ‘Crack is whack’.
Her latter years saw her gain infamy because of the car crash nature of her life, rather than her awesome, glittering talent.
It’s little wonder that the shock death of Houston brought back painful memories for the family of Amy Winehouse, who died from drink, and who received a post-humous Grammy last night on behalf of the dead singer.
Celebrity and excess go hand in hand. But for me the whole sex-drugs-rock-n-roll is passé and I’m tired of watching the painfully predictable carousel of talented individuals dropping like flies because they overdo it.
Like many, I would give my right arm to possess even a smidgen of the beauty and talent that these people have. I think it’s desperately sad and astoundingly ungracious for people who have these incredible gifts to literally flush them down the plughole.
I loved Whitney. She was like the Bee Gees – you knew more of her songs that you realised. I loved the pure joyfulness of I Wanna Dance with Somebody, which is a proper singing-in-the-bathroom-mirror-with-hairbrush classic. I grew up with her music, it was the backing track to my adolescence and her music has a special place in my mind.
So I hope that Whitney Houston is remembered for her sparkle, her shining talent rather than a wasted has-been, dying alone in a hotel bathtub.
R.I.P Whitney… and I genuinely mean that.
- Read more: Whitney Houston: the life of a diva
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