The day the music truly died
She didn’t. It’s a year ago today that she died in her house in Camden, not from crack or heroin, which she had kicked, but from vodka. Booze, that most acceptable of drugs, had killed her, aged 27.
She left only two albums, which took eight years to record — one good, one astonishing. She could not be rushed, could not write songs to order. She didn’t write as much as gestate — months of brooding, then a song delivered fully formed, straight from her head. Such was her genius. The more pain she was in, the more heart-stopping her music. “My destructive side has grown a mile wide,” she sang, in what now sounds like a premonition.
