Mitch called by Amy’s house the next day, Thursday, 21 July, and found his daughter looking at family photographs. He was flying to New York in the morning and didn’t see Amy alive again. Amy spoke to Reg on the phone. He was busy at work and wouldn’t be coming over that evening. As we have seen, Amy disliked being alone, but several people she would normally count on for company were unavailable. Her friend and occasional lodger Tyler James was visiting his mother. Naomi Parry wasn’t around either. ‘Naomi was living at the house, but Amy was getting more and more erratic and kept coming into Naomi’s room, and Naomi was getting pissed off so she moved out,’ says Doug Charles-Ridler.*
It was warming up to be a lovely summer weekend in London, with clear blue skies during the day and warm nights. It was later reported that Amy’s neighbours heard screams and howling from Amy’s house in the early hours of Friday, 22 July, one of several sinister stories that appeared in the press immediately after her death. All of Amy’s close neighbours were spoken to for this book and none had heard a peep from her in the hours preceding her death, including next-door neighbour Steve Jones and his wife. ‘We were here that weekend. We sleep in the front, so if there had been any noise we would know.’ Indeed, neighbours had seen and heard little of Amy since she had moved to Camden Square. They saw her occasionally in the garden, or walking down to the Portuguese restaurant on Murray Street. Amy cut a distinctive figure, and her deep voice carried, but she was inconspicuous most of the time. ‘That house was her retreat; it was not a party house,’ notes neighbour Catherine Hays.
Janis Winehouse visited at lunchtime on Friday, with her partner Richard Collins, whom she would marry later in the year. Amy made tea and showed her mother the photos she’d been looking at. While this is evidence of reflection, perhaps an attempt to make sense of her life, Amy had plans for the future. Janis noticed that her daughter had dresses laid out to choose from for the wedding she and Reg were going to on Sunday. Then it was time for Janis to go. ‘When we left, she hugged me and said, “I love you, Mummy.” She was always calling me that and telling me she loved me. Amy never really grew up. She was like a little girl, permanently fixed in time as a kiddie. I said, “I love you, too.”’
Amy drank throughout the rest of the day. ‘She was drinking vodka,’ says Andrew Morris, who popped out between four and five in the afternoon to buy milk. When he came back Amy was in the kitchen having a snack of celery and a dip. Then she went up to her room, where she listened to music, watched TV and surfed the Internet.
In her eternal search for company Amy had been Skyping Ricardo Canadinhas recently. He was appearing in drag, as Miss Mince Meat, at the nightclub Heaven. ‘When she was on Skype it was because no one was there,’ says Ricardo, providing an insight into how lonely Amy had become. ‘She was, like, “Talk to me, talk to me.” I would be in between shows, the half-hour call, in intervals on Skype to her. I was, like, “I’ve got two minutes!” She was, like, “Get ready while you’re on camera …”’ The loneliness was almost palpable, reminiscent of Janis Joplin’s.
Amy also spoke to a member of her band on that last day. During the conversation she referred to telling off Troy Miller at the 100 Club, something for which she hadn’t apologised. ‘Does Troy still love me?’ she asked, which Miller cites as evidence that Amy considered the feelings of her musicians, ‘and she did feel remorseful about things she had done or said, and she wanted to improve as a person. I believe that right to the end. I think she was just sort of a lost soul, really.’
Attempts to reach other friends failed. ‘A lot of people had missed phone calls, because it was the Secret Garden [Party weekend],* so a lot of people were there. Basically everyone was out, so she was alone,’ says Doug Charles-Ridler. ‘I think Kelly [Osbourne] said she tried to Skype. Chantelle [Dusette] had missed calls.† Naomi [Parry] had missed calls. Everyone, like, had missed calls from her. No one picked up, and she was alone.’
To comfort herself Amy drank. She drank vodka more or less constantly during the last three days of her life. It is a mark of how dissipated she had become that drinking for days on end was considered normal within her entourage. ‘She [was drinking] normally [sic], she didn’t appear drunk,’ Andrew Morris told the inquest. ‘She was alert and she was calm.’ It was another mark of how low Amy had fallen – and how strange her life had become – that her doctor called regularly at the house. At seven p.m. Amy received a final home visit from Dr Cristina Romete. ‘She was tipsy, I would say, but she didn’t slur her words, and she was able to hold a full conversation,’ the doctor later said. Amy was vague as to when she had started drinking again, and when she might stop, telling Dr Romete she was drinking because she was bored. But the GP was satisfied that Amy wasn’t suicidal. They discussed the matter in terms.
‘She specifically said she did not want to die,’ Dr Romete told the police, adding that Amy said there were still things she wanted to do.
After Dr Romete had left, Amy spoke to Reg on the phone. He suggested he might come over later with a takeaway. But Amy and Andrew ordered an Indian meal. When Reg rang again, later in the evening, he couldn’t get an answer. ‘Something told me it was a bit strange … I just left a long message. I said, “Look, I’m ready to come over. Call me back.” Reg waited at his office for Amy to call. When she didn’t, he walked into Soho where he had a drink, before getting a cab home where he sent Amy another long text message to which she didn’t reply.
As we have seen, Amy spent much of the evening looking at YouTube with Andrew Morris. Although Dr Romete decided that Amy was not suicidal at their final meeting, such behaviour suggests that she was making an examination of herself. She may not have liked what she saw. Around two thirty a.m., Andrew went to his room where he watched a film. He could still hear Amy moving about upstairs.
Most of the principal 27s died at night. Like several others Amy was alone at the end. Andrew was in the house, but Amy was alone in her bedroom suite. As a result it is not known for certain what she did at the last, or what she consumed, other than that she probably drank more vodka, judging by the post-mortem evidence and the empty bottles found in her room.
What Amy’s state of mind was when she took her last gulps of vodka is impossible to know. She didn’t appear suicidal to Andrew Morris or Dr Romete, who stressed to the police that her patient ‘did not appear depressed at any stage’. But it is hard to agree with Reg Traviss that ‘there was nothing wrong’ in Amy’s life. Yes, she had plans for the weekend, and had talked of celebrating her birthday in the Caribbean. These are superficial matters that may not reflect her state of mind in the dark hours before dawn, a time when depression can come suddenly and overwhelmingly. She had said there were things she still wanted to do, but she seemed unable to take action. She may well have kept her deepest thoughts to herself. Despite being a remarkably honest and open person in many respects, she had always been cagey about her inner life. Observing Amy as we have, there is a strong sense that she was sick of her career by the summer of 2011. Like Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, she had become a prisoner of her image. She didn’t want to sing the songs from Back to Black anymore. She didn’t want to be that person. Amy’s private life had become more important than her work. She badly wanted a family. But she had wanted that family with Blake. Reg remained a semi-detached boyfriend. And, as with Janis Joplin, her man was glaringly absent at the end. So were other people Amy had depended upon and, in many cases, exhausted.
So she drank to forget herself, and her problems, as drunkards do. She drank herself into a stupor in the early hours. Then she curled up to sleep as the sky lightened with the dawn. She may not have meant to die. But, like the other 27s, she had been living dangerously for a long time. Death had been shadowing her for years, sometimes coming close, sometimes retreating. Amy had imagined ghosts in the night. We can imagine Death materialising at the foot of her bed as the vodka bottle slipped from her grasp and the last grains of sand ran through the hour-glass.
3
‘Who are you?’ asks the knight in The Seventh Seal, as a sombre figure appears before him.
‘I am Death.’
‘Have you come for me?’
‘I have been walking by your side for a long time.’
‘That I know.’
‘Are you ready?’
4
Andrew Morris checked on Amy at ten a.m. on Saturday. She was lying on her bed with the duvet back. He assumed she was asleep and so left her alone.
Reg Traviss rose late at his flat and went into Soho to pick up a suit and get his hair cut. When Andrew rang him around four o’clock, Reg didn’t answer because he was in the barber’s chair. Afterwards he went to the Groucho Club for a drink, then walked to his office in Holborn where he’d left a pair of shoes. He intended to return Andrew’s call when he got upstairs. Then he was going over to Amy’s. Before he had a chance to do so, friends were ringing his mobile phone to ask him about the news breaking on television and the Internet. They said Amy was dead.
Reg tried to hail a cab, but he couldn’t find one. He panicked. ‘I must have looked like a right state. It might have looked like I was drunk or something [because I was] completely frantic. No cabs were stopping for me and I thought, I’ve got to compose meself, otherwise no one’s going to stop for me and I’m gonna fucking explode. And eventually I got a cab.’
By the time Reg reached Camden Square the police had sealed the house. Reporters, photographers and camera crews were gathering outside. Neighbours came to their windows to watch. After a while three men in suits emerged from the house, a police detective and two undertakers, the latter carrying a gurney on which lay Amy’s corpse in a red body bag. The men carried it down the path and slid it into a private ambulance. As neighbour Steve Jones observes, it was a shocking sight to behold. ‘It’s very unpleasant to see a young lady in the garden one day, and then see her being carried out in a red plastic bag the next.’
Amy’s death made front-page news around the world. Although she had long been heading for trouble, her death came as a shock to those who knew her personally and to the millions who knew of her, whether they liked her music or not. It crystallised a tragic life and gave new meaning to her songs, which were played relentlessly on radio and television from the moment her death was announced.
Media interest was intense at Amy’s funeral on Tuesday, 26 July, an unusual two-part service on an overcast day in north London. First there was a public service at Edgwarebury Jewish Cemetery, followed by a private ceremony at Golders Green Crematorium. In practice, both were attended by hordes of people, including Amy’s band and celebrity friends, as well as being thronged with journalists, camera crews and photographers, many of whom brought stepladders to get pictures over the wall.
Rabbi Frank Hellner was obliged to wear a microphone at Edgwarebury so his words could be broadcast to people who couldn’t squeeze into the prayer hall. Although he had conducted countless funerals in his long career, including those of celebrities, the rabbi found Amy’s funeral disconcerting. ‘As far as I’m concerned a funeral is a private thing, and one doesn’t expect or want the press to be there in a very conspicuous manner, and although they were kept at bay their presence was very much felt. It takes away from the decorum of the occasion.’ The family didn’t seem troubled by the attention, though, and, of course, the press had been part of Amy’s life. ‘Even those press people liked Amy, do you know what I mean?’ says Reg Traviss.
In his eulogy Mitch Winehouse spoke of Amy’s ‘fantastic recovery’ from drug addiction and gave the impression that she had been conquering her alcoholism. He said she was not depressed at the end. She was in good spirits when her mother had seen her, and he believed she had ‘passed away happy, [which] makes us all feel better’. Mitch announced an idea that had come to him directly after Amy had died. He would be launching the Amy Winehouse Foundation, ‘something to help the things she loved – children, horses – but also to help those struggling with substance abuse’. Some of Amy’s friends took exception to Mitch’s comments, and to the tone of the funeral. ‘It was The Mitch Winehouse Show,’ says Lauren Franklin. ‘It was a media frenzy … so distasteful.’
In his remarks to the mourners, Rabbi Hellner observed that Amy’s death put her in the same company as Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. ‘Not because I thought there was anything to read into it. More the tragedy of [lost] youth, the tragic circumstances in which youth is taken, and that ironically they happened to be the same age.’ The emotion became too much for Amy’s producer, Mark Ronson, who left the second service early, clearly upset.
Since Amy’s death, fans had gathered outside her house in Camden Square. Opposite the house was a patch of grass where people left flowers, beer cans, miniature vodka bottles, cigarettes, cards and other tributes to Amy. They also wrote messages on the trees. ‘RIP Amy’, ‘Oh Amy why?’ Then, on the evening of Amy’s funeral – a warm, dry night – the crowd swelled to a couple of hundred and took the form of a wake. A car was parked outside Amy’s house with the windows wound down and Back to Black on repeat on the CD player, so loud it was distorted. A hardcore group of fans – several middle-aged women, a man in a wheelchair, local drunks – danced around the car to the music late into the night. As the evening wore on the dancers became increasingly wild and inebriated, joining together in raucous choruses of ‘No! No! No!’ An ambulance was summoned after one woman passed out. ‘She was off her face,’ explained reveller Michaela Van Es, who insisted that Amy would have appreciated this celebration of her life. Jim Morrison would have recognised the wake as a Dionysian rite.
* Naomi Parry declined to be interviewed for this book, but says she ‘never had a disagreement with Amy’.
* An annual music festival in Cambridgeshire.
† Girlfriends of Amy.
Epilogue
THE DANCE OF DEATH
Jig, jig, jig, what a saraband! Circles of the dead dance holding hands!
Henri Cazalis ‘Danse Macabre’
1
Cynics say that death is a good career move, and so it has proved for the 27s. Amy Winehouse is at least as popular in death as she was in life. She is ubiquitous, sometimes in surprising forms. Amy Winehouse wigs, transfer tattoos and a ‘Rehab babe’ fancy-dress costume can be bought online for parties, while Amy’s waxwork is one of the premier attractions at Madame Tussaud’s in London. The other 27 Club stars are not forgotten. A billboard of Jimi Hendrix looms above Times Square in New York, while tourist shops on Broadway purvey Lizard King dolls, with nodding heads, modelled on Jim Morrison, as well as the ever-popular Jim Morrison T-shirts. Kurt Cobain T-shirts sell almost as strongly. Janis Joplin T-shirts are rarer, but plans are afoot to bring a musical about Janis’s life to the stage. Meanwhile, the music of the 27s is heard everywhere, and endlessly repackaged. The 27s buck the decline of CD sales.
Least remembered is Brian Jones, whose part in the Rolling Stones story has been effaced by the success of the surviving members. Brian almost went without mention as the Stones celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2012. It was partly his own fault. He was the least likeable of the six principal 27s – neurotic, weepy and sometimes violent – and he was always going to be less iconic than Mick Jagger. Still, there are those who lament Brian’s death. Cotchford Farm is a place of pilgrimage. Alastair Johns, who bought Brian’s house from his estate, says Brian’s fans are less troublesome than Winnie-the-Pooh readers, who trespass across his land, and he has had no qualms about using the swimming-pool in which Brian drowned. ‘My children have enjoyed it enormously.’
Admirers also pay their respects at Brian’s grave, particularly on his birthday and the anniversary of his death. Visitors to Cheltenham Cemetery leave small gifts and notes for their idol: flowers, homemade CDs, photographs. A book of remembrance is kept in a plastic lunch box to preserve it from the rain, the pages inscribed with fond messages. ‘Thank you Mr Rollin Stone’, ‘Happy New Y
ear, Brian … Never forgotten’.
Diehard fans aside, Brian is chiefly remembered for the circumstances of his death in 1969, which we have explored. The death of Jimi Hendrix the following year also proved rich material for theorists. Although no one knows what was in Jimi’s mind when he swallowed those sleeping pills at the Samarkand Hotel, his death was adequately explained at his inquest. He inhaled his vomit while intoxicated. Yet theorists rushed forward at once to offer alternative explanations, including Eric Burdon, who went on television to suggest that his friend had committed suicide. ‘He used drugs to phase himself out of this life,’ Burdon told the BBC, basing his comments on the note he found next to Jimi’s bed. He assumed initially that this was a suicide note. It turned out to be a song Jimi had been writing. Although Burdon got his facts muddled, the idea that Jimi Hendrix committed suicide is among the least incredible theories. In a sense he did kill himself. Other friends, including Noel Redding, went way over the top in suggesting that Jimi may have been murdered.
Putting aside the wilder stories, there was genuine confusion over Jimi’s final hours, mostly because of the unreliable statements given by his girlfriend, Monika Dannemann. She claimed Jimi was alive when she woke up next to him on the morning of 18 September 1970, and still alive when she went with him in the ambulance to the hospital, blaming the emergency services for failing to save his life. This was a gross falsification. When the London Ambulance Service reviewed the case in 1992 it concluded that Jimi had been dead when the ambulance crew arrived at the scene, and he was alone. Monika Dannemann was nowhere to be seen, and she did not travel with Jimi in the ambulance. The truth is that if anybody let Jimi down, Monika did, and the guilt this surely created seems to have warped her mind.
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