Natalie Cole may be music royalty, but should that give her carte blanche to issue royal decrees? Amy Winehouse, Cole maintains, should not have been given any Grammys – least of all the stellar five she managed this week – because Cole disapproves of her.

“I think it sends a bad message to our young people who are trying to get into this business,” she said. “We have to stop rewarding bad behaviour.” Cole would have preferred clean-living Beyoncé or Rihanna to have won, not just because of their undoubted talent but because “they’re great people and their heart is in the right place”. “It’s a slap in the face to artists who work very hard that they give it to someone who really obviously doesn’t have a grasp of what she has.”

Cole herself has had quite a life. Now 58, she grew up in an affluent area of Los Angeles and has said she thought of her family as being the “black Kennedys”. Her father, Nat King Cole, who died when she was only 15, was one of the first African-Americans to have his own TV show, and the young Natalie first sang on it when she was 12 (though not without doing an audition first).

“I probably got bitten [by the performing bug] that night,” she has said. “I’m like ‘Oh, I like this’.” Unsurprisingly, when she embarked on a professional singing career she laboured for years under the title of “daughter of”. But her first album, Inseparable, won her her first Grammy in 1976 for Best New Artist, and she followed it over the years with seven more. It was Cole who put an end to Aretha Franklin’s nine-year unbroken run of winning Best R&B Female Vocalist.

But along the way she had developed the addiction to LSD, cocaine and heroin that led to her being admitted to rehab twice, the first time in 1983 when she spent six months in a clinic in Minnesota. Drugs, she has said, were socially acceptable in music circles and pretty much everyone did them. “But then there were those of us who had that inclination to really get sucked in. I have that inclination.” In rehab, she says, she learnt how to grieve for her father, and to like herself for the first time.

Clean since 1984, Cole has been married three times and has a grown-up son, Robbie, a musician who now tours with her. In spite of her sometimes chaotic personal life, she has an undeniably impressive back catalogue of 20 albums, and singles ranging from cleverly orchestrated duets with her late father to Wild Women Do in the movie Pretty Woman. The latest album, Forgiveness, is slated for release in May, and there have also been forays into acting, including an acclaimed role in Grey’s Anatomy.

“I think,” Cole has said, “that I am a walking testimony that you can have scars, you can go through turbulent times and still have victory in life.” She might remember that the next time she seeks to deny victory to others.

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