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Good Morning, My local pub has a chalkboard outside on which the landlord writes a different quote every week. This week’s quote is from Amy Winehouse and it says ‘every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.’ This great singer, who died at the age of 27 from alcoholic poisoning, is the subject of a new documentary, a painful and powerful study of a towering talent brought low, for the most part, by the earthquake of fame. With her extravagant licks of eyeliner and beehive hair, and her humiliating public fall, there was something so cartoonish about the Amy Winehouse persona that it was easy to forget there was a person there. Using intimate footage, this documentary succeeds in showing you a person - a mouthy, beguiling, very funny girl, but one with normal worries about spots and weight and boyfriends. An ordinary North London Jewish girl who happened to be blessed with a world-class talent. When we first hear it, as she sings happy birthday aged 14, the voice is so incredible you wonder if it’s really coming from her. It seems transcendent, a divine gift. Such a talent had to rise and there is a thrill in seeing her gain a record deal and then recognition. And even though we know what’s coming and see the flaws (an attraction for weak men, an addictive personality) that will crack and break her later, we still will her to make it. We almost don’t hear it when she suggests, long before the tidal wave of fame hits her, that she won’t be able to handle it. Much later, she will say -‘If I could give it all back just to walk down that street with no hassle – I would’ – but by then it’s too late. If fame is the condition of being known, usually on account of a notable achievement, it seems that it actually leads to a state that is its very opposite. Being renowned is not being known at all. Fame with its empty chatter, easy confessions, senseless compliments and boring confidentialities, dehumanises people on both sides of the equation; it even requires us to depersonalise the famous so that we can feel we own them; so we can shout out their names, reduce them to an image, make them a thing. In the lyrics of this North London Jewish girl it’s possible to detect a spiritual ancestry in the Psalmist. He would use ‘the bad situations in life’ to sing of his woes to the one he believed truly knew him. She may have sung about rehab and lamented treacherous lovers, but her addictions contained the same craving for a deeper rehabilitation, and a better definition of personhood. I think she would have appreciated the Psalmist’s song: ‘O lord you know me and even before a word is on my tongue you know it completely.’ For in the cries of both these singers we hear the desire to be truly known.