Amy Winehouse

In Norway last weekend one far-right fanatic slaughtered scores of innocent people - many of them little older than children. It was brutal, pre-meditated, home-grown murder. Not the work of international terrorists but a young Norwegian killing other young Norwegians in Norway - of all normally peaceful places. Here in Britain, the news was greeted with stunned amazement. Needless death always is. And then came the next item on Saturday's Evening News. Another tragedy. The death of yet another young person - the singer Amy Winehouse. True musical icons do not have to live long to attract critical acclaim. Amy Winehouse's voice alone made her different. It belonged to a girl in her twenties but sounded as though it had been matured in oak barrels. Her songs were dark. Her lyrics personal and telling. She wrote not of love and romance but of addiction, sex and every Jewish girl's favorite emotion -- guilt. The words oozed with regret and heralded her own decline. She had compelling talent and a single homicidal demon - a lifestyle guaranteed to destroy her. We might have guessed at some of her musical influences - Frank Sinatra, from whose ability she mimicked the art of breath control. Ella Fitzgerald, one of the all time jazz greats. And it was probably inevitable that she so much admired the songs of Billy Holiday - if not her life-ending addiction. But she was also attracted to the be-bop musical style of record producer Phil Spector, now a long-term inmate of one of your penal institutions. Music is not always the cleanest route to follow. What a waste. International acclaim in her mid-twenties. And nothing to show but a failed marriage, declining health, a distraught father and a pointless end. Only the pointlessness has any parallel with what happened in Norway where they are about to bury their dead. On Tuesday, Amy was laid to rest. 27 is too young to live, let alone to die. This is Ed Boyle for CBS News in London.