She was a big drinker from the start, drinking shots rather than wine or beer, and usually ordering doubles. Jack Daniel’s was her favourite tipple when she started frequenting the Mixer. Then she developed a taste for sambuca, vodka, tequila and Jägerbombs – a shot of the green liqueur Jägermeister in Red Bull. After a while she was drinking everything mixed together in a pint glass. Although physically small, Amy could consume huge quantities of booze, drinking ‘flat out’, as former Mixer bar-keep Bradley Leckie recalls: ‘Everyone got pissed. Everyone would fall over,’ he says, of the nights he spent with Amy in the Mixer and afterwards at her flat, where the party would continue until dawn. ‘You’re young. You have fun, don’t ya?’
That summer – the summer of 2004 – Amy got falling-over drunk many times. One night she banged her head so badly that a friend took her to hospital, and then to her father’s house in Kent to recuperate. According to Mitch Winehouse, there was a meeting as a result of this accident with Amy’s managers, Nick Godwyn and Nick Shymansky, who spoke to him about Amy’s ‘drinking problem’. Mitch writes that Godwyn suggested Amy should go to a rehabilitation centre, which was apparently the first time the idea had been raised.* Amy said she didn’t need help, and at first Mitch agreed. Still, she was persuaded to visit a rehab centre in Surrey. Amy made this brief visit the subject of her song, ‘Rehab’, in which she describes her interview with a counsellor who asked her why she was drinking, and suggested that she might be depressed. She agreed sarcastically, ‘and the rest!’ In life, as in the song, Amy was told that the treatment programme lasted seventy days, which she considered out of the question. ‘No! No! No!’ she told the therapist. Then she left the clinic. Amy believed that only she could deal with her problems.
Amy turned 21 in September 2004. Although she’d had a busy year, Frank had not been a hit and her recording career seemed in danger of petering out. Mitch appeared concerned. It seemed to matter less to Amy, who carried on in her own sweet way, singing for fun as much as for money, hanging out in the Good Mixer, drinking, playing pool and flirting with men who took her fancy, which was how she met Blake Fielder-Civil.
4
The love of Amy’s life was born Blake Fielder in Northamptonshire, on 16 April 1982, making him seventeen months older than her. His father was a restaurateur named Lance Fielder. His mother, Georgette, was a hairdresser. The Fielders were living in Spain when Georgette became pregnant. She came home to Britain to have the baby and, after an acrimonious break-up with Lance, took the child to live with her parents. Blake had little contact with his natural father while he was growing up. He came to see Georgette’s new husband, teacher Giles Civil, as his dad, and took his surname.
Georgette considered Blake to be an unusually clever child and had high expectations for him. He was privately tutored at primary level, and when Giles Civil got a job at a prep school in Surrey, Blake was enrolled as a pupil. It was at this stage that Blake started to go astray. He disliked the prep school and was apparently upset when his mother and stepfather had another son, when he was ten, a third when Blake was eleven. The arrival of these half-siblings made Blake feel left out, in addition to which he became conscious of the fact that Giles wasn’t his genetic father, which also unsettled him. In later life, Georgette questioned whether she had let Blake down as a mother. As an adult, Blake formed a closer bond with his natural father and went by the hyphenated surname Fielder-Civil, later reverting to his real father’s surname.
The Civils moved to Lincolnshire where Blake attended grammar school. He had lost interest in his studies by this time and left school at seventeen to go to London – to get away from home, he says. This is seemingly when Blake first used drugs. He worked in a hairdressing salon in the capital, sharing a flat with a girlfriend, but the job didn’t last, and his mother lost track of where he was staying because he moved so often.
Blake had long been told that he was talented, and he harboured ambitions to be a novelist. Like Amy, he read literary fiction. Lolita was his favourite book – later Amy gave him a valuable first edition. Blake aspired to be a writer in the style of Nabokov or, more so, William S. Burroughs, who documented his experiences as a drug-user in Junky and other books. It was some time before Blake grasped that he didn’t share Burroughs’s talent, only his weakness. ‘I had to accept that the only similarities between me and Burroughs was the ingestion of drugs,’ he wrote to this author, describing this as a ‘devastating’ realisation. As a young man in London, Blake still harboured literary ambitions. While he waited for them to come true, he worked for a video production company and hung around the bars of Camden Town. He dressed to match the hipsters on the scene, getting tattooed, using drugs and altering his speaking voice, that of a grammar-school boy from Lincolnshire, so that he sounded like a Londoner. Young men he met in the capital tended to distrust Blake. ‘I could see why people wanted to kick his arse,’ says Good Mixer barman Bradley Leckie. ‘He seemed to get along better with the chicks …’
Women found Blake attractive. ‘He was definitely a figure in Camden … definitely seen as a Jack the lad,’ says Sarah Hurley, landlady of the Good Mixer. Amy and Blake first set eyes on each other one day in the Good Mixer when Amy was playing pool. She loved to play pool, and was good at the game. She saw a pale young man, tall with short dark hair and a skinny but muscular physique, his arms smothered in tattoos. Amy loved tattoos. She’d recently added a tattoo of her grandmother, Cynthia, in the form of a 1950s pin-up, to her right shoulder, balanced by a horseshoe and the words Daddy’s Girl on her left.
They exchanged looks. Blake asked a friend about Amy. His friend told him he was ‘ten years too young and the wrong colour’ for Amy, who had been dating an older black man, but he was wrong. ‘God almighty, she found him sexy! There was a hell of a lot of lust there,’ says Sarah Hurley, who watched the romance unfold. ‘Blake was very popular [with women]. And [he] found it very hard to stay faithful, but for Amy it was a challenge. And she got him … she really wanted him, and she got him. She liked to vaguely mother him, definitely, but she loved being his woman. He was the man and she was the woman. She liked that role. I think that was very important to her. Even though she went out onstage and did what she had to do on her own as a woman, at the end of the day she wanted to be his woman.’
Not long after they met, Blake moved into Amy’s flat in Jeffrey’s Place where drugs became an issue. Mitch Winehouse believes that Blake was smoking heroin in the flat at this early stage in the relationship, and that he offered Amy cocaine. It is unclear whether she tried it at this point. Alcohol and marijuana were her drugs of choice. When she sang about ‘blow’ (cocaine) and ‘puff’ (marijuana) in ‘Back to Black’ she was describing Blake’s and her own respective drug preferences. But it would have been in character for her to try cocaine.
The first crisis in the relationship came when Amy discovered Blake was seeing an ex-girlfriend. Amy was in despair, weeping and drinking herself insensible. Mitch invited Amy on holiday to Spain with himself and his second wife in the hope that his daughter would benefit from the break. No sooner had they arrived than Amy was on the phone to Blake discussing a reunion.
When she wasn’t on the phone to her lover, she was writing songs about their relationship. She composed three important Back to Black songs in Spain, ‘Love is a Losing Game’, ‘Wake Up Alone’ and ‘You Know I’m No Good’. These are dark love songs, written in original and poetic language that showed a new maturity. Gone was the sassy young girl of Frank. Amy was now a woman, as passionate about love as Janis Joplin, and likewise as prone to depression.
In ‘Wake Up Alone’ Amy evoked the misery she suffered after Blake went back to his ex. She wrote that she tried to keep busy during the day, to save herself from thinking about him and from drinking. But after sunset depression descended like night. The writing is sophisticated. In a few words Amy managed to evoke all the agony of an unhappy love affair, laced with lust and self-doubt. We see Blake as a vision swi
mming before her eyes, mesmerising her in a sexual fantasy. She wants to ‘pour myself over him’ – an appropriately liquid image for a sex dream, and for a boozer. None of this is tacky. One of Amy’s achievements as a songwriter was to address sex in a way that was explicit and erotic, but not seedy. Her honesty saved her from sounding cheap. Indeed, the song is romantic. When Amy sings of the moonlight coming into her room, she evokes a scene reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, in contrast to the depression of waking up alone at the start of a new day. With this and other songs written at this time, Amy showed herself the equal of the best female songwriters of the twentieth century, as good as Carole King or Joni Mitchell.
The third love song written in Spain evokes what was, no doubt, in Amy’s mind, the alluring image of Blake in his ‘skull T-shirt’, sleeves rolled up to reveal his tattoos. With this song Amy displays her talent for unusual images and rhymes, finding unexpected rhymes for Tanqueray gin and Stella Artois lager, and creating a convincing picture of pub life in the process. One can almost smell the booze, and taste the junk food consumed on the way home to soak it up. There is also a reference to the casual violence so common in London when young people drink. Amy refers to her lover tearing men apart, as if it turned her on to watch Blake putting the boot in. Like Ray Davies of the Kinks, Amy did not attempt to sound transatlantic in this and other songs. She wrote and sang about her London life in vernacular English, which added to the sense that she was telling the truth. And part of that truth was that she didn’t like herself. The title of this song said it all: ‘You Know I’m No Good’.
Amy got back with Blake when she returned to London. The couple were a familiar sight in Camden, lurching down the street hand in hand, or with their hands buried in each other’s back pockets, lanky Blake with his gargoyle face towering over tiny Amy, who had recently taken to wearing her hair in a beehive. She looked happy when she was with him.
Apart from frequenting the local pubs the couple would often pop into Pat’s News near Amy’s flat where Amy would buy tabloid newspapers, rolling tobacco and Rizla papers for joints, as well as the kind of cheap chews school children enjoy. Amy’s favourite sweet was strawberry laces. There was always a childish side to her (though it is also true that drug-users develop a sweet tooth). Blake got into trouble with the Patels who own Pat’s News when he appeared to take sweets from their shelves without paying. When Vidia Patel protested, she says Amy scolded Blake and paid for him. ‘[Amy] would tell him, “Don’t do that in this shop.”’
During the early stage of the romance, in the late spring of 2005, Amy and Blake went to an exhibition of landscape paintings by John Virtue at the National Gallery. The exhibition made a big impression on the lovers. Then they broke up. A short time later, when they were apart, Blake returned to the gallery to have another look at the exhibition and was surprised to find Amy there. It felt as if they were meant to be together, and so they were reunited.
Although some people take the view that Blake latched on to Amy because of her success, as some believe Courtney Love set her cap at Kurt Cobain for the same reason, friends see these relationships as true romances. They may not have been healthy love affairs, but they weren’t without substance. ‘I think he did love her. From what I could see, they seemed very happy. He was affectionate,’ Sarah Hurley says of Blake and Amy. ‘If she got up, his eyes would follow her.’ Like many lovers, the couple used pet names for each other. Amy was Lioness, because she was wild like a lioness. He was Christopher Crocodile. To demonstrate the sincerity of her love Amy had another tattoo applied to her much decorated torso. She asked Mirek vel Stotker, at Eclipse in Camden, to draw a pocket over her heart, and above the pocket she had him ink Blake’s. Blake felt flattered.
Then they argued, and broke up again. It became a wearisome pattern. This time it was Amy who told Blake to go, taking up instead with a mild-mannered chef named Alex Clare, whom her girlfriends liked and thought good for her, but whom Amy seemed to find a little dull. It was Blake she craved. Blake was her obsession, and he was the inspiration for the album that made her a star.
* Godwyn gave a different account of this in a 2011 article for The Times, stating that the first attempt to get Amy into rehab came after her initial break-up with Blake Fielder-Civil. This seems incorrect. She didn’t meet Blake until 2005.
Six
EXCESS
‘I wonder, Madam,’ replied the Doctor, ‘that you have not penetration enough to see the strong inducement to this excess; he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.’
Samuel Johnson on drunkenness
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The week after the Monterey Pop Festival, the Jimi Hendrix Experience performed at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West in San Francisco. Big Brother was in town at the same time. It is said that Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin got it together backstage at the Fillmore, presenting the intriguing vision of two principal 27s in an intimate encounter. Even at a time of free love, Jimi and Janis were notably promiscuous. Janis propositioned men on a daily basis – often men who were obviously unsuitable – as if to prove to herself that she was attractive. She boasted of her exploits, announcing onstage that she had slept with two thousand men, more or less, ‘and a few hundred chicks’. There were countless one-night stands for Jimi, too, though there was more to his relationship with Janis than sex.
‘They had a closer connection. They were trying to have a romance,’ says Jimi’s friend Anthony Atherton. ‘I was in San Francisco with him and we went to Janis’s place. But they had another thing going on: a working relationship that was really close. Janis just fell in love with his style of music.’ Atherton believes that racial prejudices prevented Janis and Jimi being a more public, stable couple, though their work schedules were probably a bigger issue.
Jimi worked incredibly hard. Many of his associates blame Michael Jeffrey – who managed the Experience with Chas Chandler initially, then bought Chandler out – for greedily overworking the guitarist. The tour schedule Jeffrey set the Experience on was relentless, even by the standards of the 1960s when bands generally worked harder than they do today. Musicians used drink and drugs to cope with the strain of constant travelling and performing, which was one of the reasons drugs began to play a major part in Jimi’s life. There were additional reasons.
In his memoir, Are You Experienced?, Jimi’s bass guitarist Noel Redding wrote that he, Jimi and the drummer Mitch Mitchell were all of the opinion that they had to be ‘properly stoned to play properly. Good dope equalled good music …’ Many contemporaries shared this view, which is a variation on the belief common among artists of all kinds that they need to maintain habits they have developed to function creatively, whether it be the novelist who claims not to be able to write without a cigarette, or Amy Winehouse who feared she would lose the ability to compose songs if she submitted to therapy in order to stop drinking. The belief that drugs were essential to creating good music was particularly prevalent in the rock community of the 1960s, and partly explains the fatality rate. There was even a competitive culture in which rock musicians vied with one another to see who could take the most dope, as young men will indulge in drinking contests (by and large such behaviour is the folly of men). So, Jimi and his band took an astonishing amount of drugs. Noel Redding reports that they returned to Britain from their first US tour, in August 1967, ‘very pissed. Very stoned. Very shattered.’
In contrast to the Experience, the Rolling Stones were taking an extended break from touring, which was fortunate for Brian Jones, who was in no state to perform. His drug abuse had escalated alarmingly since he had lost Anita Pallenberg to Keith Richards and, ironically, since being busted for drugs. Brian’s nerves were shot and, although he was still young, his face was haggard under his mop of blond hair, while the bags under his eyes had become darker and heavier. Yet he still had admirers.
Brian was dating two models, Suki Poitier, who had been with the Guinness heir Tara Browne the night Browne died in a car cra
sh, an accident that had partly inspired the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’, and Amanda Lear, who recalls Brian as being extremely neurotic. ‘I’ve never seen anybody so complex.’ This is quite something, coming from a woman widely believed to have started life as a boy.* ‘Everything was taken wrong, in the wrong sense. He wouldn’t go out if the wind was blowing his hair. He had to have that hair style, with that heavy fringe covering his [brow]. On top of it he was putting a hat. So he was all day long with my blow dryer getting his hair together, and he was afraid to go out, and to be seen in the daylight. I don’t know, he was so full of complexes! And at night he was having nightmares when he was asleep. He was waking up screaming, “Where am I? Who are you? What are you doing here?”’
Within a month of the Monterey Festival, worried about his forthcoming drug trial, Brian checked into a clinic. From now on Brian used private clinics like hotels. Amy Winehouse was the same, often frequenting the same establishments decades later, demonstrating that while patients come and go the lucrative business of looking after unhappy people rolls along indefinitely. Brian was in such a bad way that he was referred to the Priory Clinic in Roehampton, south-west London, for more specialist treatment. Amy, too, would find her way to the Priory.
Brian’s criminal case came before the Inner London Sessions on 30 October 1967. The Crown didn’t proceed against his friend and co-defendant, Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, and Brian’s not-guilty plea to possession of Methedrine and cocaine was accepted. However, he had little choice but to plead guilty to possession of cannabis, and to allowing his home to be used for smoking the drug, only hoping that he would be spared a custodial sentence. In his defence, Brian’s barrister told the court that his client had suffered a nervous breakdown since his arrest, and had been under the care of psychiatrists at the Priory. Dr Leonard Henry gave evidence that Brian was depressed and agitated to the point of incoherence, and had had to be tranquillised. The doctor believed that if he was sent to jail he might go into ‘a psychotic depression … and he might well attempt to injure himself’. A second psychiatrist, Dr Anthony Flood, concurred. Nevertheless, the chairman of the court made an example of Brian, sentencing him to nine months in prison. Brian was taken directly to Wormwood Scrubs, but freed on bail the following day after his psychiatrists came before an appeal-court judge.
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