Emma Cowing: Her music inspired; death at 27 does not

THERE was a time, around three years ago, when it was impossible to get away from pictures of Amy Winehouse. The paparazzi had set up camp outside her London home, and Winehouse was forever emerging for late night drunken, drug-fuelled forays around London, every cough and stumble of which were faithfully recorded by photographers.

Her emaciated body, clad in tiny denim shorts and bra, with that large beehive and those grubby, blood-stained ballet pumps, she was instantly recognisable as the talented singer-songwriter who had so violently gone off the rails.

In those pictures, she is often tear-stained and unfocused, waving a cigarette around, a pitiful image that still, even now, has the power to shock.

Now that Winehouse is dead, I fear that this is the image of her that will live on. When we have forgotten that she sold 15 million albums, or that she was the first British female to win five Grammy awards, we will remember the drink-soaked, drug-addled, shuffling figure whose image popped up so regularly in the tabloids and showbiz magazines. If there is any doubt that this might be the case, you need only look at the vast numbers of cigarette packets, bottles of vodka and beer cans that have been left at the makeshift shrine that has been built outside her house in Camden Square since her death last Saturday.

When she was alive, Winehouse's life had come to epitomise a certain type of fragile destruction. The tortuous love affair; the distinctive outfits and hairstyle; the never-ending drug addiction; the prodigious boozing - and all the while producing this extraordinary jazz music with dark, excruciatingly personal lyrics and the voice that sounded like it came from another age.

For many young people, it was an intoxicating cocktail to be worshipped, a glamorisation of drink, drugs and excess to be rivalled only by her male counterpart, and friend, Pete Doherty, and reminiscent of the lives of fellow members of the "27 Club", such as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

Over the last few days, hundreds of people have turned up outside Winehouse's home to publicly declare their love and worship of the singer for her following her death. Alongside the empty bottles of alcohol notes have been left that talk of Winehouse as an "inspiration" and "special".

I find such sentiments chilling. There was nothing at all inspiring about a lost, self-destructive drug addict who failed countless attempts at rehab and refused to accept the help that so many, including friends, family and management, tried to give her.

There is nothing inspiring about dropping so much weight that your figure becomes skeletal, nor having a "legendary" capacity for drinking vodka, nor having such a violent relationship with your husband that you regularly - so her stylist related this week - smash two television screens a month.

And there is absolutely nothing inspiring about going shopping wearing a pair of bloodied ballet pumps because you have just finished injecting heroin between your toes.

Too quick, these days, do we attempt to glamorise the sordid, the dark and the dangerous. Winehouse was seen as an antidote to the bubblegum popstrels that dominated the charts, and was marketed as such - a new, more grown-up icon for impressionable teenagers and young people. What is perhaps most frightening, is just how successful that marketing campaign has been.

At the end of Winehouse's video to her most famous song, Back to Black, she is shown dropping a handful of earth on to a grave. In the original version, the grave read "Here Lies Amy Winehouse" - but the image apparently upset the singer so much that it was removed. Perhaps Winehouse realised then, the road to destruction that she was on. For the sake of her fans, let's hope that these events have shocked them into realising that there is nothing glamorous about dying at the age of 27.