She immediately started drinking again 'to get the thing going. She woke up bleary-eyed at 5.30am, still drunk from the night before. She had her last piss-up on the morning of April 19, 1978. Judy, the golden voice of Stephen Sondheim's Send In The Clowns as well as Amazing Grace, has exorcised many demons in her long life: alcoholism, depression, her attempted suicide, her son's suicide, among them. But it is a compelling illness, because it will take you down whether you want to go there or not.' I had a couple of medical situations which meant I wasn't allowed to drink, and I was a good girl so I didn't. And I never tried to control my drinking. 'I would drink anything,' she smiles, those famous blue eyes sparkling in the sunshine. 'I stopped drinking because I was dying,' Judy says now with a loud-ish laugh. Judy Collins – who recorded her first album A Maid Of Constant Sorrow in 1961 when she was just 22 – was headed for the same early grave as Joplin with her heavy drinking. Janis said to her: 'One of us is going to make it, and it's not going to be me.' Not long after, in October 1970, a very drunk Janis died of a heroin overdose in room 105 of the Landmark Motor Hotel in LA. They were both wired on booze, were both alcoholics. One summer night in 1968, Judy Collins ran into fellow singer Janis Joplin at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. There were evenings tinged with a madness – GBH of the liver and the mind – particular to the times. There were many such late nights in Judy's career in the late Sixties and Seventies. I would stay up and talk to Bill until 2.30 in the morning and think, 'My God, when is this man going to let me get to bed?'' 'For eight years,' she wrote in her 2011 book, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life In Music, 'I went in and out of the White House like I owned it. Judy, who sang it at President Bill's 1993 inaugural ball, became friends of the Clintons, often sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom. A certain Bill and Hillary Clinton were so inspired by hearing Collins' 1969 recording of Chelsea Morning that they named their daughter Chelsea. Collins won a Grammy award for her version in 1968. Mitchell famously sang Both Sides, Now over the phone to Judy, who cried when she put the phone down, so overwhelmed with inspiration was she. She also became something of a superstar herself along the way. Judy, who is playing shows in Ireland in two weeks, recorded Cohen's Suzanne and Mitchell's Both Sides, Now when they were relative unknowns and gave them exposure to go forward into the legends they are today. This indomitable 74-year-old woman, of course, launched the careers of everyone from Joni Mitchell to Leonard Cohen. ''It's not doing it',' she laughs now, nearly four decades later. So he wrote this song which was supposed to get me back.' 'And he was very insistent all the time on everything and I was not having it.

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