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The sun rose shortly after five in London on Saturday, 23 July 2011. It was another glorious summer’s day, the sort of day when one wants to be up and about. Andrew went to check on Amy at around ten. He called her name first and knocked at her bedroom door, opening it when she didn’t answer. He saw Amy lying on her bed and assumed she was asleep. ‘It wasn’t unusual for her to sleep late in the morning.’ So he left her.
Over in Marylebone, Reg Traviss rose late and went into Soho to get his hair cut and collect a suit from his tailor. He and Amy were due to attend a wedding on Sunday and he wanted to look his best.
Andrew Morris still hadn’t heard any sounds from Amy’s room by mid-afternoon, ‘which seemed strange’, so he went back upstairs.
He found Amy lying on the bed exactly as she had been hours before. ‘I checked her pulse, but I couldn’t find one.’ Instinctively Andrew glanced around for evidence of drugs – Amy’s old problem – but there was nothing of that sort, just the vodka bottles.
Andrew called an ambulance at three fifty-seven. He said on the phone that he thought his boss had had a heart attack. As he waited for assistance he saw Amy’s friend, Tyler James, coming to the gate and let him into the house, telling him not to go upstairs. Minutes later an ambulance crew arrived. ‘There was no pulse,’ confirmed paramedic Andrew Cable. ‘I noticed rigor mortis.’ Amy must have been dead for several hours. She was declared so shortly after four o’clock.
Andrew made a round of desperate telephone calls: to Amy’s doctor, to Reg Traviss, and to Amy’s father in New York. The ambulance service summoned the police. Officers recovered three vodka bottles from Amy’s room, two large bottles and a small one. All were empty. Amy may not have drained them all in her final hours, but the autopsy revealed that she had drunk a very large quantity of alcohol.
To appreciate how much alcohol Amy had consumed, drinkers appear tipsy with concentrations of 30–50 milligrams of alcohol per decilitre of blood; the drink-drive limit in the United Kingdom is 80 milligrams per decilitre; drinkers become uncoordinated at 50–150 milligrams; they become slurred, confused and unsteady on their feet at 150–250 milligrams; and they have difficulty in staying awake at 250–400 milligrams. Amy’s blood alcohol level was 416 milligrams per decilitre of blood, with still higher readings in her urine and vitreous humour.* A pathologist explained at her inquest that this was a toxic level of alcohol associated with death: enough booze to depress Amy’s central nervous system and bring about respiratory arrest, which is what, he said, had probably happened. The coroner recorded a verdict of misadventure, saying that Amy had died ‘as a result of alcohol toxicity’.† In short, she drank herself to death.
By the time Reg Traviss arrived at Camden Square, the police had sealed off the house. He would next see his girlfriend in the morgue. The press had started to gather behind the police tape as the news broke:
Amy Winehouse – dead at 27.
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Amy’s life had been so chaotic in recent years that her death was not unexpected. Yet it came as a shock to those who knew her, and it was a major news story around the world.
The fact that Amy had died at 27 was seized upon by journalists as one of the piquant aspects of the case: she was the latest in a series of iconic music stars whose short, gaudy lives had ended at that particular age, a series of fatalities usually traced back to 1969 when Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones drowned in his swimming-pool. Jimi Hendrix choked to death in a London hotel the following year. Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin three weeks later in Hollywood. Jim Morrison was found dead in his bath in Paris in 1971. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana shot himself at home in Seattle in 1994. All were 27.
When Kurt Cobain died a reporter knocked at the home of his mother, Wendy O’Connor, who remarked ruefully: ‘Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club.’ The term coined by Mrs O’Connor in her grief, encompassing all the stars who had died at 27, was widely quoted in reports of Amy’s death seventeen years later. ‘Tragic Amy joins rock’s 27 Club,’ read a typical headline in Britain’s Mail on Sunday, while the Washington Post referred to ‘rock ’n’ roll’s most dangerous number’. There were also references to the ‘curse of the 27 Club’. With many of these stories – and in the chatter on television, radio and online – there was an inference that supernatural forces may have driven the musicians to their graves, with some commentators citing an astrological concept known as the Saturn Return as a malign influence; the less excitable said it was just a coincidence.
The 27 Club is, essentially, a media construct based on a coincidence. It is also a flippant, even vulgar term. Nevertheless the phrase is widely used and understood, and these deaths are intriguing. The question is: are there common factors, apart from coincidence, that help explain the death of Amy Winehouse and the five major rock stars who died before her at 27?
Before getting into the detail of these lives it is helpful to know whether the 27 Club deaths are statistically significant. The Big Six, as I shall call them, are not the only pop musicians to have died at 27. There are scores more. Over the years various lists have been published to support a theory that a disproportionately large number of artists have died at this age. To test the theory I compiled a list of 3,463 people who died between 1908 and 2012 having achieved notoriety in popular music. The first date marks the earliest notable 27 death I could find in the modern era, that of ragtime pianist Louis Chauvin (1881–1908); while 2012 is the year I began writing this book. I counted jazz as well as pop and rock musicians, also songwriters, record producers, managers, promoters and other people who achieved fame in the music business, or by connection to it, but excluded classical musicians, who would have enlarged the survey enormously. I tended to focus on Anglophone artists, but included non-English speakers who achieved renown. For simplicity I refer to all these people as musicians (or artists), although, as noted, some were not professional musicians.
The youngest person to die in my cohort of 3,463 artists was fifteen years old. The oldest was 105. It was not uncommon to find artists dying in their twenties, with 29 individuals dying at 25, for instance, and thirty at 26. Confounding my scepticism I found a sudden and dramatic increase to fifty deaths at age 27. The figures then fell back to 32 deaths at 28, 34 at 29 and so on, the numbers not exceeding fifty until middle age. From the early forties deaths rise with age, as one would expect, to a peak in the sixties, before falling again. This is best illustrated by a graph.
Graph Showing a Spike in Music Industry Deaths at 27
Age at Death
The figures, and the graph, seem to verify the theory that something strange is happening with musicians at 27, but this may be a hasty conclusion. The graph also reveals other spikes: a smaller spike at 21, and substantial spikes at fifty and eighty. Nobody writes about the 80 Club, of course. The death of an octogenarian is no surprise.
It is also true that by looking for members of the 27 Club one is likely to find people who fit the theory. Because this survey was drawn from published sources it relies upon subjective decisions as to the choice of lives worth recording. The attention the 27 Club has received, especially since the advent of the Internet, means that almost every musician who dies at 27 is identified and inducted into the Club; if a musician of equal achievement (or lack of) dies at a different age their death may go unnoticed. As conscientious as I was, checking death certificates to eliminate mistakes, and discounting the most obscure artists who had died at 27, knowing they would pass without mention in normal circumstances, my survey is still probably skewed by what statisticians call the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. A Texan who is a bad shot blasts away at the side of his barn, then draws a target around some bullet holes that happen to cluster together, declaring himself to be a sharpshooter.
After Amy Winehouse’s death an Australian academic, Professor Adrian Barnett, and colleagues, set out ‘to test the 27 Club hypothesis that famous musicians are at an increased risk of death at age 27’
. Instead of simply listing stars by age of death, as I and others have typically done, Professor Barnett and his associates compiled a list of all the musicians who achieved a number-one album in the United Kingdom between 1956 and 2007, including those still alive. The cohort amounted to 1,046 individuals, only a proportion of whom were ‘at risk’ at 27 in that they were successful at that age (many didn’t achieve success until they were older). Of this lesser number only three had died at 27, a virtually identical rate to ages 25 and 32 in this survey. ‘There was no peak in risk around age 27,’ the statisticians concluded, adding that the 27 Club ‘has been created by chance and cherry picking’.
There are shortcomings to the Australian research. The sample of musicians is narrow, excluding some of the most famous 27 Club artists because they didn’t happen to have a number-one album in the UK between 1956 and 2007 (Hendrix, Joplin and the Doors didn’t, surprisingly). Yet the survey does give an idea of the risk of death at 27, which most 27 Club lists don’t, and the risk is apparently normal. This is borne out by a look at the hundreds of artists inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame over the years, living and dead, only eight of whom have so far died at 27.*
Nevertheless, six of the biggest names in popular music died at that age, along with another 44 individuals (listed in the Appendix). The fact that a cluster of very big names died at 27, at the height of their fame, is what makes the 27 Club the phenomenon it is. While the fact that they all died at this particular age is undeniably coincidental, there are fascinating common factors that help explain why they all died young.
In the first place rock stars tend to die younger than the general population. In 2007 academics at Liverpool John Moores University made a survey of pop stars who had enjoyed success with an album rated as one of the all-time top 1,000 pop albums (based on a book by musicologist Colin Larkin). In the 25 years following initial success, those musicians were two to three times more likely to die than the general population. Drugs and alcohol were associated with more than a quarter of the deaths, which is crucial to understanding the 27 Club, but not the whole story.
Looking at my long-list of fifty artists who died at 27 only five (ten per cent) died of natural causes while drink and/or drugs played a part in eighteen deaths (36 per cent), nine of which were from straightforward drug overdoses. Amy Winehouse was one of four who drank themselves to death, while a combination of drink and drugs did for four more, including Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and, probably, Jim Morrison. Drugs were also significant in Kurt Cobain’s death. Death was seemingly accidental in every case, except Cobain’s. But some deaths are more accidental than others.
The most straightforward types of accident account for the second largest number of deaths, fifteen members of the 27 Club (thirty per cent), most of whom died in road accidents. Travel is part of the professional musician’s life and travel is hazardous. It is likely that some of those fatalities were under the influence at the time; others were the victim of other drivers’ carelessness, or bad luck. There are also less common accidents: two musicians – organist Wally Yohn and singer Maria Serrano Serrano – died in plane crashes, and Roger Lee Durham of Bloodstone was thrown from a horse. Eight 27s were murdered, a high proportion being gunshot homicides of African-Americans, such as Randy ‘Stretch’ Walker of Live Squad, whose tunes included ‘Murderah’, and the rapper Raymond ‘Freaky Tah’ Rodgers. The bluesman Robert Johnson was also probably murdered when he died at 27 in 1938, apparently poisoned by a cuckolded husband. The high proportion of homicides among black American stars is in line with evidence that young African-American males are more likely than their white and female contemporaries to be involved in such violent deaths.
Kurt Cobain is one of five Club suicides. He shot himself after taking a massive overdose of heroin. Even though the evidence that Cobain took his life is clear and strong, some refuse to believe it. Kurt’s grandfather Leland Cobain argues in this book that his grandson was murdered as part of a conspiracy. Likewise friends and fans of Brian Jones say that he cannot have drowned by accident because he was too good a swimmer: he must have been held under the water. There are those who see hidden hands in the death of Jim Morrison, too. Throughout the story of the 27 Club there is reluctance on the part of family members, friends and fans to accept that such talented young people died in wretched and often banal circumstances. To suggest that they died because of their own foolishness is taken as an insult. It is even more egregious to suggest that they wanted to die.
Suicide is a taboo that offends and upsets people. It is widely denounced by religious leaders and has been treated as a criminal offence in many countries, including the United Kingdom where, until the Suicide Act of 1961, a Briton who attempted and failed to take their own life faced the additional misery of prison. Most people prefer to ignore this melancholy subject and look on the sunny side of life, devoting their energies to what Sigmund Freud called the ‘pleasure principle’. Yet Freud observed that ‘the death instinct’ is a counter-force to the pleasure principle, with human beings prone to destructive instincts, including suicide, which is more prevalent than one might think. A million people take their lives each year, according to the World Health Organization, making it the world’s fourteenth most common cause of death. The true figure may well be higher, because suicide is under-reported. Not all suicides leave notes to explain their intentions, and in the absence of clear evidence of the deceased’s state of mind, the authorities tend to record verdicts of accidental death or misadventure.
Several of the artists on the 27 Club long-list who met apparently accidental, drug-related deaths may have intended to die. For example, the death certificate of Al Wilson, of Canned Heat, records that he died of an accidental drug overdose in 1970. But Wilson had a history of suicidal behaviour, including suicide attempts, and at least one band member believes that he meant to take his life. There are likewise those who believe that Pamela Courson overdosed deliberately in 1974 so that she would die at the same age as her boyfriend, Jim Morrison, though her death certificate records an accidental overdose. It is also true that people rarely gas themselves in cars by accident, as the German musician Helmut Köllen apparently did in 1977; neither, generally, do they plunge to their deaths from high buildings by mistake, as the Russian singer Sasha Bashlachev reportedly did in 1988.
In this book I argue that all six principal members of the 27 Club can be said to have killed themselves, though they didn’t all do so as directly as Kurt Cobain when he shot himself. For the drug addict and the chronic alcoholic, the decision to be or not to be is drawn out over years, during which life becomes more tenuous to the point where death is likely, if not inevitable. Like all heroin users, Janis Joplin had several friends who died of overdoses. She had survived overdoses herself, knowing that she might not be so lucky next time. Yet she continued to use heroin until she overdosed and died. She may not have meant to die when she shot up for the last time, but if a drug addict or an alcoholic continues to indulge in negative behaviour in spite of the known risks they are, to some extent, ‘the author of [their] own end’, as Émile Durkheim wrote in his renowned study of suicide.
Durkheim noted that suicide is not a fixed concept. People define the word in different ways. In On Suicide, he concluded that the best definition is ‘the term applied to any case of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act, carried out by the victim himself, which he is aware would produce this result’. Amy Winehouse’s decision to continue drinking after being warned by her doctor that this might result in death was a ‘negative act’, by Durkheim’s definition, closely related to suicide, if not ‘a fully realised’ suicide, because Amy may not have meant to die at that moment. Indeed her doctor and the coroner at her inquest stressed that she did not seem suicidal. As with most of the 27 Club deaths (aside from Cobain’s: he wrote a note), it is of course impossible to know what was in her mind at the end. This is the enigma of many sudden deaths. It is, however, pl
ain that many of these artists, Amy included, were reckless and self-destructive over a period of years to the point of virtually throwing their lives away. And most were profoundly troubled in other ways.
Everybody knows that Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse used drink and drugs to excess. They were notorious for it. Why they behaved like this, what it was about them as people that made them self-destructive, is what this book is about.
Apart from the headline coincidence of dying at the same age, the Big Six were all intelligent and talented people. Most were also psychologically flawed and, in many cases, they had personality disorders, bordering on mental illness. The roots and early shoots of such problems are often found in childhood. Despite appearing confident, many were dogged by low self-esteem. The business they went into is conducted at entry level in bars, where drink and drugs are part of the culture, and they developed bad habits when very young. All achieved fame in a giddy rush in their early twenties, getting high to celebrate success, conquer stage fright, beguile longueurs and overcome self-doubt. They tended to pair up with lovers who shared their frailties, while being surrounded by professional exploiters in a business that fetishises dissolute young rebels. Bored of past achievements, but unsure of their future, these fragile people got into the habit of getting high until they couldn’t control themselves. With all six there is a sense that they were weary of life by the end – not all the time, perhaps: even the condemned man will joke with his jailer. But behind the brave talk they’d had enough.
That all these stars died at 27 is a coincidence. Living accelerated lives, they wore themselves out that fast. But behind the coincidence is a common narrative that helps explain why Jones, Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain and Winehouse exited life through Departure Gate 27, what Kurt Cobain’s friend Eric Erlandson describes as ‘that busy gate, the so-called stupid one’. Comparing their stories illuminates their individual fates, and helps explain Amy’s death in particular.