27

by Howard Sounes

  Away from work, Amy continued to surf the Internet for company, finding her old stage-school pal Ricardo Canadinhas on Facebook, then dialling him up on Skype. ‘Literally, within seconds I had a telephone call and there she is in the middle of St Lucia,’ says Ricardo, who asked Amy how she was.

  ‘Good. My life’s changed quite a lot.’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock, I read about you in the papers.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Amy, as if she didn’t know her life was documented daily in the press. ‘I got married.’

  ‘I know! I read the papers,’ laughed Ricardo, who decided that Amy was clueless, though she was perhaps being modest.

  Amy talked about her new music, playing a snatch of a song seemingly titled ‘You and Me’ down the line. It was about Blake. ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she said defensively.

  ‘You’re a grown woman.’

  ‘Yes, I am. I’ve grown my hair and everything.’ Amy was always a joker.

  Mitch Winehouse flew out to St Lucia to see his daughter, bringing documents for her to sign. He still had his black cab in London, but he didn’t drive it much anymore. He devoted his time to Amy and her business, becoming a director of her company, Cherry Westfield, in November 2008 after his disqualification had ended. Indeed, he now gave his occupation as company director. Over the next few years he would be appointed director of a series of companies set up to channel Amy’s money. In most cases Janis Winehouse was also a director, making Amy’s career a family concern.

  Along with documents, Mitch brought business people and journalists to St Lucia to see Amy, which didn’t please her. One journalist, Daphne Barak, had an agreement with Mitch to make a film about Amy, but Amy wasn’t co-operative. ‘My daddy is always bringing people [here] for business,’ she told Barak, when they met on the island, going on to complain about Mitch and Janis, ‘saying horrible things about her parents’, and moaning about people who got to her via her family. ‘Why don’t [these] people talk to me?’ she asked. In a subsequent book, Saving Amy, Barak connected Amy’s problems with what she saw as deep-seated family issues: ‘Sometimes, I feel, Amy’s problems are used as an excuse to mask other underlying and undealt-with issues in the family.’ Barak also noted that, despite protesting how private the family was, Mitch gabbed to reporters constantly.

  Barak thought she had an exclusive agreement with Mitch, but then he started to make a documentary with Channel 4, My Daughter Amy, bringing another camera crew to St Lucia. Amy avoided the Channel 4 crew, and seemed to avoid her father when he was with them. By the end of the project Mitch conceded that Amy was ‘obviously uncomfortable with the camera being here’ and asked himself why he’d brought a TV crew to the island when so much effort was made in normal circumstances to keep the media away from Amy. ‘I’m starting to question my own motives.’ Amy was dismayed by her father’s film. ‘WHY don’t my dad WRITE a SONG when something bothers him instead of going on national TV? an you thought YOUR parents were embarrassing,’ she tweeted, when the documentary was screened.*

  Amy’s relationship with her father was complicated. She loved him, despite his faults, or wanted to love him. One of her most perceptive friends, Stefan Skarbek, says that Amy ‘seemed to love’ her father. ‘I mean, she seemed to want to love him badly.’ Since Amy had become a star, a new element had been introduced to the relationship. Mitch was becoming well known by association with his daughter, and he seemed to like the attention.

  On the back of Amy’s success Mitch set out to become a professional singer in his own right, singing in clubs and recording a CD of saloon-bar standards, Rush of Love. He also conducted interviews with celebrities in the back of his (underused) cab for an online chat show. In these pursuits he was represented by the same management company as Amy, while also having a hand in her business affairs. Not everybody was impressed by the way he conducted himself. ‘The only thing of which we can be sure is that Mitch Winehouse has managed to parlay his daughter’s heroin addiction into a media career for himself,’ wrote a critic in the Guardian.

  Mitch decided that Amy might do better when she returned home from St Lucia if she stayed away from Camden Town. He rented a house in Hadley Wood, an outer suburb of north London, where Amy came to live in July 2009. She was in tears as she walked through Arrivals at Gatwick Airport, for in coming home she faced the end of her marriage. Blake was granted a divorce on 16 July. Blake says that when Amy asked her father how much he was getting in the settlement, Mitch told her, with satisfaction, ‘Not a penny’ (and she wrote a song of that title as a result). Blake insists that he was never interested in Amy’s money, in contrast to Mitch, who took a sharp interest in his daughter’s affairs. Blake referred to Mitch as the Fat Controller, after the rotund character in Thomas the Tank Engine. He says Amy grumbled about Mitch, but concedes that she loved him above all men, and concluded that Mitch hadn’t been such a bad father-in-law. At least he had visited Blake in prison.

  After the divorce Amy had a breast enlargement and spoke about having rhinoplasty next, telling her father that she couldn’t stand seeing herself in the mirror. The breast enlargement was too big for her physique, making her figure unbalanced, like that of a cartoon character. Her self-loathing was sad to behold. Shortly after the breast enlargement she hosted a thirtieth birthday party for her brother Alex at Hadley Wood, then ruined the party by getting drunk and telling everyone to leave. It was not the first or last time that Amy would upset Alex, and a family row ensued.

  At the end of a difficult year Amy went to a Christmas pantomime. She drank five vodka and Cokes before a production of Cinderella in Milton Keynes in December 2009, entering into the spirit of the occasion with such gusto during the first half of the show that she was asked to quieten down. When she tried to order a double vodka at the interval the theatre manager suggested she might have had enough. Amy was infuriated. She pulled the man’s hair and called him a ‘fucking cunt’. This resulted in a court case in January 2010, at which Amy pleaded guilty to common assault and disorderly behaviour. She was fined and received a two-year conditional discharge. The judge noted that Amy already had two cautions for similar offences, but took into account a letter from her doctor saying that she was trying to curb her drinking.

  2

  Amy was soon bored of the suburbs and moved back to central London. She rented a penthouse above Bryanston Square, near Marble Arch. Going for a walk in the neighbourhood one day, she saw a young man sitting outside a pub on Devonshire Street.

  ‘Amy walked past, and as she walked past she sort of looked at me, and sort of made eye contact, and then she just carried on walking … I recognised who she was. Then she sort of looked over her shoulder,’ says Reg Traviss, who finished his cigarette and went inside the pub, Inn 1888, which his parents owned. ‘She came in and we both ended up at the bar at the same time and we got chatting.’ This was the beginning of Amy’s last significant relationship, spanning the final months of her life.

  Reg Traviss was 33 in the spring of 2010, six and a half years older than Amy. Like Amy he was interested in 1950s style, dressing in the clothes of the era, usually in a suit and tie, with his dark hair cut short and slicked back. His pale face was typically set in an unsmiling expression that gave him a surly look, reminiscent of an old-time East End gangster. He had the voice to match. Again like Amy, Reg’s family were from east London and, despite a successful career as a film director, he retained the accent and was, in fact, somewhat inarticulate. Yet he was polite, thoughtful and industrious. Reg had three pictures to his name: a Second World War drama, Joy Division, which came out in 2006; a 2010 horror film, Psychosis; and a prison drama, Screwed, which was due out in the spring of 2011. Reg lived for his work. He wasn’t married, and eschewed drugs, which was a welcome change from Blake, as far as Amy’s parents were concerned. In many ways Reg was an ideal prospective son-in-law.

  ‘I thought she was really beautiful and always thought she was really gorgeous,’ says Reg, of
his first impression of Amy. As he got to know her he found that Ame (as he called her) was a paradox. Although she had stopped using drugs she looked back on her drug years with a degree of nostalgia, talking about the good times, and she was still wild, ‘in a fun way’. Yet she was also a ‘dreamy girl’ with a domestic side, a woman who liked nothing better than spending nights at home, making snacks for her and Reg and intimating that she’d like to start a family. She was clever, with a facility for maths, yet she took little interest in her financial affairs. Indeed, money seemed to scare her. ‘She had designated people who dealt with it, and that was it. And to a degree I would say she didn’t like money, wasn’t really interested in money, and large sums of it frightened her. The thought of a massive amount of money in any sort of context was something she didn’t like thinking about.’

  Reg did not find Amy depressive, but he believes that she had ‘an issue with self-belief’. He was surprised to learn that she had released only two albums, the last four years ago. She was writing new songs, working at home on a keyboard borrowed from a member of her band. She sometimes sang to herself as she worked. There were recording sessions where she tried out her ideas. But she didn’t seem close to making a third album. The truth was that she had suffered a fundamental loss of confidence. ‘She always felt she wasn’t a frontline performer,’ says Reg. ‘She always felt she was more of, like, a kind of backing singer …’

  Amy told her friends that she liked Reg because he treated her well. ‘She said, “He treats me like a lady,”’ recalls Sarah Hurley. Yet Reg wasn’t by her side all the time, and as a result some old friends wondered how serious the relationship was. ‘Who is Reg? Does he exist?’ asks Doug Charles-Ridler, facetiously.

  Although Amy and Blake were divorced, she remained in contact with her ex, who was now out of jail and living in Sheffield with a girlfriend. Amy visited Blake in Yorkshire and saw him in London. They were photographed kissing in Camden in March 2010, shortly after which Amy tweeted: ‘I love my husband Blake an it aint wrong! Marry for life.’ The following month they were photographed walking hand in hand on a night out in the capital, during which they visited Jazz after Dark, a Soho club Amy frequented.

  Reg refused to be jealous of Blake, accepting him as part of Amy’s past. He took the view that she was over the relationship and was trying to deal with Blake in a civilised way. Sometimes it became too much, though. Amy changed her phone number to stop Blake calling. Then he wrote letters to her, sometimes asking for money. She sent him small amounts by return. Her new boyfriend kept his cool. ‘I said to her at the beginning of our relationship, “Look, I don’t feel threatened by this,”’ says Reg, who believes that Amy never saw Blake again after he and Amy became a couple. ‘At one point she asked me if I wanted to meet him. Because he was going to come to London. I said, “No, no, but you should go and see him.” It never ’appened in the end … There was periods where she would hear from him quite a lot, and then he would bother her a little bit, which is all understandable. They were married. Then there were periods when she wouldn’t hear from him, and she was quite ’appy with that … There was no sort of feelings there. She had definitely grown out of that relationship. And she almost felt a bit more like a sort of mother figure. She felt sympathy for him, obviously, because of the sort of situations he was finding himself in, as did I … We never once argued about Blake getting in touch, ever.’

  For his part Blake seems envious of Reg, suggesting that Amy had traded him in for someone better. He noted that Reg’s parents owned a pub, that he was a sharp dresser and, above all, a film director, whereas Blake had only ever been a teaboy for a video production company.

  Meanwhile Amy continued to struggle with her alcoholism. It is often easier for people who drink to excess to stop altogether, rather than trying to moderate their drinking. Such people have an all-or-nothing disposition, commonly described as an ‘addictive personality’. Boswell observed that Dr Johnson ‘could practise abstinence, but not temperance’. The same was true of Amy. There were weeks when she was teetotal, banishing drink from her sight. Then she would fall off the wagon with a crash. There was no middle way, though Reg repeatedly refers to Amy having ‘a little drink’ with his blessing, because he thought she could handle it. This was a delusion. Amy’s ‘little drinks’ were tributaries to rivers of booze in which she would drown.

  That summer Amy went on a series of benders, which ended with her checking into the London Clinic. She was too drunk to attend a meeting with her record-company boss, Lucian Grainge, in May. She showed her father up in July when she arrived drunk at the Roundhouse to see their hero Tony Bennett perform in concert. And she performed drunk at her brother’s engagement party in August, despite promising that she would stay sober.

  After a midsummer spree, during which Amy drank all afternoon and all night, she was photographed splayed in the sunshine on a pub bench in central London early the following morning, the pub owned by Reg Traviss’s parents. Reg says Amy was merely sunbathing, but it looked as if she had passed out drunk.

  3

  Amy turned 27 in September 2010. During the depths of her drug period she had predicted that she would join the 27 Club, according to friends Alex Foden and Alex Haines. She had, of course, grown up knowing about the Club. She was nearly eleven when Kurt Cobain died, her brother was a Nirvana fan, and though Amy disliked rock music she couldn’t help but be aware of the series of deaths at 27 preceding Cobain’s. Reg Traviss says that Amy made no reference to the 27 Club while they were together, but they discussed the problem of getting through one’s twenties, Reg encouraging Amy to think about her future, as others had tried to make Kurt Cobain take a long view of his life. ‘I did [say to her], “Amy, you’ve got so many possibilities, because of what you’ve already created … Now I think you’re at an age when you’re going to start really developing as an individual.”’

  First, Amy had to stop drinking. In common with Mitch Winehouse, Reg was optimistic that Amy may have been on the verge of giving up the bottle completely at the end of her life, just as she had managed to kick drugs. ‘I had a feeling that at that time the drinking was on the way out.’ This seems optimistic. In truth, Amy was a very heavy binge-drinker until she died. That was what killed her. Her binges were so serious that they put her in hospital repeatedly. Her life became a pattern of binge-drinking followed by hospital visits, a short period of sobriety, then more drinking. Doctors struggled to help Amy, prescribing Librium when she was off the booze to help her cope with alcohol withdrawal (the drug had the side effect of making her dopy), patching her up after she fell off the wagon, and trying to get her to see the benefit of psychological therapy. She never did.

  Amy typically turned to drink when she was due to perform, something she seemed less and less comfortable with. Stage fright had become a major problem. There was, however, financial pressure to give concerts. It is how music stars make their money, especially stars, like Amy, who aren’t releasing new material. There was also a natural expectation from audiences that when Amy did appear in concert she would sing the songs from Back to Black. Unfortunately, Amy no longer felt comfortable singing about Blake and their drug use. ‘She didn’t want to sing anything she didn’t mean,’ says her drummer, Troy Miller. ‘For instance we always used to open up with “Addicted”. There was a point where she [said], “No, I don’t want to sing ‘Addicted’. It’s about drugs, and that’s not me anymore.”’

  Amy committed to a show in Russia at the end of 2010. The day before the show, Mitch visited Bryanston Square and found Amy drunk. They had a ‘terrible row’. He came back later in the day and found her even worse, ‘so drunk she couldn’t speak’. Dr Cristina Romete was called to examine Amy, who was admitted to the London Clinic. Mitch writes that Amy nevertheless insisted on going to Moscow where she performed as scheduled, and her manager reported back that the show was ‘fantastic’. This is one of a number of examples from Mitch’s book where he paints a rosier pictu
re of Amy than others do. In Troy Miller’s memory, the Moscow show was ‘slightly disappointing’. The band had got used to disappointments. ‘There were points after gigs where we wouldn’t [show] our faces at the after-show parties.’

  Amy did a short tour of Brazil in the new year, starting with a festival appearance at Florianópolis on 8 January 2011. She was sober and focused for the first night. She sang properly, enunciating all the words, which was not always the case now, and she seemed to enjoy herself. Again, the band hoped she had turned a corner. ‘It showed promise, and we all got excited,’ says Troy Miller. But the tour was not without issues. Amy was drunk in Recife on 13 January. She larked around on stage, shouting lyrics and falling over while attempting a pirouette. Hearts sank. ‘There was a lot of spectacle, and a lot of false hopes,’ says trumpet player Henry Collins.

  She rallied for the final show of the tour, in São Paulo, giving a performance imbued with the vulnerability of Judy Garland or Edith Piaf. When Amy sang ‘You Know I’m No Good’, her expression hovered between mischief and pathos, her personal story informing her act, as had been the case with Garland and Piaf. So long as Amy didn’t drink too much this made for a riveting concert, indicating that she might have matured into one of the great torch singers.

  When she came offstage Amy spoke to her father on the telephone, telling Dad that the Brazilian tour had gone well (which was true for the most part), and that she had stayed sober throughout (which wasn’t). She was slightly more frank with her boyfriend, though she downplayed the state she had got into in Recife, the evidence of which is available for all to see online. ‘We spoke about it,’ said Reg Traviss. ‘She just had a little drink, and I think that was probably just nerves.’ Once again, there is a sense that people around Amy weren’t facing up to the scale of her problem.