Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston...what is it with all of these troubled stars dying right on schedule? Anna Nicole, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, now this - with the exception of the Heath Ledger death which came out of left field, it's all been very predictable. I don't think we've seen this frequency of deadly celebrity flame-outs since the late Sixties/early Seventies era. Now it's all prescription drug combinations instead of heroin overdoses.

I always felt, with Houston, that despite her impressive instrument, her choice of material was ho-hum. Quite a number of the pop divas - Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, Celine Dion - can sing just fine technically, but unlike operatic sopranos, they haven't got a quality repertoire at hand; their vocal pyrotechnics would tend to overwhelm the Great American Songbook, and the stuff that is written specially for them to show off with is frequently quite lame. They need someone to minister to their voices the way that Burt Bacharach so memorably did with Dionne Warwick, writing excellent and musically complex songs (Tin Pan Alley meets Ravel, Donald Fagen once said) that were tailored niftily for her vocal style.