Amy Winehouse´s death

HER life was a drama played out on a tabloid stage, her death a tragedy watched by millions.

Yesterday, Amy Winehouse's funeral became the last act of her short, unhappy life to go under the spotlight: a family's sorrow performed in private and watched by all.

There were moments when it was possible to think this was just the sad tale of a family that had lost a daughter. "Goodnight, my angel," said her father, Mitch, in his eulogy. "Sleep tight. Mummy and Daddy love you ever so much."

Such unbearable tenderness: then, at the cremation afterwards in north London, when the reporters and the fans and the photographers sticking their cameras over the wall outnumbered the mourners inside, and the traffic slowed to a halt because no one could get past, it became just another stop in the celebrity culture travelling circus.

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• Dad pays tribute to 'happy' Amy The Daily Telegraph, 16 hours ago
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• Family, friends farewell Winehouse NEWS.com.au, 1 day ago

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Stuck in the traffic? Never mind, open the sunroof, stick your phone out the top and take a picture anyway.

An elegant, middle-aged woman passing the sorry tableau outside Golders Green Crematorium muttered under her breath, "It's tragic, all this shit -- it breaks my heart." Then she stopped and took a photograph of all the crowds, to remind herself of how horrible it was.

"The girl was just this lost soul," she explained. "She was a genius, and geniuses cannot cope with reality. I take a photograph of these people because I am in shock. They are like hyenas."

Yet for all the media madness, Winehouse's funeral still had tradition, and family, at its heart.

The day began with an Orthodox Jewish funeral service in a synagogue in Edgware: Winehouse, despite her feistiness and rebellion, was always a woman who recognised tradition.

The mourners, who included her mother, Janis, and brother Alex, Kelly Osbourne, Mark Ronson, the producer responsible for the Back To Black album, and her boyfriend, Reg Traviss, heard prayers in Hebrew and English before listening to a eulogy from Mitch, the former cab driver who instilled in her a love of jazz.

He told stories of her childhood, snapshots of a headstrong girl who became a headstrong woman: an Amy everyone in the Edgwarebury Cemetery instantly recognised. "It was emotional, it was funny," said a family spokesman. "There were a lot of tears. But it was a celebration."

He also talked of her recovery, and how she had been happier recently than she had been in years, and even said she had been planning a future together with Traviss, a filmmaker.

At the end of the service, they played Carole King's So Far Away which, the congregation was told, had been Winehouse's favourite record. Sing along, the congregation was told: they did.

"Holding you again could only do me good," went the song. "How I wish I could, but you're so far away."

While the Edgware service was a relatively dignified occasion -- only the most dedicated of the media made it to the furthest reaches of suburban north London, and none of the fans -- the cremation at Golders Green was another matter: crowds, ladders, photographers there since seven in the morning to get a good spot.

Sammy Berman, 15, had turned up with his mother and brother. "We are going to miss her voice," he said. "She was iconic."

But why had they come? "We are here because we wanted to just witness stuff," he said. "We wanted to feel the emotion of what was going on. And to do that we had to attend this event."

What will happen to Winehouse's ashes afterwards has not been confirmed. A report claimed they were going to be mixed with those of her grandmother, Cynthia Winehouse, who died in 2006. The family spokesman could not verify that, but did say the decision to hold the cremation at Golders Green had been because Cynthia, who had been close to her granddaughter, had been cremated there.

The final leg of what felt like the Amy Winehouse Farewell Tour of North London took the congregation back to Winehouse's roots in Southgate, for the wake at the Southgate Centre for Judaism.

Bemused locals came out of their homes opposite to see what all the fuss was about.

Nothing, they might have been told. Just a headstrong girl who used to sing along to Carole King with her dad. She's dead now.

THE TIMES