Whitney Houston: Angel brought down by her demons

HER voice was fit to grace a chorus of angels, and helped define the sound of a generation of female singers. Yet in a painful battle through the last 15 years of her life, it was Whitney Houston’s demons that won out.

Born into a preternaturally talented family, she was the daughter of gospel singer Cissy Houston, the cousin of Dionne Warwick, and the goddaughter of Aretha Franklin.

From the age of five, Houston’s voice would reverberate around New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, learning and interpreting a rich canon of work. By her teens, she had synthesised the music of gospel with pop, singing back-up vocals for the likes of Jermaine Jackson.

She was soon spotted in a Manhattan nightclub by Clive Davis, the head of Arista Records. So taken was he with her poise and delivery, he signed up the 19-year-old.

Allied with a formidable team of songwriters, her eponymous debut album became the biggest-selling release by a new artist when it hit record stores in 1985, and featured songs such as the Grammy-winning Saving All My Love for You.

Houston’s career went into the stratosphere, and she enjoyed seven consecutive No 1 singles in the US, wresting a record long held by The Beatles.

Her greatest success came when she crossed over to the silver screen, courtesy of 1992’s The Bodyguard, the soundtrack to which shifted 44 million copies.

The same year, Houston married R&B singer Bobby Brown, and had a daughter, Bobbi Kristina, in 1993. It was a tempestuous and troubled union: Brown was envious of his wife’s success and their relationship became characterised by abuse.

But Houston said they belonged together, telling Rolling Stone in 1993: “You see somebody, and you deal with their image, that’s their image. It’s part of them, it’s not the whole picture. I am not always in a sequined gown. I am nobody’s angel. I can get down and dirty. I can get raunchy.”

The hint at a darker side to her personality was to prove sadly prescient. Cocaine, marijuana and pills entered her life and by 1996 she was using daily, a habit that would rob her voice of its range and timbre.

Houston divorced Brown in 2007, and she went to rehab twice before declaring herself drug-free to Oprah Winfrey in 2009. The damage, however, had already been done.