As an artist, in the 21st century, in a “loud” news culture, your career can
be marked by one of two things: high-grossing artistic endeavours, or
crises. Some artists are all about 100 per cent artistic endeavour:
Radiohead, say, or Dame Judi Dench. They never do drugs off a Picasso, or
ride a tramp around a private member’s club like a horse. Not even for a
“conceptual” pop video; or their birthdays. They just turn in a quality
product, which meets a huge audience.
Others, equally obviously, are pretty much all crises: yer Lindsay Lohans and
Pete Dohertys and Tara Reids. However much of an audience these artists
might have reached with their “output”, it is dwarfed by the audience
they’ve reached with headlines about their car crashes, overdoses, love
triangles and smelly, unwashed hair.
From a purely PR point of view, handling an artist who can “do both” – span
both artistic endeavour and crisis – is the ideal blend: perhaps in a ratio
of, say, 65 per cent creating the music of the spheres, 35 per cent punching
snooker player Willy Thorne in the face during an argument about parking
restrictions.
This combination gives you a healthy spread of coverage in both the tabloids and
Newsnight. The Rolling Stones, say (record-breaking world tour, but Keef
falls out of a coconut tree on to his head and nearly dies), or Madonna
(makes the album of her career, then almost provokes a diplomatic crisis
adopting an African baby). They allow us to gossip, but then conclude with
something like: “But still. Eh. They’ re the best live party band in the
world, innit.” They don’t make us do nothing but bitch.
They allow us to be connoisseurs and fans, too.
And so to Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse. Blimey O’Reilly, what a week for the
ladies. One understands why both Winehouse and Allen are vexed at being
continually lumped in with and played off against each other – sighing about
sexism and “all women looking the same to you”. But, at the same time, the
roughly concurrent launches of their careers, and subsequent parallel
developments in profile, have tied them together in the popular imagination
in much the same way as the Beatles and the Stones – or, more prosaically,
Jesus Jones and EMF. Not least in this exciting week, when Winehouse has
been arrested, while Lily Allen has announced that she is pregnant.
Of course, one doesn’t wish to imply that having your first child is in any
way an experience comparable to being arrested in connection with an alleged
bribery plot – you get only a maximum of ten years’ misery for trial-fixing,
ha ha – but both seem telling conclusions to the ladies’ extraordinary,
frenetic and high-profile years.
If, ten years ago, you had said that female pop artists would outnumber male
artists, and that the charts would, finally, be dominated by women – Girls
Aloud, Leona Lewis, Rihanna, Britney, Madonna, Sugababes, Katie Melua,
Beyoncé, K. T. Tunstall, Kate Nash, and, of course, Allen and Winehouse – no
one would have believed you. Around the time of the boys-only Britpop, it
finally seemed to be accepted that however much you might try and
desperately promote your Louise Weners of Sleeper and Justine Frischmanns of
Elastica, and try and fulfil your “birds in the paper” quota, women just
didn’t have the chops like the men, and people like Kate Bush and P. J.
Harvey were just freaky genetic one-offs.
However, women are now both finally finding their feet artistically, and
starting to rival the classic male rock heroes in their “excess”. If you
think about it, within the pantheon of rock behaviour, Winehouse and Allen
aren’t that extraordinary. After all, they haven’t married a 13-year-old
(Jerry Lee Lewis), killed 49 condors in a forest fire (Johnny Cash) or
murdered their girlfriend (Sid Vicious). And both are, without doubt,
extremely talented and charismatic artists. Winehouse, in particular, is
shaping up to be one of the definitive artists of her generation, and not
least in respect to her hair, which has revolutionised women’s attitude to
both volume, and possible levels of total blackness.
What does separate Winehouse and Allen from the rock gods, however, is both
gender and era. Although it is a good time to be a female pop star, it is,
in general, a bad time to be a high-profile female. In a nutshell, the
pressures are immense and unparalleled. Imagine, for a moment, a world in
which the Beatles had been photographed, in every minute of their existence,
by a pack of screaming Eurotrash paparazzi on mopeds – and were also subject
to a shrill, constant, daily barrage of comments about how fat their arses
were, and how raddled they looked, even though they were only 22. In fact,
John Lennon was ONCE referred to as “the fat Beatle”, and was so distraught
about it that he semi-retired, retreated to Weybridge, and spent all his
time taking acid and eating only corn-flakes. Just ONCE. And he was John
LENNON.
Within the shifting, constant, high-pitched dust clouds of their day-to-day
existence – headlines about anorexia or fat calves here, ex-boyfriends
selling them out to tabloids there – it would be hard for either Winehouse
or Allen to appraise their situations with any measure of cool-headness.
They’re 22, for God’s sake. Who knows anything at that age? You may as well
expect a sane and productive life decision from a wooden cat.
So these latest, Christmas crises are, in their odd ways, Winehouse’s and
Allen’s attempts to have a break. For Winehouse, living a life of
high-profile addiction will mean that, at some point, she ends up in some
manner of institution – whether it be prison or rehab. That’s ultimately
what you are causing to happen if you are a drug addict. You want to
abnegate responsibility. After all, people don’t start taking heroin to
engage with life. They take it to retreat. They take it to, in a strange,
addled way, have a holiday.
And by deciding to have a baby, Allen is – like Britney Spears before her –
ducking out of facing international management teams, record companies,
promoters and tour agents, and saying “I, Lily Allen, need to have a
six-month holiday”. Instead, she’s having a baby – because no one can argue
with a baby.
Who knows, ultimately, if these tactics will work? Who knows if ending up in
rehab, or having a child at 22 with your boyfriend of three months, is a
good idea? People have lived stranger lives. I once had a lifetime
revelation lying on the floor of a Novotel in King’s Cross, crying because
I’d just found an ancient, dust-covered sausage under the bed. I have to
say, I wouldn’t have put money on that at the age of 16.
But what it means for Winehouse and Allen in the meantime is that ratio of
“artistic endeavour” to “crises” lurches ever more to one side.
