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I Said No, No, No.

Just a quick one, but we inadvertently flicked on to the coverage of the Grammys the other night and saw a bit of Amy Winehouse. She sounded pretty awful, as she always seems to do whenever I see her on TV (I once had the misfortune to see her performing some kind of hideous duet with Charlotte Church that was just about the most tuneless thing I’d ever heard, and although this was bad, it wasn’t quite that bad). So I was wondering if someone out there in the big wide internets could explain the whole Amy Winehouse thing to me?

I wouldn’t want to suggest that TV talent shows should be held up as the barometer of good taste, but if she turned up at an X Factor or Whatever Idol audition and gave a performance of the kind she regularly gives on TV, she’d be one of the deluded fools that gets laughed out of the room. So how is it that she’s lauded to the hills with awards and things?

Now of course I know that the Grammys are the most ridiculous and self-congratulatory back-slapping awards of all, with so many categories as to render any success utterly meaningless (“Best Studio Tea Making (Non Classical)”, “Best Yodelling (Country)”…) and they always remind me of that scene in the B-Sharps episode of the Simpsons where Homer chucks his award out of his hotel window and the kid who finds it (“Hey! an award”) throws it back into the dumpster (“Ah, it’s only a Grammy…”) but she seems to have won several of the things, which is usual for a British artist. So this means that someone somewhere must have (a) bought her records in significant quantities (in so far as anyone really buys records any more) and/or (b) paid money to see her perform. Who are these people? I don’t believe I know anyone who has ever paid money for the music of Amy Winehouse* Do you?

[* Yeah, I know Sal and I accidentally ended up in the same field as her at Glastonbury this year, and that, even if we hadn’t done, a portion of our ticket price would have contributed to her gak habit anyway, but surely her imminent self destruction can’t be entirely funded by festival ticket sales–there must be other people making a more direct contribution. Seriously. Who are these people?]