Amy Winehouse became more helpless with every photograph

Amy Winehouse was found dead at home at 3.54 p.m. last Saturday afternoon. A day earlier, a Norwegian gunman had let off a bomb in central Oslo, shooting youth workers and teens in a national horror-show that was still ongoing. For a couple of hours, editors deliberated who they should ‘go with’ as the top story. In the ‘hierarchy of death’, as one commentator grimly put it, was Anders Behring Breivik bigger than the sadly predictable demise of the dark star of British pop?

Not for the tabloids, who hungrily ‘went’ with the 27-year-old singer. They splashed her across the front pages, the Star, the Mirror, the Sun, the Express, reliving the drink and the drugs and desolate divadom: mawkish, hawk-like tributes complete with commemorative posters and pictures of the flowers and beer cans outside her ‘£2 million mansion’ in Camden, north London. Breivik was the bigger scoop, but the tabloids always ‘went’ with Amy.