27

by Howard Sounes

  Troy Miller agrees that Amy wanted to tour; at least, she said so initially. ‘I remember her talking about the tour, and being excited about it. She really wanted to do it.’ She ordered new stage suits for her band, and arranged to give a private warm-up show at the 100 Club in London on 12 June. It was at this club appearance that she betrayed warning signs of the disaster that was to follow.

  Amy had been sober for several days – some say weeks – prior to the 100 Club gig. But on the day of the performance she was gripped with stage fright, craved a drink, and became very bad-tempered. She told her keyboard player that he was fired and she yelled at Troy Miller. ‘She felt very tetchy. She was having withdrawal symptoms at that stage. She was very irritable with the band,’ says Miller, whose misdemeanour was to introduce Amy to some people who took pictures of her backstage without permission. ‘[She] said, “Don’t you ever do that again! You left me with these people. They were taking photos”… I went to hug her, you know. She said, “Don’t touch me”… It was because she hadn’t been drinking for several weeks, and we were all sort of very understanding of that, [but] she really went off on one.’ Dr Romete arrived and gave Amy a small amount of diazepam to calm her down. Although Mitch Winehouse writes that Amy didn’t drink at the 100 Club – as she shouldn’t when taking diazepam, for alcohol would enhance its potency – her boyfriend says she did drink. ‘She had a tipple,’ says Reg Traviss. ‘I think she had, like, one drink, one glass of wine or whatever.’ Finally she was able to perform, and the show went tolerably well. But if Amy had got herself into this state at a club gig in front of family and friends, what would she be like on tour?

  Five days later, on the eve of the east-European tour, Amy told her father that she didn’t want to perform. Mitch asked her why, but he couldn’t get a lucid explanation. The next day she apparently changed her mind again and boarded the private plane leased for the tour. Dr Romete had been asked for a prescription of Librium and diazepam to help Amy cope with the stress. Raye Cosbert was so nervous that he kept Mitch informed of virtually every step of their progress from London to their Belgrade hotel, where a floor had been made available for Amy and her entourage, all the rooms cleared of alcohol.

  The first show of the tour, on the evening of Saturday, 18 June, was an open-air event in the grounds of the Kalmegdan Fortress in Belgrade, overlooking the river Danube. On a hot summer night Amy and a cast of support acts drew an audience of 20,000 from across Serbia and neighbouring east-European states. Once again Amy was gripped with stage fright. Mitch Winehouse (who wasn’t present) writes that she became agitated before the concert and asked her manager for a drink, ‘so Raye had allowed her one glass of wine to calm her down’. Unless this glass was as big as a bucket it would not account for the state Amy got into before going onstage. Either she drank a great deal more than one glass, or she mixed alcohol with medication, or both. She was out of her head by show time.

  ‘People were coming into our dressing room [saying], “We need coffee … We need strong coffee,”’ says Troy Miller, who reveals that by then Amy didn’t want to perform. ‘The management and friends were trying to encourage her to go on.’ That was a grave mistake. But 20,000 people were yelling Amy’s name, with eleven more dates to follow. ‘She had taken on this tour. She then has an obligation to go on stage regardless of what state she was is [in]. She has a contract,’ reasons Miller, ‘there’s a lot at stake. So you can understand it, from friends and especially management’s point of view: “We need coffee.”’

  Finally the band was given the signal to begin the intro ‘Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-Ko-Bop’. Ade Omotayo and Zalon Thompson sang the song. Zalon caught Amy’s eye as she lurched into the wings and announced her. Another artist on the bill, Ana Zoe Kida, was later quoted saying that Amy was ‘pushed’ on stage, which her management denied.

  The audience roared as Amy appeared in a lime green mini dress. Her beehive was gone, replaced by a collapsed haystack of a wig, streaked like Cruella de Vil’s hair. She scampered across the stage to embrace her musical director, Dale Davis, who stopped playing his guitar to welcome her. Then she sat down on a monitor, with her back to the audience, to fiddle with her shoes, which halted the show before it had begun. As with so much that Amy did during her final concert, as with much of her recent behaviour, she seemed to be doing everything possible to delay the moment when she had to sing, which she either didn’t want to or wasn’t able to do. She was so out of it in Belgrade that it wasn’t entirely clear to her band that she even knew where she was. ‘I don’t know whether she didn’t want to be there, or whether she didn’t realise she was there,’ says Troy Miller, who saw immediately that they were in deep trouble. ‘The thing is we’d sort of know whether it was going to be a good or bad gig usually from the very first note. I seem to remember she just didn’t come in [musically]. There was no clear entry point, [which] makes it very hard for a musician trying to play the song. You lose where you are in the song.’

  The audience hollered encouragement as the band struck up ‘Just Friends’. Amy slunk to the microphone, like a recalcitrant child, crossed her arms and began to mumble. The band quickened the tempo and Zalon gave Amy encouragement. ‘Come on, baby!’ Amy smirked as she slurred the lyrics about having a drink at the end of the day, words that seemed more apposite than ever, but she soon gave up. Instead she introduced her band to the audience as if they’d already reached the end of the show, shouting out their names and complimenting them on how handsome they looked in their new suits.

  ‘What comes next?’ she asked Zalon, when ‘Just Friends’ fizzled out.

  ‘“Addicted”.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘“Addicted” … “Addicted”.’

  Amy crossed her arms, steeling herself for the ordeal.

  ‘I would say it was surreal. We had done a few shows like that, so it wasn’t the first time, but you felt sort of helpless,’ says Troy Miller. No show had been quite as bad as this. ‘At one point I looked round to the side of the stage and Raye was just standing there with his arms folded. The expression on his face, I’ll never forget – helplessness.’

  Amy let the audience sing most of the first verse of ‘Tears Dry on Their Own’ while she danced with Zalon, shouting the occasional line. The song was about Blake, therefore one of the songs she found difficult. She roused herself to sing a couple of the most vivid lines about their doomed love, and the ‘shadow’ it cast over her life, then gave up.

  The set list had been arranged to intersperse Back to Black material with less demanding songs. Yet perversely Amy asked Zalon if they could try ‘Some Unholy War’. When Zalon assured her they could do this song about Blake and his drug addiction, Amy warned him that she might have problems with it. ‘But you will have to catch me, though.’ Latterly Amy had got into the habit of pretending to collapse on stage as part of her act, with the backing singers catching her in their arms. But when she was in this state she also needed Ade and Zalon to sing the words if she forgot them. ‘OK. I’m just letting you know that I am going to fall.’

  Amy assumed a pained look as the song began. The audience was becoming restive, with sections of the crowd barracking. She sang over the catcalls, delivering the words about how she would stand by Blake in his ‘unholy war’, as if he was a freedom fighter rather than a drug addict, in a shaky voice. True to her warning, she was unable to remember all the lyrics. Zalon prompted her. She repeated what he said, then turned away with a bereft expression, shivered, and closed her eyes. While the venue erupted with boos, Amy’s most ardent fans sang the rest for her. Amy looked down at them as if to ask, What are we doing here?

  The next moment she seemed to nod off, stumbled and grabbed the microphone stand for support. People were laughing now. Amy made a desperate effort to rescue the song, looking like she might cry, vomit or collapse. She gathered enough energy to wail the histrionic line in which she asks Blake (‘B’ in the song) what he is ‘dying for’, adding that
she would willingly trade places with him. Then she hid her face, turned and collapsed into Zalon’s arms, smirking finally as if it was all a joke. Throughout the show Amy alternated between inebriation, pathos and schoolgirl cheek. ‘Understand, Amy’s an actress,’ observes her friend Lauren Franklin. ‘She loves the drama.’

  The show dragged on. Indeed, it seemed to last longer than normal. ‘It was such a strange [show]. It certainly felt like the longest gig,’ says Troy Miller. When Amy failed to sing the next tune the band segued into ‘Back to Black’, which held her interest briefly. She sang the first line about Blake’s infidelity with belligerence, then became tearful. The audience carried on, helping her describe the drugs she and Blake had preferred which lead to one of Amy’s most original couplets in which she compared herself to a penny coin rolling around a pipe. In her prime Amy had delivered this unusual but compelling metaphor with confidence, evoking the image of someone who had no control over themselves. Now she was snivelling as she sang, wiping her nose with her hand.

  It was hard to know whether she was acting or not when she sang ‘You Know I’m No Good’. One minute she was grinning and fooling about. The next she was the picture of misery. She sang that she had warned everybody about herself, adding sorrowfully ‘you know I’m no good.’ Having apparently finished with the song, the show, and her career, she attempted to remove her wig.

  The band launched into ‘Valerie’. Amy made Zalon sing it. There was one more tune, an upbeat ska song, ‘You’re Wondering Now’, which Amy sometimes used to close the show and lift the mood. It had a dance tempo, but the lyrics were dark, concerning the price paid for misbehaviour. The words seemed to describe the sad state Amy had got into during her short life.

  The stage manager got Amy off as the crowd howled and booed, furious that they had paid to see a fiasco. There were no encores.

  2

  Amy’s career ended in Belgrade. The concert was a catastrophic mistake that made everybody involved look bad, including her manager and father for letting the tour go ahead, while her band appeared foolish, though that wasn’t their first concern. ‘Probably the biggest emotion on stage for us musicians was disappointment, not embarrassment or anger,’ says Troy Miller.

  The tour party left that night for Istanbul where the next concert was due to take place. But the show was cancelled. Amy would never perform again. As with Jimi Hendrix, despite creating glorious music, and giving some extraordinary concerts, Amy was booed offstage at the last at an obscure open air gig in a foreign land.

  Amy checked into the W Hotel in Istanbul, where she was joined by Reg Traviss, who flew in from London by prior arrangement. Amy had come offstage in Belgrade in a stroppy mood, and sulked on the flight to Turkey, but by the time Reg arrived his girlfriend was sober and contrite. ‘She was taking it quite seriously. She was like, “Aw, fuck, what did I do?”’ The band and entourage were sent home in Amy’s private plane, rather than on the usual commercial flights, partly to compensate them for what had happened. They would be paid for the tour. Reg remained in Istanbul with Amy for a couple of days. Once again she asked him what she should do next, and he tried to explain that she was free to do whatever she liked with her life. Reg denies that Amy felt trapped, or that she was in conflict with her management: ‘She had a fantastic relationship with her manager.’

  Amy and Reg returned to London on 22 June. Dr Romete saw her at home in Camden Square that day, having been informed that Amy had become drunk in Belgrade. Amy told her doctor that she couldn’t remember anything about it. Then she looked on YouTube to see amateur footage taken by fans in Belgrade with their phones. It was unusual for Amy to look at herself online, though she did so more than once during her final days. The footage was shocking and Amy became increasingly contrite. She told her father that she was sick of drinking, and grew introspective, talking about her late grandmother, Cynthia, and asking for reassurance that she was talented and attractive.

  Amy’s surgeon cousin Jonathan Winehouse texted Mitch to express his concern, having seen the press reports of what had happened in Belgrade. ‘I sent him a text to say something had to be done about it, and I wanted to discuss it with him.’ Jonathan saw from the media coverage that Amy’s alcoholism had reached a critical stage. ‘The interesting part about alcoholism is that these people manage to hold it together. It’s kind of a stepwise deterioration, where they just about hold themselves together and then they literally fall off a cliff.’ Jonathan had a psychiatrist friend whom he felt could help Amy. But he didn’t receive a reply to his message. ‘I’ve never been able to get through to Mitch about it … I don’t know what the reasons are.’

  Amy was sober for several days after Belgrade. Then she started drinking again, possibly triggered by news that Blake had been given 32 months for burglary and possession of an imitation firearm. He would serve his time in HMP Leeds, where he was given methadone to wean him off heroin. Blake remained in contact with Amy, speaking to her regularly by phone, and there is evidence that he retained a hold over her. There was a telling incident at Jazz after Dark in Soho when Amy sat at the bar to make a call on her mobile phone while Reg Traviss went outside to smoke a cigarette.

  ‘Amy, I’m really happy for you,’ the club owner Sam Shaker told Amy, whom he had known for some time. ‘Reg is a very handsome, decent man … He is better than Blake.’

  ‘Shut up,’ snapped Amy, covering her phone. ‘I’m talking to Blake.’

  Amy got back on the wagon around 5 July. ‘It’s what she periodically did and she had said she really had sort of had enough of being drunk around the ’ouse,’ says Reg. ‘So it was a combination of that, and it was getting into that middle part of the summer, and we were going to be doing things, and I think maybe that made her feel she wanted to give up, and she’d had enough of being drunk around the ’ouse for a few days here and a few days there, and then feeling shitty afterwards.’

  Reg says that he and Amy felt there was ‘a cloud’ over them at this time, though he denies press reports that they split up. In Amy’s case this uneasy feeling may have been to do with the fact she was making a concerted effort to remain sober, seeing her doctor again on Friday, 15 July, when she was prescribed medication to help with her withdrawal.

  The dark mood lifted for Reg and Amy over the weekend of 16–17 July, which they spent at Camden Square. Both felt happier by Monday. Amy saw her doctor that day and Dr Romete noted that she was sober. ‘[The cloud] lifted for me. It lifted for her. And we were both really ’appy. It was really, really strange,’ says Reg. ‘The weekend before we’d stayed in watching films, having a laugh, just having a really, really nice time … On the Monday I was here in work and I was saying, “That thing has just lifted.” She goes, “Yeah, it’s just lifted, innit? Great.” We were making plans for the week.’

  Their plans included attending the wedding of Nick Shymansky the following Sunday. Beyond that Amy wanted to go to the Caribbean to celebrate her 28th birthday in September, and ultimately there was an understanding that she and Reg would marry, though the couple exhibited little of the customary excitement. ‘I hadn’t got down on one knee and produced a ring or anything like that, but we had talked about it and Amy said, “Well, let’s get married,” and I said, yeah, I would. And it was something that we were going to do. If what happened hadn’t happened, I can only say that probably sometime around [2012] we would have probably been sorting that out. And I had resigned myself in my mind that we are going to get married.’

  Reg spent Tuesday night at Camden Square, leaving for work on the morning of Wednesday, 20 July, around the time Amy’s bodyguard, Andrew Morris, returned to work after a break. Reg says Amy was sober when he left the house, though she had got up early to go downstairs to make breakfast. ‘So it’s not impossible that she had had a drink and I didn’t realise … It’s not impossible. But I’m pretty sure she hadn’t.’ This is significant because Andrew Morris told the police that when he arrived at ten a.m. he realised that
Amy had been drinking, ‘because of the way she was speaking to me’. He wouldn’t say she was ‘drunk’. Andrew had seen Amy drunk too many times to use that word lightly. She was drinking moderately – for Amy.

  Amy was going out that evening. She was going to hear Dionne Bromfield sing at the Roundhouse, the former train shed on Chalk Farm Road where Jim Morrison had performed with the Doors in 1968, with Brian Jones in the audience. This touchstone venue in the history of the 27 Club was less than a mile from Amy’s house and turned out to be the scene of her last public appearance. Amy called Reg and asked him if he wanted to come to the show with her. ‘I was going to go to that gig, [but I] got the times wrong, and it was starting quite early.’ Reg could tell that Amy had been having a ‘little drink’ prior to going out. ‘And the reason she’d had a little drink, I would say, is just purely because she was going out and she just needed that little lift.’

  Dionne – still only fifteen, but a confident performer with a strong voice – introduced her ‘godmother’ to the audience at the Roundhouse. Amy bounded onstage wearing a Fred Perry top and jeans. She was chewing gum and looked edgy. Dionne gave the signal for the band to play ‘Mama Said’. As she sang Dionne watched Amy carefully, as one regards a pet that is known to bite. She appeared to want Amy to join her in a duet, but Amy merely danced around the stage, looking evasive and high. When Dionne held the mike to her, Amy muttered a couple of words but clearly wasn’t in the mood to sing. Still, she hugged Dionne at the end of the song and exhorted the crowd to cheer. Amy’s exaggerated movements and shouty voice betrayed her inebriation. ‘I heard she was backstage and she was drinking either vodkas, or gins, with Red Bull,’ says Amy’s publican friend Doug Charles-Ridler, who had last seen Amy when she’d come past the Hawley Arms a few weeks earlier. He had felt then that something was wrong. ‘I held her and I was like, Oh, my God. She just didn’t weigh anything. I thought, Oh, that’s a bit weird.’