27

by Howard Sounes

  ‘I didn’t see him saying no. I saw him a couple of times, and it’s not like when we were in rehearsal and she was drinking her bottle of vodka he was going, “Hey, daughter, what the hell are you doing? Give me that.” No, he was just letting it happen,’ says Jay Phelps, who played trumpet with Amy’s band for a time. ‘Maybe she would have switched on Mitch if he had done something like that. But you know you do that as a parent. You have to be hard on [your children]. It’s not like she was a big ol’ thirty-odd-year-old woman who was completely experienced in life. She was still a young girl. [And] it didn’t seem like Raye [Cosbert] was doing too much. I can only say what I saw at the times when I was there, but I would’ve liked to have seen someone not give her a drink. Or say, “You can have just that, and that’s your lot until maybe after the gig.” Maybe after the gig, then let’s have some fun … But like before the gig, during the gig, after the gig, until you just conk out? You know, it’s a bit much.’

  The material was part of the problem. Amy had made a rod for her back with Back to Black, an album comprised of sad songs about her break-up with Blake. She was obliged to sing them every night, and she found ‘Back to Black’, ‘Wake Up Alone’ and ‘Some Unholy War’ particularly upsetting. So she incorporated lighter material in her set, including upbeat ska songs made famous by the Specials, usually ending with a romp through ‘Monkey Man’, which lifted the mood. ‘What she said quite regularly to audiences was, you know, “The trouble is I’ve written all these depressing songs, and I’ve got to go and sing them,”’ recalls Aaron Liddard. ‘The first two tunes were quite tough, and then you’d have about forty minutes of depression, and then finally you’d get to play “Monkey Man”, and “Monkey Man” was for all of us a release.’

  Interest in Amy and her darkly unusual album grew in Britain during the autumn and winter of 2006, the press seizing on her as a talented and entertaining new celebrity, who was photogenic, articulate and uninhibited. Her antics offstage started to make headlines. An early example came when Amy heckled Bono at the Q magazine awards in London in September, telling the U2 singer to shut up while he gave a speech. ‘I don’t give a fuck!’ she yelled. What wasn’t mentioned in the press coverage was that Amy was also rolling joints at her table at the Grosvenor House Hotel during the ceremony. ‘I mentioned I wouldn’t mind a spliff, and Amy pulled a big bag of weed [out of her handbag] and starts grinding up and making a spliff at the table,’ laughs Don Letts, who sat with her.

  In October Amy was invited onto Charlotte Church’s television show, filmed before a studio audience at the LWT building on London’s South Bank. A memorable day started with an interview for morning television – and a drink. ‘If I remember right she had a Jack Daniel’s with Coke at breakfast time, at nine o’clock in the morning. I don’t know why nobody said, “Don’t,”’ says Lou Winwood. ‘And then the record company took her out for a lunch … I think that turned quite boozy. Then we went to a pub and played pool. Then we went to Charlotte Church. Hence you can see at that point [she was drunk]. She had been drinking all day. But nobody stopped that. You want to keep her onside … people found it hard to stand up to her when she said, “I want another Jack Daniel’s and Coke.”’

  Amy was supposed to sing ‘Beat It’ with Charlotte Church, a big production number with horns and backing singers and a blitzkrieg of stage lights that would close the show. But she hadn’t learned the song and was so sloshed by the time it came to record that she couldn’t read the autocue.

  ‘Is she drunk?’ a stage manager asked her entourage.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ replied Lou Winwood. Anybody could see that. The stage manager was horrified, but a girl on the lighting desk was crying with laughter.

  Amy seemed unaware of the havoc she was causing as she made repeated, cheerfully hopeless attempts to sing ‘Beat It’ with her host Charlotte Church, who watched her like a hawk. Finally, Amy marshalled her thoughts and belted out one semi-useable take of the song, which was televised, even though Amy looked and sounded like a drunk in the pub on karaoke night. Naturally, this made headlines, increasing Amy’s celebrity.

  When ‘Rehab’ went to number seven in the charts a decision was made to make ‘You Know I’m No Good’ the second single from the album, with Amy obliged to shoot a quick promotional video. Beforehand, Lou Winwood took a couple of rails of tiny clothes to Amy’s flat for her to select what she wanted to wear. She walked into a blazing argument between Amy and Alex Clare.

  When the girls were alone, Amy confessed to her stylist that she had been with Blake, they’d done crack cocaine, and Alex had found out. ‘And so there was this enormous fight going on.’ At the same time Amy was trying to cook dinner for Alex, and they had a guest coming, so the flat was in chaos. As Amy undressed to try on outfits for her video, Lou noticed carpet burns on the singer’s body. ‘She had marks down her back from where she’d been with Blake on the floor, she told me. She was trying to hide them from Alex.’

  Blake started to show up backstage at Amy’s gigs, making furtive appearances in the wings after Alex had left for his evening job as a cook. Although some friends believe that Blake truly loved Amy, his attitude seemed cold and distant in contrast to Alex’s: the latter obviously adored Amy. ‘[Blake] was definitely not all over her, not in your wildest dreams,’ says Lou Winwood. ‘When he did turn up, she was, like, all over him. But we liked Alex. Alex was lovely. It was a little bit odd to see Amy chatting to Alex one minute – he’d go off to work – and Blake would turn up, and she’d be all over him.’

  Drink and drugs complicated Amy’s relationship with Blake. ‘I mean, she was drinking a lot and she was snorting a lot of cocaine,’ says Blake. ‘She was worse than any of us for the drink. And so, like, when she started getting on the coke, it was double bad.’ What most people find hard to forgive is that Blake introduced Amy to heroin, though it was her decision to take it. By Blake’s account their mutual heroin use started one night when they were in a London hotel, ‘just having one of our mad little nights’, no doubt behind Alex Clare’s back. ‘We had a bottle of rosé champagne, had a bath. I had a couple of stones of crack and a few bags of brown [heroin] for myself, and I was smoking it, and she said, “Can I try some?” I was out of my fuckin’ nut. I said, “Yeah, of course.”’

  Excessive drinking, career pressure, love-life problems, and now crack cocaine and heroin altered Amy’s appearance and behaviour dramatically. She walked offstage in London in the new year, after singing one song, to be sick, and she was in a fearful state when she returned to the BRIT School in Croydon, where she had once studied, to perform for the students. ‘I remember seeing her arrive, seeing her in the car, she was just utterly miserable,’ says her former teacher Adrian Packer, who was distressed by what he saw. ‘I found it all very difficult.’

  Backstage Amy created a scene. ‘She turns up and she literally looked like a plucked chicken. All her extensions had come out of her hair. It was all sticking up on her head. And she’d been crying, and there was, like, black makeup all down her face, and she was just in a terrible state … She was shouting at her tour manager, “I’m not doing this. I’m getting the train now.” Because she’d had a row with Alex,’ explains Lou Winwood. ‘So she walked out.’

  Amy stomped out of the dressing room, slamming the door behind her. Unfortunately, she walked into a cupboard. She re-emerged, glaring at her entourage as if to dare them to say anything. Finally the boldest did.

  ‘Wrong door,’ said her stylist.

  ‘Oh, Lou!’ exclaimed Amy, and flounced out by the right door.

  The scene was funny and exhausting. Lou Winwood sat down and cried when Amy had gone. ‘Because it had been intense, it had been uncomfortable, and it had been like being at the top of a roller-coaster. There were moments of magic, and she was a great person, but there was just difficulty and chaos … the whole thing was stressing me out a lot more than I realised … That was that for me. I sent her a text message, [but] I never spoke to her a
gain.’

  3

  Sometimes Amy’s misbehaviour was funny; then it became disturbing. One worrying incident occurred when Amy and her band were having a drink in a nightclub after a show on tour. Amy’s mood darkened. ‘She got a bottle. Smash! The whole place went [silent],’ remembers saxophonist Aaron Liddard. ‘And then she makes out that perhaps she’s going to cut herself.’ The band hustled Amy outside before anything worse happened, but this was not an isolated incident and the musicians were not always able to save Amy from herself. ‘She did self-harm,’ says Aaron. ‘There were cut marks.’

  ‘Self-harming’ is a broad term covering behaviour up to and including a suicide attempt. Self-cutting, typically scoring one’s forearms with razors, knives or glass, is usually less serious. It is behaviour typically associated with overwrought young women, though young men do it, too. Blake Fielder-Civil says he has been cutting himself since he was nine years old, describing the experience as a ‘release’. His arms are criss-crossed with scars. When freshly done, cuts bleed profusely. This creates drama, and gets the victim attention, while not being life-threatening. Such behaviour is, however, a warning. People who self-harm are estimated to be one hundred times more likely than the general population to take their life.

  The most notable example of self-harming in the history of the 27 Club is Richey Edwards of the Welsh band the Manic Street Preachers, a young man who became notorious for mutilating himself, often in public. Edwards suffered serious mental illness and went missing in 1995 after a period of instability. Although his body was never found, he is presumed to have committed suicide. We shall return to his sad story later.

  Amy’s self-harming was therefore concerning. But, like so much of her odd and wayward behaviour, it was observed but mostly ignored. Crew member Dave Swallow says that he noticed the scars on Amy’s arms, as Aaron Liddard did, but he doesn’t recall anybody discussing the issue with Amy.

  Meanwhile, Amy’s career went from strength to strength. Back to Black made number one in the UK in January 2007. ‘Rehab’ was being played constantly on the radio, and Amy was in the papers almost daily. She won Best British Female Solo Artist at the BRIT Awards in February, which she attended with Alex Clare, her manager, parents and band members. Mitch and Janis congratulated Amy warmly, and she thanked them from the stage, but at least one band member sensed that Amy’s relationship with her father was not without issues.

  ‘I think that as children we all know that we have elements of our parents in our own character, whether we like them or not, and girls would like to respect their fathers, and I’m not sure how much respect there was. There was a lot of love, a lot of buddiness, a lot of friendship, but I’m not sure how much respect there was [for her father],’ says Aaron Liddard, who observed Mitch at the BRITs, accompanied by the woman for whom he had left Janis, an episode that had caused pain for the family. Now Amy was repeating history by cheating on her boyfriend with Blake, something she vowed in ‘What is it About Men?’ that she would never do. ‘I got the impression she might have recognised herself as being a little bit more like her dad, and a little bit less like her mum,’ says Aaron, ‘not in a way that she particularly liked.’

  4

  While Amy was a rising star in Britain she was so far virtually unknown in the United States. Her first promotional performance in the USA took place at Joe’s Pub in New York in January 2007, backed by the Dap-Kings. ‘Really nobody knew who she was other than some people who were from Britain,’ says Maurice Bernstein, whose marketing company was hired to build interest in Amy in advance of the US release of Back to Black. ‘Some people were a little resistant. “Oh, she sounds like she’s trying to be African-American. Is that really her voice?”’

  Bernstein had to work hard to fill Joe’s Pub for that first show, and he found Amy a nervous performer. But she did well enough to be invited onto Late Night with David Letterman, one of a series of promotional appearances she made in America in the spring of 2007. In March she played the Roxy in Los Angeles, where Nirvana had once impressed the executives from Geffen Records. Kurt Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, was in the audience to see Amy. There was another crossing of paths with the 27s when Amy checked into the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, a hotel Jim Morrison had frequented. In May, Amy was back in New York to play the Highline Ballroom. There were already signs in her stage manner that all was not well. ‘It was the first time I had seen her where I felt, hmm, she was a bit off,’ says Maurice Bernstein. Still, Back to Black had entered the Billboard chart at number seven, the highest entry position ever for a British female artist. It was a promising beginning.

  Around this time Amy broke up with Alex Clare and became engaged to Blake. When she went back to the USA to do further promotion for her album, Blake was by her side during interviews and photo sessions for Rolling Stone and Spin, both of which put Amy on the cover, reflecting growing American interest. But again there were worrying signs. When the journalist from Rolling Stone asked Amy about the scars on her arms she said they were old marks from cuts made in ‘desperate times’, seeming embarrassed by the question. But she flaunted her self-cutting during her photo session with Spin, posing with shards of broken mirror, which she scratched across her belly to write, ‘I love Blake’. A few days after this odd and unpleasant display of affection, on 18 May, Amy and Blake married in Miami. She did not ask her parents to be there.

  Returning to England, Amy was invited to appear on stage with the Rolling Stones at the Isle of Wight Festival during the band’s summer tour of Europe. This was the Stones 37 years on from the death of Brian Jones, with Ron Wood filling Brian’s shoes, and Bill Wyman retired from the band. The spotty lads Brian had recruited in 1962 were now grizzled old men, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, living on their legend. On the evening of Sunday, 10 June, the Stones performed a cover of ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’. After the first verse, Amy sashayed onstage to join Mick Jagger in a duet. The crowd roared approval when they saw Amy, showing how popular she had become in a short space of time. She delivered her opening lines with panache, then lost her way in a song she didn’t seem to know any better than ‘Beat It’.

  A few nights later there was another echo of the past when Amy met Ray Manzarek of the Doors at the Mojo magazine awards in London. She sat on the lap of the 68-year-old keyboardist, who, like the Stones, was living on music made decades ago, and discussed the possibility of a posthumous duet with Jim Morrison on a remixed ‘People are Strange’. It never happened.

  Two days later a violent incident threw Amy’s life into crisis. Blake attacked a man in a London pub, a serious assault that led to a charge of Grievous Bodily Harm with intent (GBH). If convicted, he faced a possible prison sentence. In the aftermath of this nasty business, Amy’s career fell apart. She started to cancel shows, sometimes at the last minute. ‘She was ill. There’s no two ways about it,’ says tour production manager Dave Swallow in her defence. ‘At some point it felt like she didn’t want to be there.’ The truth was that her drug use was getting out of hand, and Blake’s nefarious activities helped destabilise Amy’s fragile sense of well-being. Amy and Blake were together at her flat on the evening of 6 August 2007 when she suffered the first of what became a series of drug-induced seizures. Blake called Amy’s friend, Juliette Ashby, who took Amy to hospital where her stomach was pumped.

  The next day Mitch Winehouse took Amy to the Four Seasons Hotel in Hampshire to recuperate. Blake joined Amy, and they got high. A doctor summoned to examine Amy informed Mitch that his daughter had probably been using crack cocaine, which was how he discovered Amy was using Class-A drugs. Others say they had known for a while. ‘We did tell Mitch, through my family, but Mitch basically said he only thought she was smoking marijuana, and thought it was a load of nonsense, that people were just gossiping,’ says Jonathan Winehouse.

  Amy’s mother and brother came to join the grim party at the Four Seasons, as did Blake’s mother and stepfather, Giles Civil. The two fam
ilies clashed over which child was to blame for the pair using drugs. It looked like Mitch and Giles were going to have a fight. ‘I was so angry with Giles I was shaking,’ Mitch admits in his book. In contrast Janis Winehouse seemed resigned to seeing her daughter destroy herself. ‘A part of me has prepared myself for this over the years,’ she told the Mail on Sunday that month. ‘She has said to me, “I don’t think I am going to survive that long.” It’s almost as though she’s created her own ending. She’s on a path of self-destruction, quite literally.’ This proved absolutely correct. While Mitch tended to talk most about his daughter, Janis seemed to know Amy better.

  Blake and Amy were persuaded to go to a rehabilitation centre in Essex, but they didn’t stay. Instead they fled to London where they checked into the fashionable Sanderson Hotel, north of Oxford Street. Alex Winehouse came to see his sister there in mid-August and they rowed about Amy’s drug use. In the early hours of the following morning, Blake and Amy had an argument while high. Blake got into a rage. ‘I smashed a bottle and took a chunk out of myself.’ Then Amy cut herself. ‘I think she just looked at me and out of love, or fear, or whatever it was, or some fuckin’ weird sense of loyalty, just did it to herself.’ The couple stumbled out of the hotel in the middle of the night and were photographed by a waiting paparazzo. Photographers had begun to follow Amy everywhere, a reflection of how colourful her life had become, and how much media and therefore public interest there was in her. Amy and Blake were a shocking sight. Blake’s wild eyes showed him to be high, while his face and neck bore what looked like fingernail scratches – not deep, but bloody. Amy’s mascara was smeared as if she’d been crying. Her left wrist and forearm were bandaged. Her trousers were scuffed, with blood showing at the knee. Blood was also soaking through her ballet pumps. It was suggested in the press that she had been injecting drugs between her toes, which Blake denies. He says blood simply dripped onto her shoes. But why was she bleeding? Amy texted a disturbing explanation to the blogger Perez Hilton: ‘I was cutting myself after [Blake] found me in our room about to do drugs with a call girl and rightly said I wasn’t good enough for him. I lost it and he saved my life.’