27

by Howard Sounes

  Kurt appeared at Courtney’s side in Cedars-Sinai with a gun, reminding her that they had made a suicide pact. They argued over who should go first.

  ‘I’ll go first, I can’t have you do it first,’ Courtney told Kurt.

  Kurt gave her the gun. Courtney held the weapon and reflected on what it would mean to leave Frances without parents. She had second thoughts and tried to talk Kurt out of the pact.

  Kurt became angry. ‘Fuck you,’ he said, ‘you can’t chicken out. I’m gonna do it.’

  But neither did. Courtney gave the gun to their friend Eric Erlandson for safe keeping. Kurt wandered off to get more heroin. Amazingly, this mad scene was taking place in hospital.

  Kurt and Courtney’s fears came true when social services intervened in the care of Frances Bean after the publication of Vanity Fair, which sent them into another suicidal depression. The authorities wouldn’t let them take the baby home without supervision, only allowing Frances to leave hospital when nannies were in place to care for her. Kurt and Courtney would have to go to court to get exclusive custody of their daughter. Meanwhile, Courtney protested that the Vanity Fair article was mostly ‘unsaid and untrue’, which was not a denial of the central allegation, and the publishers stood firm. In retrospect the article reads as fair and balanced, showing Courtney to be a complex character who, for all her faults, came across as more rational than her husband, who raged hysterically in the aftermath of the affair that he wanted to track down journalist Lynn Hirschberg and murder her dog, ‘then shit all over her and stab her to death’.

  In the wake of this mess Nirvana went back on tour in Europe and the United States, the US tour bringing Kurt home to Washington state and a family reunion reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix’s Seattle homecoming. Nirvana was playing the Seattle Center Coliseum in September 1992 when Don Cobain showed up backstage. Don hadn’t seen Kurt for seven years. He had made repeated efforts to contact his son, but had been rebuffed. Now that they stood face to face Kurt seemed to have nothing to say to his dad, nothing pleasant. He apparently told Don to ‘shut the fuck up’ when he spoke to Courtney in a way Kurt didn’t like. As with other 27s, one of the fundamental relationships in life, between child and parent, was broken.

  It was time for Nirvana to record their third album. Kurt had some powerful new songs including ‘Serve the Servants’, which addressed his relationship with Don. Kurt rasped that he had wanted a father in his life, but unfortunately ‘I had a dad’. This was a sharp rebuke to Don, delivered with a typical economy of language. Kurt went on to sing that he didn’t hate his old man anymore, suggesting that the subject of divorce had become boring. Yet it was the event upon which he brooded, the quagmire from which grew the weird tree of his adult life, his drug abuse, his rage, and his obsessions with guns and suicide, among the strange fruit it bore.

  Kurt wanted to call the new album I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.

  * Though her gender at birth has been the subject of much debate, Amanda Lear has always denied being a transsexual. See Source Notes, page 322.

  * An earlier album, Big Brother and the Holding Company, was released on the minor Mainstream label in 1967.

  Seven

  DISTRESS

  What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

  Søren Kierkegaard

  1

  Drinking was a problem for Amy Winehouse long before she became a notorious alcoholic. In the period between the release of her first album, Frank, and her second, Back to Black, the record that made her a star, Amy steeped herself in booze, and then she started using hard drugs.

  One of Amy’s haunts was the Ten Room at the Café Royal on Air Street in London, a private club run by two veterans of the music scene, Patrick Alan and John Altman, for the entertainment of their fellow musicians and celebrity friends. Alan and Altman recognised that Amy had great talent. ‘Amy sings with a low register,’ explains Patrick Alan, whose career credits include working with the Drifters and Michael Jackson. ‘Because she has that nice meaty bottom end when she goes to her highs it’s really impressive … It just moves you.’ But drink sometimes got the better of her. ‘With Amy, I could see early on that she drank,’ says John Altman, who jammed onstage with Jimi Hendrix in the sixties as he now jammed at the Ten Room with Amy. ‘Sometimes she would get up and she’d be unable to perform, [or] I’d have to play through a lot of what she was singing to keep her on track, because she’d lose her place, because she was drunk.’

  At this stage in her career Amy would sing at private functions and small venues in Britain and abroad to boost her income. In the summer of 2005 Patrick Alan got Amy a gig with fellow singer Natalie Williams in Greece. Unfortunately, Amy started drinking as soon as she arrived in Skiathos and passed out drunk backstage during the interval on the first night. ‘[They] couldn’t wake her up,’ says Alan, who had to deal with the irate promoter. ‘They were supposed to do three nights. He was so upset, he sent her home the next day [without pay].’ This was a foretaste of trouble to come.

  Amy had always suffered mood swings, and drink made her more volatile. When she sang in aid of charity at the Cobden Club in London in November 2005 she was in a particularly grumpy mood, telling her audience to be quiet and leaving the stage after three songs. Her surgeon cousin Jonathan Winehouse was in the audience, and once again he felt concerned. ‘I saw in her all of those things I’d learned in medical school,’ he says, noting a decline in Amy’s health and behaviour that worsened over the next few years into what he calls a ‘stepwise deterioration’. ‘[People] talk about her death being totally unexpected, but if you actually look at the history of what she did, and study the chronology of what she did, you’ll see that stepwise deterioration. Sometimes she was able to hold it together, and other times she wasn’t, and she ended up at the point she ended up, and died. There’s a lot of denial, unfortunately, both with her and the people around her as well, and that’s half the problem with alcoholic people.’ Again, Jonathan tried to talk to Mitch Winehouse about his concerns. ‘He just wasn’t receptive to hearing it.’

  In truth, it wasn’t easy to tell Amy what to do. She hadn’t forgiven her manager Nick Godwyn for trying to get her into rehab after Frank was released. ‘After that my relationship with her definitely changed. She hadn’t wanted to go, didn’t think she needed it and she lost her faith in me,’ Godwyn wrote, after her death. Amy dropped him and signed with a new management firm, Metropolis Music, run by Raymond ‘Raye’ Cosbert, who ingratiated himself by sending Amy champagne and getting friendly with Mitch at football matches. Amy grew fond of her ‘Raye-Raye’, as she called him, but Cosbert struggled to impose discipline on his artist. Perhaps nobody could. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, God couldn’t manage Amy Winehouse,’ says musician and filmmaker Don Letts, a mutual friend of Amy and her manager. ‘Raye did the best he could … It was more about damage limitation, trying to guide her.’ And, when all was said and done, Raye Cosbert guided Amy to worldwide success with her second album.

  Amy had been writing songs for the album throughout her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, and after they broke up. When it came time to record she collaborated with a DJ and producer eight years her senior. Like Amy, Mark Ronson had been born in London to a Jewish family. His was wealthy and well connected. Relatives included two former British government ministers, Lord (Leon) Brittan and Sir Malcolm Rifkind. After his parents divorced, Ronson’s mother married Mick Jones of Foreigner and settled with her children in New York, where Ronson established a recording studio. Amy paid him a visit in March 2006.

  Amy showed Ronson the lyrics to ‘Back to Black’ and he came up with chords that fitted, thus completing the song. Amy was delighted and extended her stay in New York so they could work together further. They were out shopping one day in Manhattan when she told Ronson the story of how her management had tried to get her into
rehab, explaining how she had replied emphatically and repeatedly in the negative. No. No. No. ‘It was so funny, the way she said it,’ Ronson said. ‘I was, like, that could really be a song, you know.’ To set Amy’s words to music, he drew on their mutual love of classic American soul, taking Amy to Brooklyn to record with the Dap-Kings, a band who lived for this music. They recorded six of the eleven songs on Back to Black at the Dap-Kings’ studio, including ‘Rehab’, ‘You Know I’m No Good’, ‘Love is a Losing Game’ and ‘Back to Black’ itself. Amy recorded the rest of the album with Salaam Remi in Miami, with overdubs in London.

  All the tunes on Back to Black are catchy, the Ronson songs in particular having a retro feel without degenerating into pastiche. Although the songs were recorded by two producers the album is cohesive, while the way it was made with musicians playing live in the studio, as opposed to using sampling and digital tuning, was a return to a traditional way of recording. ‘We do a lot of these recordings but this one stood out because it sounded so real. It was all live drums and live rhythm section, [and] because so much of it these days is programmed, it was almost old-fashioned,’ says Jamie Talbot, who played tenor sax on ‘Rehab’. ‘You go in and it’s the same old, same old, boy bands and this sort of thing, kids that are making records and they are just being processed, and they sound like it. But this sounded real. It was an honest, old-fashioned pop song. It was great.’

  The lyrics matched the quality of the music. Amy became a poet of song on Back to Black, relating the story of her romance with Blake in original and evocative language that brought each stage of the affair to life, from the initial sexual excitement and joy to the pain of separation and resulting depression. The darker aspects of the relationship give Back to Black its tone. At times Amy sounds distraught, almost mad with grief. There was another event in her life during the making of the record that contributed to this downbeat mood. Her grandmother, Cynthia Winehouse, died of cancer in May 2006.

  Amy’s writing talent shines through all the tracks on Back to Black, but her vocabulary is particularly interesting on ‘Me and Mr Jones’. In this song Amy invents a word, ‘fuckery’, to describe the unreliability of her lover, asking: ‘what … fuckery is this?’ This twist on a well-worn vulgarity – simple, yet very expressive – may earn Amy a place in the Oxford English Dictionary in time. She sang the line beautifully, with a raised eyebrow of contempt for a man fallen below expectations, as so many men had and would. Yet Amy wasn’t perfect. She was indulging in fuckery by the summer of 2006, by sneaking around behind her boyfriend’s back with her ex.

  2

  Blake was using cocaine, crack and heroin by the time he and Amy starting seeing each other again that summer, behind Alex Clare’s back, and they were soon using hard drugs together. Pandora’s box was opened one day when they were in a pub in the West End of London listening to tracks from the forthcoming album, songs about Blake, of course. ‘I think I had a little bit of coke, one of my pals had a bit of coke, and she wanted some,’ Blake said, in a 2009 television interview, in which he gave an unusually detailed and direct account of their drug history. ‘As far as I know, she only took it on certain occasions. She didn’t always take it when I was with her. It took months – six, seven, eight months – before she got bad.’

  During this period, photographer Mischa Richter and stylist Lou Winwood visited Amy at her Camden flat to discuss the photo shoot for her new album cover. Amy was in the bath when the photographer arrived at Jeffrey’s Place. He waited downstairs in the living room, chatting to Alex Clare. ‘And all of a sudden I heard water dripping,’ he says. ‘I look up and there’s a big hole in the ceiling and water is rushing out of this hole.’ Clare and Richter ran to get pans to catch the water. As they did so Amy sauntered downstairs with her hair in a towel, ‘and paid no mind at all to the fact that water was pouring down,’ laughs Richter. ‘I loved that.’

  Amy looked very different from the girl who had made Frank. Most obviously she had lost weight. Lou Winwood says that when she first dressed Amy in 2003 she had worn size ten or twelve (UK), fairly small but not unhealthily so. Now Lou was obliged to go to children’s shops to find items for Amy to wear because she was so thin. Amy had also perfected her image. She had a preference for 1950s-style clothing. She had many more tattoos than previously, up and down both arms, which she liked to show off in short-sleeve tops; she had refined her Cleopatra eyeliner, and had taken to adding extensions to her hair, which she piled up in a tower. These elements came together to create a unique look that became familiar to millions of people.

  Lou brought a selection of tiny garments to Mischa Richter’s north London house a few days later for the Back to Black photo shoot, but there was no sign of Amy. Instead of getting an early night so she would look her best for the most important photographic session of her life, not to mention wanting to be on time (she rarely was), she had partied until dawn after a wedding in Essex and crashed out in a country hotel where she was finally located. A driver was sent to collect her. She tipped up belatedly at Richter’s house in Kensal Green very much the worse for wear. ‘When she arrived I was having to pick coke out of her nose, and stuff like that,’ says Lou, ‘brush her up a bit.’

  The cover photo for Back to Black was taken in the front bedroom of Richter’s house, which happened to have a black carpet and a cupboard he’d painted black for his children to chalk on. The use of the black room with its blackboard was a happy accident: Richter didn’t know what the album would be called. The chalk marks on the board had been made by his five-year-old daughter, Elsie, and her friend, Honer, whose name can be deciphered on the CD sleeve. The inside pictures of Amy in a purple top were taken in the back garden, while the shots of Amy in a red and white dress were taken by the front door. Having started the day hung-over, and in a difficult mood, Amy had loosened up by the time these pictures were taken, becoming coquettish and chatty with the photographer as she perched on his garden wall, one hand behind her head, showing a bit of leg, looking like a Reader’s Wife. ‘She’s talking about Blake this whole day, and how it was a bit naughty of her … She was full of Blake,’ says Richter, who felt sorry for Alex Clare, ‘because I thought he was cool and I liked him … She was saying to me, “I’m doing something [bad]. I don’t care. I’ve got to see him.”’

  Amy’s sneaky affair with Blake continued while she assembled a band to promote Back to Black. As her musical director, Amy hired bass guitarist Dale Davis, whom she knew from the Ten Room, and he helped her select seven more musicians, mostly men with a jazz background, including two horn players and two backing vocalists, Ade Omotayo and Zalon Thompson. A third horn player was added later, and sometimes Amy worked with three singers. In keeping with the retro sound of her songs, the musicians wore suits and ties for the stage, which was dressed to look like an old-time jazz club. Musicians came and went from Amy’s band over the next five years, but Davis, Omotayo and Thompson remained constant, while several others served long stints. Amy endeared herself to her band. She didn’t set herself apart from the musicians, although she was clearly the boss. She chose them and paid their wages, cheques coming from her company, often signed by her mother. Amy’s knowledge of music, her love of singing and her sheer talent impressed everybody. ‘Many times she made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up on end, just down to the timing of her phrasing,’ says Aaron Liddard, who played tenor and baritone saxophone and flute with the band.

  Drummer Nathan Allen, a veteran of the Frank band, was one of those who were taken aback by how much weight Amy had lost. ‘I was like wow. I didn’t say anything. But, yeah, there was a drastic change.’ Amy explained her altered appearance by saying she was using the gym more often, confiding in Aaron Liddard that she was exercising to cope with mood swings. ‘She knew she was bipolar, and she knew how to deal with it healthily,’ says Aaron, who was himself slightly bipolar. ‘I think I was asking her why she was going to the gym all the time, she don’t need to lose any weight. S
he’s like, “I don’t do it for that. I do it because it helps me to feel stable. I’m self-medicating. That’s why I go and do it. It makes me feel good.”’ This was not the whole story. In truth, Amy suffered with eating disorders. She binge-ate and then made herself vomit.

  Amy also spoke about drugs. ‘She knew that if she ever started doing Class A, it would kill her,’ says Aaron. ‘She said, “I don’t do weed anymore. I just do alcohol. I won’t do any A-Class. I’m too addictive a character. If I did A-Class, I would like it too much and it would kill me.”’ Again, it seems that Amy wasn’t being entirely candid. Or perhaps she was expressing a desire to keep off drugs. She had already started to use cocaine with Blake, and never really stopped using marijuana. But alcohol was still her preferred drug. A drink with the band and crew after the show was a social pleasure that helped draw everyone together. ‘We’d all go out and get plastered,’ says production manager Dave Swallow, pointing out that this is what young people typically do in Britain. ‘She was out there having fun. She was getting paid to sing in front of people. What do you expect?’ These were indeed fun times, before the stress of her career overwhelmed Amy. She travelled with the boys, typically sitting up late on the tour bus as they drove through the night to the next gig, singing to the accompaniment of Dale Davis. The songs were like lullabies sending the rest of the band to sleep.

  Yet Amy was a nervous performer who found talking to her audiences surprisingly difficult, considering how witty she was. Like Janis Joplin, she got into the habit of having a drink before the show to settle her nerves. Then she started to drink on stage. As the shows wore on, and her glass was refilled, she became erratic. The musicians noticed that Amy could drink a bottle of vodka in no time, with a thirst that went beyond having fun, and decided it was better not to drink in front of her lest it encouraged her. But nobody seemed able to tell Amy when she’d had enough, including her father.