Amy Winehouse and many others perform at Nelson Mandela show

Amy Winehouse actually showed up and performed at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday concert in London tonight.  Winehouse performed “Rehab” and “Valerie” for the 45,000 people in the audience. She also stuck around to sing “Free Nelson Mandela” along with the other performers.  Organizers of Friday’s concery feared Winehouse would be a no-show for the concert after she failed to attend a scheduled photocall on Thursday.  However Winehouse (derisively nicknamed the crackie of Camden)  according to reports looked remarkably tanned and healthy compared to her ghoulishly pale complexion of recent times.

Other acts that performed included Queen, Razorlight, Leona Lewis, Annie Lennox, reggae singer Eddy Grant, girl group Sugababes and African artists including Emmanuel Jal, Johnny Clegg and Papa Wemba.  Josh Groban and the Soweto Gospel Choir also performed at the event, which comes 20 years after a 70th birthday concert for an absent Mandela at London’s Wembley Stadium. Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist, had at that point been imprisoned in South Africa for 25 years. He told Friday’s crowd that that concert made a big difference in his eventual release and the fight against the racist system, which was dismantled in the early 1990s.