Celebrity addicts are a special case; they activate, through media obsession, all available circuits of admiration, envy, and schadenfreude.

But in what is most interesting about the piece is not what it says about celebrity, but what it says about talent. The music she left was marked by an emotional intensity that made her a rarity among pop singers.

I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction.

All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they are not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but unignorable veil.

Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his speedboat, there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they are looking through you to somewhere else they would rather be.

And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.

He left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
Me and my head high
And my tears dry
Get on without my guy

You went back to what you knew
So far removed from all that we went through
And I tread a troubled track
My odds are stacked
I’ll go back to black

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to…

I go back to us

I love you much
It’s not enough
You love blow and I love puff
And life is like a pipe
And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to…

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to…

Black, black, black, black, black, black, black,
I go back to…
I go back to…

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to…

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to black