Following this bizarre and grisly incident, Blake and Amy flew to the Caribbean island of St Lucia where they lay low while a series of concerts, including an entire US tour, was cancelled.
5
During this turbulent period in her life Amy enjoyed her biggest UK hit with ‘Valerie’, a wistful love song by the Zutons, which she recorded with Mark Ronson. It went to number two in the singles charts in the autumn of 2007 as she made a shaky return to live performance. There was trouble almost immediately.
Three nights into a European tour Amy and Blake were arrested in Norway for possession of marijuana, which they’d been smoking in their hotel room. The couple spent a night in the cells before paying a fine. Although this might appear a minor matter – par for the course for rock stars – Amy was denied a US visa as a consequence, which meant she couldn’t tour America. In fact, she never visited the United States again. Back to Black continued to sell in America on merit, and Universal belatedly released Frank there, but Amy was unable to promote herself, which hobbled her career. ‘To become a huge star in the States you’ve got to work it. And she wasn’t available to work,’ says her US publicist Maurice Bernstein, who believes that the record industry was partly to blame for what subsequently happened to Amy, and the 27s who came before her.
‘I think the music industry has a lot to answer for. It’s quite obvious that all [these artists] had abuse problems, and I don’t think that the music industry always, with their hands on their hearts, can say they acted in the best interests of getting these artists healthy. I know ultimately it is up to the artists. Addiction is a very touchy thing, and you’ve got to want [to get clean]. But I can’t say that the industry has always acted responsibly either.’
Drugs take over the life of the user, the business of scoring and consuming becoming a daily chore. Blake scored for Amy and himself. He took perverse pride in it, as he explains: ‘As mad as it sounds, it’s the only thing I was bringing to the table for a while, cos I mean I couldn’t match her financially.’ As Amy became dependent on drugs, and on Blake as her supplier, she lost interest in her career. It was touch and go whether she would turn up onstage each night, and often the only person who could influence her was Blake. He seemed to enjoy this power, and would bring his wife offstage if he had a mind to, as he did at a show in Zürich in October 2007. The couple’s hairdresser friend Alex Foden has said that a further complicating factor was that Amy had been trying for a baby, and had just found out that she wasn’t pregnant, which upset her. She certainly looked unhappy.
The band found Blake and Amy’s hanger-on friends a nuisance. ‘I think there was a certain amount of sort of emotional blackmail going on, and it would upset the show sometimes,’ says Troy Miller, who took over as Amy’s drummer at this time and worked with her until she died. ‘Obviously, she was in love with someone who wasn’t very supportive, let’s say, of her music and her career as a whole. So that made things difficult. That was part of the reason some of the shows got pulled.’
Then Blake got arrested again. The police came looking for him at Jeffrey’s Place first, breaking down the door of Amy’s apartment, but Amy and Blake were not at home. Officers caught up with them at a flat in east London, arresting Blake on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. The allegation was that he had conspired with others to bribe the man he’d allegedly assaulted in a pub earlier in the year not to give evidence against him in court. This was even more serious than the original GBH charge, carrying a potential sentence of life imprisonment. Disaster was heaped upon disaster, and Amy was beside herself.
Her mental disintegration was apparent at a concert in Birmingham. Amy came on stage late and complained to her audience about Blake being held on remand, as if the charges against him were petty. She was blind to the facts, and the audience showed little sympathy, heckling and booing. Amy became indignant.
‘First of all, if you’re booing, you are a mug cunt for buying a ticket,’ she told them. ‘Second of all, to all them people booing, wait till my husband gets out of incarceration. I mean that.’
The audience howled with laughter.
In subsequent shows Amy incorporated Blake’s prison number into the lyrics of songs. Audiences came to expect eccentricity, many coming to her shows to see what crazy thing she would do next, as they had once come to gawp at Jim Morrison. Amy wearied of this and cancelled the tour. She got a reputation for cancelling. ‘She would always pay us for the whole tour, even if it got cancelled. She was very good like that,’ says Troy Miller, who insists that Amy felt bad about cancelling concerts. ‘She realised that it was disruptive. But I don’t think she had much control over it, that’s the problem.’
With Blake in prison Amy let herself go, getting stoned day and night. Paparazzi set up camp outside her flat, taking pictures of her lurching about in a state of inebriation. Her appearance had deteriorated significantly in a short space of time. Her skin was bad and her eyes were wild. She had also lost a tooth. At her worst she looked like a homeless junkie. So wretched had she become that a website was set up in the USA inviting the public to predict the date of Amy’s demise, which seemed imminent. Amy surrounded herself with fellow users at Jeffrey’s Place, including the singer Pete Doherty, whose drug problems were notorious. Although Amy told one friend that she thought Doherty an arsehole, they spent a lot of time together while Blake was in prison, and by Doherty’s account they became lovers.* Certainly Amy seemed less committed to Blake than she had been.
In the months ahead Amy angered her husband by arranging to see him, then failing to show up, even though she lived fifteen minutes from Pentonville Prison. She may have been advised to keep her distance. Detectives were investigating her possible involvement in the conspiracy Blake was charged in connection with. He had apparently offered the man he assaulted £200,000 ($318,000) not to give evidence against him. Detectives wondered where unemployed Blake expected to get this money. Amy was questioned under caution in December, but not charged.
She flew to the Caribbean for Christmas, having swallowed packages of heroin before boarding her flight, according to an interview her friend Alex Foden gave the Daily Mirror after Amy died. She was interviewed by detectives again when she came home.
Finally, her record company had had enough. Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal Music, decreed that Amy should not perform again until she’d been to rehab. Otherwise he would stop her working. As a result, on 24 January 2008, Mitch drove his daughter to the Capio Nightingale private psychiatric hospital in north London. She did not want to go, and threatened to kill herself en route. When she repeated her threat in the hospital, the staff discussed having Amy sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Things had got that bad. In the end she was sedated. Over the next few days Amy was treated both at Capio Nightingale and the London Clinic on Harley Street, which became her preferred bolt-hole in a crisis.
All this was happening in the build-up to the biggest music ceremony of the year, the Grammy Awards, which were held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on 10 February 2008. Amy was nominated in several categories and her management had been trying to get her a US visa so she could appear live on the show. When the visa was denied, because of her drug history, arrangements were made for her to perform via satellite from London. She won five Grammys on the night, including Best Pop Vocal Album for Back to Black and Record of the Year for ‘Rehab’. Her parents and brother celebrated this remarkable success with her. ‘For the first time in God knows how long, my parents were truly happy, and Amy was, too,’ Alex Winehouse said, in one of his few public comments about his difficult sister, revealing something of what Amy had put the family through. ‘We hugged and kissed and suddenly the world melted away. We were alone, a loving family that has suffered so much.’
The Grammys win was incongruous. It was the ultimate celebration of success at a time when Amy’s career was actually declining. She had achieved more in America than any British female artist in recent years,
becoming an international superstar at 24. American sales of Back to Black rose dramatically on the back of the Grammys. Yet Amy was unable to tour America, and virtually unable to work at all because of her drug problem. The woman celebrating her multiple Grammy win had threatened to kill herself days previously, becoming so crazed that she had almost been sectioned.
6
Although she disliked being told what to do, in her more lucid moments Amy recognised that she had a problem and began to make tentative efforts to quit drugs. In March 2008 she moved out of her flat in Jeffrey’s Place in Camden – which she continued to own – into a townhouse around the corner on Prowse Place. She decided to take a cure there. Doctors were consulted, including Dr Cristina Romete, a private general practitioner who would treat Amy from now on; a drug-replacement programme was prescribed and private nurses were engaged to care for Amy while she got clean. But she had to stop using heroin, and stay off it for twelve hours, before the cure could begin.
It was a tall order to get clean of heroin and pursue a career at the same time, yet this is what Amy tried to do. While she was attempting to kick heroin she was supposed to be writing and recording a theme song with Mark Ronson for the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, a prestigious commission everybody thought she should do, though Amy didn’t seem keen to write a song to order. Frankly, she was in no state to try.
Mark Ronson was at the Dog House recording studio in Henley-on-Thames waiting for her to start work. Amy turned up with two nurses. Although she had said she wanted to detox, she continued to use crack and heroin during her stay at the studio with the result that she was often incapable of work. When Mitch Winehouse visited on 11 April 2008 he found Amy in a terrible state: strung out, emaciated and physically filthy. She was also clashing with Ronson. After one row, she invited Salaam Remi to the Dog House to work on a different song, ‘Between the Cheats’, in which she sang about her undying love for Blake. The song was arranged with doo-wop backing vocals to sound like classic 1950s R&B. It is the best indication of what a third Amy Winehouse album might have sounded like.
While she was at the Dog House Amy had a fling with a young man named Alex Haines who was working for her manager. The News of the World published a lurid account of the affair in which Haines was quoted as saying that Amy reached for her crack pipe as soon as she woke up; she lived on junk food, which as a bulimic she then forced herself to vomit; she cut herself, and attacked people when drunk. Haines was further quoted as saying: ‘She reckoned she would join the 27 Club of rock stars who died at that age.’ This stilted quote reads as if he was prompted by a journalist. But, for what it’s worth, Amy’s friend Alex Foden said the same.
Returning to Camden, Amy went on a bender with friends, during which she hit a man who wouldn’t give way to her on a pool table and slapped another in the street, as a result of which she was arrested. A police doctor decided she was unfit to be questioned so she was locked in the cells overnight. Amy eventually accepted a caution for common assault. This was not the end of her problems with the police. The following month she was charged with possession of crack cocaine, though the case did not proceed to court.
Between visits to the police, Amy returned to the Dog House in a desperate attempt to record the James Bond theme. While she was at the studio she spoke to Blake by telephone, confessing her adulterous fling with Alex Haines. The conversation upset her badly, triggering a breakdown. ‘I had never seen Amy so bad,’ her father writes of the ghastly scene he encountered at the studio. ‘She had cuts on her arms and face; she had stubbed out a cigarette on her cheek, and had a bad cut to her hand where she had punched a mirror.’ Mitch restrained Amy while nurses bandaged and tried to calm her. He later told a journalist that he was so disturbed by what Amy had done to herself that he tried to have his daughter sectioned, but by the time the requisite doctors had been summoned Amy had calmed down.
The Bond theme was abandoned. Amy returned home where she suffered another seizure and had to go back to the London Clinic. She now had emphysema among other problems. She was allowed out on 27 June for a concert in honour of Nelson Mandela’s ninetieth birthday, singing before Mandela and an audience of 42,000 people in Hyde Park. Amy showed that she had not lost her sense of humour when she altered the lyric of ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ to ‘Free Blakey, my fella’.
The following day she performed at the Glastonbury Festival, the penultimate act on the Pyramid stage on Saturday night. Amy was escorted to the gig by her nurses and a team of minders, who now accompanied her everywhere. She was compos mentis, but agitated. ‘She had this kind of fragmented manner about her, like a nervous energy. It almost put me on edge,’ says Don Letts, who hung out with her backstage. ‘That wasn’t how she was when I first met her.’ When the headliner Jay-Z came into the dressing room to say hi, Amy told him that he reminded her of her late grandmother. Sometimes it was hard to know what was in her mind.
Amy sang a full set at Glastonbury, telling the crowd with girlish pride that Blake was getting out of jail in two weeks, which was an optimistic view of his forthcoming trial. She was drinking. ‘It wasn’t among the best shows, but I thought it went well,’ says drummer Troy Miller. ‘Sometimes she’d have a drink during the show, so she became progressively less in control towards the end, but it was usually never completely out of control.’ The booze showed by the time Amy got down from the stage to sing ‘Rehab’ while greeting members of the audience. When a fan made a grab for her, she elbowed him back angrily, then threw a punch at the man before she was pulled away.
Like many addicts Amy had a tendency to construct a fantasy world. Her belief that Blake was about to walk free from prison, an innocent man, was a prime example of her self-delusion, common to stars who are pampered and spoiled by a sycophantic entourage. In fact Blake pleaded guilty in court in July to GBH and perverting the course of justice and was sentenced to 27 months. Although he would be out sooner, Amy’s fantasy was shattered, and she descended into further debauchery.
Record-label boss Lucian Grainge – a voice of reason – had already told Mitch Winehouse and Raye Cosbert that he didn’t want Amy performing live until she was well. Mitch, who had effectively become part of his daughter’s management team, makes it clear in his book that he clashed with Grainge about this issue in a ‘heated’ conversation. It was the summer festival season, and Cosbert had bookings lined up. Although Mitch writes that Cosbert was himself worried about Amy performing, she played several festival shows that summer, though she sometimes looked shaky and seemed reluctant to perform. Mitch writes that Cosbert had to ‘persuade’ her to sing at the V Festival in August. Typically, Amy arrived late. Her band was already onstage when her Range Rover pulled up. Amy had got into the habit of changing into her stage clothes in the car while the band played her intro. She would join them at the last minute. There was a crisis at one festival when Amy got out of the car and wandered off in the wrong direction. ‘So we’d already been given the signal to start, and we were literally on stage playing this intro for [what] felt like an hour,’ says Troy Miller. The crowd booed and threw things. ‘I had a bottle of piss thrown at the drums … [But] we loved her. And the thing that we had was the hope that she’d get better, really, and we always clung to that.’
Amy had always been a nervous performer. Now she seemed to have lost her nerve completely. Just as she had once avoided going to school, she now employed a variety of childish stratagems to get out of touring, including hiding from her manager.
‘Quite often when Raye would be trying to track her down, and she was supposed to be picked up, she’d be hiding in our flat. She’d be hiding in my bed, or hiding in the toilet, not wanting to go on tour,’ says Doug Charles-Ridler, landlord of the Hawley Arms in Camden Town, which had become Amy’s favourite pub. ‘Raye would come down and I’d just go, “Yeah, she’s here. Give me five minutes. I’ll sort her out.”… Amy would say, “Oh, I gotta change …” like, delaying tactics all the time, and then she’d l
ock herself in our toilet. We’d be, like, “Amy [coaxing voice]? You’ve gotta go.” And she’d be, like, “I’m just changing, I’m just changing.” And then she would do, like, her eye makeup – she used to take hours – and I’d be, like, “Raye, she’s coming …” It was really difficult. She was like a friend, whereas I was friends with Raye as well. So it was a real difficult situation, because I wanted to always make sure Amy was OK. And also Raye is quite an imposing guy.’
In recent months Amy had befriended a child singer from south London named Dionne Bromfield. Amy referred to Dionne as her goddaughter though she wasn’t in the religious sense. Rather, Amy had decided to mentor the girl, who was signed to Amy’s record label. Amy relaxed with Dionne, giggling with her as if she was a child, too. The relationship was part sisterly, part maternal, Amy deriving pleasure from Dionne’s youth and innocence, which contrasted with her debased and wretched self.
In September 2008 twelve-year-old Dionne was hired to sing at the Berkeley Square Summer Ball where Amy’s friends from the Ten Room, Patrick Alan and John Altman, were also due to perform. Amy agreed to make a guest appearance with them all. The Berkeley Square Ball is a grand annual event in Mayfair, held beneath the square’s plane trees, with many wealthy and well-known people attending in evening dress, including Kate and Pippa Middleton in 2008. The dinner menu was by Marco Pierre White, and after dinner there was music and dancing.
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