At 6am on a bleak October morning in 2006, I was driving down the North Circular in London to a job I hated. I usually kept the radio low, a background murmur to keep me focused on the road. But that morning I turned up the volume allowing the buoyant bassline from Amy Winehouse’s Rehab to reverberate through my Ford Ka.
As Amy’s rich voice conveyed the depths of her despair, I stared blearily at the empty road ahead and wondered how I’d taken such a wrong turn. It was a disorienting time for me. Two years out of uni, I’d accepted a job in the back end of London’s Docklands area, in a freezing cold, windowless office, staring at four giant screens to check whether any of the world’s stock exchanges had technical faults.
My shift pattern meant I would wake at 5am, then endure a male colleague relentlessly monitoring me – the way I had to monitor those blinking screens. From two desks behind, he would send me Myspace messages with inappropriate observations about how tight my outfits looked. But it was better money than my previous job, an admin role that had been sold to me as a graduate media position.
And perhaps it would look good on my CV if I just surrendered to the grownup notion of a sensible job in finance. (Who did I think I was, expecting to be paid to pursue my passion as a writer anyway?) Maybe one day I’d be able to clear some of my debt and move out of my parents’ house. But I hadn’t seen my friends, who were partying every night in east London, for more than six months. In my bleakest moments, I’d will a minor car accident on my drive in, in the hope I wouldn’t make it to my desk.
The moment in Rehab when a man tells Amy he thinks she’s depressed had never felt so close to home. The weekend after I first heard the song, Amy’s album Back to Black was released, and I rushed to HMV to buy the album on CD. Delving into her storytelling, I was astonished at her unflinching brilliance, but I should have known.
Amy and I grew up on parallel tracks. As a teenager, she’d play pool with my brother at our local pub in Whetstone, north London. We were both suburban girls who wanted something different, and found it in little retro dresses, tattooed men and raucous nights in Camden.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
