Amy Winehouse found dead

London, July 23: British singer Amy Winehouse, whose hit single Rehab became the anthem for troubled celebrity culture, has been found dead at her home in north London.

Police confirmed finding a 27-year-old woman’s body at a home in Camden Square, north London, after being called by ambulance services around 3pm. The cause of death was not immediately known.

London Ambulance Services said Winehouse died before the two ambulance crews it sent arrived at the scene. A spokesperson for the singer could not immediately confirm she had died.

Winehouse was born on September 14, 1983, to Jewish taxi driver Mitch Winehouse and his pharmacist wife Janis, but the family had a history of jazz musicians. Soul singer Tyler James discovered her at the age of 16 and in 2003, her debut album Frank was released to general acclaim.

Winehouse shot to fame with the October 2006 release of her second album Back to Black, whose blend of jazz, soul, rock and classic pop was a global hit. It won five Grammys and made the singer — with her black beehive hairdo and old-fashioned sailor tattoos — one of music’s most recognisable stars.

The album’s hit single Rehab contained the line: “They tried to make me go to rehab. I said ‘No, no, no’.”

“I didn’t go out looking to be famous,” Winehouse said at the time. “I’m just a musician.”

But in the end, the music was overshadowed by fame, and by the diva’s demons. Tabloids lapped up the erratic stage appearances, drunken fights, and the stints in hospitals and rehab clinics. Her performances became shambling, stumbling train wrecks, watched around the world on the Internet.

Winehouse’s health often appeared fragile. In June 2008 and again in April 2010, she was taken to hospital and treated for injuries after fainting and falling at home.

Her father said she had developed the lung disease emphysema from smoking cigarettes and crack, but her spokeswoman later said Winehouse only had “early signs of what could lead to emphysema”.

She left the hospital to perform at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday concert in Hyde Park in June 2008, and at the Glastonbury festival the next day, where she received a rousing reception but scuffled with a member of the crowd. Then it was back to a London clinic for treatment, continuing the cycle of music, excess and recuperation that marked her career.

Winehouse grew up in the north London suburbs and was set on a showbiz career from an early age. When she was 10, she and a friend formed a rap group, Sweet ’’ Sour — Winehouse was Sour — that she later described as “the little white Jewish Salt ’’ Pepa”.

She attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School, a factory for British music and acting moppets, later went to the Brit School, a performing arts academy, and was originally signed to Pop Idol Svengali Simon Fuller’s 19 Management.

Music critic John Aizlewood attributed her trans-Atlantic success to a fantastic voice and a genuinely original sound.

“A lot of British bands fail in America because they give America something Americans do better — that’s why most British hip-hop has failed,” he said. “But they won’t have come across anything quite like Amy Winehouse.”

Winehouse’s rise was helped by her distinctive look — black beehive of hair, thickly lined cat eyes, girly tattoos — and her tart tongue.

She was famously blunt in her assessment of her peers, once describing Dido’s sound as “background music — the background to death” and saying of pop princess Kylie Minogue: “She’s not an artist... she’s a pony.”

The songs on Back to Black detailed break-ups and breakdowns with a similar frankness. Lyrically, as in life, Winehouse wore her heart on her sleeve.

“I listen to a lot of ’60s music, but society is different now,” she said in 2007. “I’m a young woman and I’m going to write about what I know.”

Even then, Winehouse’s performances were sometimes shambolic, and she admitted she was “a terrible drunk”. Increasingly, her personal life began to overshadow her career. She acknowledged struggling with eating disorders and told a newspaper she had been diagnosed as manic depressive but refused to take medication.

Although she was often reported to be working on new material, fans got tired of waiting for the much-promised follow-up to Back to Black.

Occasional bits of recording saw the light of day. Her rendition of The Zutons’ Valerie was a highlight of producer Mark Ronson’s 2007 album Version, and she recorded the pop classic It’s My Party for the 2010 Quincy Jones album Q: Soul Bossa Nostra.

She was investigated for smoking crack cocaine in 2008 and fined for assault in 2010. In May 2007, she married music industry hanger-on Blake Fielder-Civil, but he went to jail for assault six months later. They divorced in 2009.