There was also a light-hearted moment when Amy complained that her songs were being used in scenes during the TV soap Emmerdale, in the Woolpack pub. ‘Amy’s very image-conscious. When she licensed her songs for commercial use, she probably wanted a lucrative advertising campaign – not a soap full of Yorkshire farmers,’ said a source.
In October, Amy was up for yet another gong. This time she was nominated for the Best Album category in the Q Awards. Previous Q winners include U2, the Rolling Stones, Oasis, Coldplay, Radiohead, The Who and Arctic Monkeys. Down the years, there have been plenty of exciting moments at Q Awards ceremonies: Pogues hellraiser Shane MacGowan set Bono’s hair alight; Oasis singer Liam Gallagher attacked photographers with a steel pole and had pops at both Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Robbie Williams; Elton John had a pop at Madonna.
She was up against some formidable opposition: the previous year’s winners in this category, Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’; Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘Yours Truly, Angry Mob’; Arcade Fire’s ‘Neon Bible’; Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Send Away the Tigers’.
Amy didn’t attend the lunchtime ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel due to illness. Naturally, this raised eyebrows and headlines far out of proportion. The Now magazine website screamed, AMY WINEHOUSE STICKS TWO FINGERS UP AT Q AWARDS. Mark Ronson collected the award on her behalf and said, ‘That’s Amy – taking her pain and turmoil and making it into music we enjoy.’
Television star Jonathan Ross took the opportunity to crack a few jokes in the absence of Amy. He said, ‘I was on a three-to-one bet that Amy would die before Pavarotti. I’m really annoyed with Amy that I lost.’ Later on in the evening, he also joked about Led Zeppelin’s forthcoming December 2007 reunion at the O2, saying, ‘There were millions of hits on the website to register for tickets to their gig. It was probably all the Parkinson’s sufferers clicking the mouse more than they should.’ Nice!
Other winners on the night included Kate Nash, who won Breakthrough Artist; the Q Lifetime Achievement went to Johnny Marr of the Smiths; and the Q Idol was Kylie Minogue. There had been precious little controversy on the night. The best the following morning’s papers could muster was that the name of Arctic Monkeys was misspelled on their gong.
The award that Amy won became the subject of something of a mystery following the ceremony, when it went missing. Mark Ronson seemed to lose it and then there were varying reports of who had last seen it with comedians Alan Carr and Ricky Gervais rumoured to have been the last people who had laid eyes on it.
The award finally emerged and in the strangest of places. Andrew Morris, owner of Bar Soho in Old Compton Street in London’s West End, found it in the toilets of his bar in the early hours of the morning following the ceremony. ‘I thought it wasn’t real when I first saw it,’ he revealed. ‘But then I looked at the newspapers and saw the Q Awards were on last night and Amy Winehouse didn’t collect her prize.’ Then he recalled seeing Ronson partying at his bar and it all fell into place. ‘I’m sure the state Amy’s in these days I’m sure she doesn’t care too much,’ he said of his find. ‘But I’m sure the Q Awards organisers wouldn’t be too happy if it’s been left in a bar. If Amy’s getting an award she should really be there to pick it up.’ The story was run in the Metro newspaper under the headline THE Q FOR THE LOO.
Around this time, two men from the music industry took the opportunity to have a pop at Amy about her personal life. Both instances reeked of hypocrisy. Francis Rossi was one of the co-founders of the rock band Status Quo. He sang lead vocals and played lead guitar with the band. Now approaching his sixties, he likes to think of himself as an elder statesman of rock. Rossi said, ‘Amy is supposed to be great but I can’t stick her. I like a couple of records but I’m not sure if people will like her in three years. I’m not knocking her for the sake of it. But I have been subjected to so much of Amy and her antics that I just think, “Fuck off”.
‘What message does giving her Woman of the Year send to young people? There has to be some responsibility somewhere, surely. Everyone knew what was going on with her. She’s not a good role model. They should have said to her, “You’re not getting it. You would have done but you’re not cutting it any more.”
‘She may be able to sing, but what gets through to the kids in the street is the fact that she’s out of her tree, falling over and not being able to keep her hands out of her knickers. She should straighten herself out.’ He then turned to Pete Doherty, saying, ‘He, on the other hand, isn’t even worth entertaining. At least Amy has serious talent. Pete hasn’t got anything. There’s no talent there, otherwise he would do something. He doesn’t count. He seems quite intelligent but the records are grim.’
Next to have a dig at Amy was Ian Brown. Having first come to public attention as the frontman of the Mancunian band the Stone Roses, Brown is nowadays a solo artist. Of Amy, he said, ‘I think she’s an absolute sucker. The girl’s got all those tattoos in the last few years – and one day she’s gonna go, “Oh, no!” Suckers. Anyone who drinks to that condition is a sucker. They’re scared of living.’
Perhaps what really sucked, though, was the hypocrisy of Rossi and Brown. Rossi has long boasted of his own drug-fuelled exploits during the band’s heyday. Asked if he enjoyed cocaine use, he boasted, ‘Fucking right. By the mid seventies I had an astonishing cocaine habit. I’d go out for the night, come back, go to bed at some godforsaken hour and my head would be going like a steam hammer.’ He has also admitted that he lost part of the septum of his nose, watching it wash down a plughole as he showered. Brown, too, has made no secret of his extensive drug use, though his drug of choice is cannabis.
Therefore, for either of these men to criticise Amy for her partying was as clear a case as one can imagine of the pot calling the kettle black. Perhaps there was also an element of envy in their words: seeing an artist and human being in her prime firing up the green-eyed monster in artists who had long since seen their best days. More reasoned, measured and admirable words came from the mouth of another veteran rocker, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Jagger dabbled with drugs during the heyday of his own band but there was no hypocrisy in his statement about Amy.
Jagger said, ‘Amy is a brilliant artist who makes fantastic music. She has class. But I’m worried she might die if she goes down the road that she’s taken. If only she would sort herself out. It’s hard, as your mind has to make that switch. If my mind hadn’t always told me that I should not do too much, I could have ended up like Amy years ago. But I always had that voice in my head that kept me on my toes and told me to stop altogether in the end. I realised I didn’t want to die young.’
Duran Duran’s singer Simon Le Bon had similar thoughts. ‘I’d like to sit her down, put some warm clothes on her, get her out of her bloodstained crap, give her a bath, put some food in her. Even if she doesn’t die of a drug overdose, she’s going to die of malnutrition. That’s what worries me. What happened to those fabulous tits?’
On the evening following the Q Awards, which Amy had missed due to illness, she seemed to have recovered when she appeared at Harvey Nichols for the launch of a new collection by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen called the Row. ‘The twins were really looking forward to meeting Amy,’ said a source. ‘They spent all night chatting.’ Amy then embarked on a three-hour shopping spree in the posh clothes store. She bagged clothes and toiletries for her and Blake.
‘The shop stayed open until 1.30 a.m. for her,’ said an employee. ‘She was having a great time. Blake was running around after her.’
However, according to a different eyewitness, Blake had got bored of the shopping and ducked off in a taxi with Lily Cole and another mystery girl. Another onlooker sourly commented that, during the dinner with the Olsen twins, Amy’s fingers had looked dirty and stained.
Amid growing fears that she was going off the rails, she did exactly that – but not in the way people expected. She was on her way to Paris to attend some fashion shows and, after going throug
h the security barrier at the Waterloo Eurostar, she seemingly had a change of heart and decided not to travel. She illegally leapt over the station’s security barrier and ran back into the main concourse of Waterloo station. Amy had arrived at the station looking tearful and it is thought that her change of mind came about because she did not wish to be parted from Blake.
A passenger said, ‘Amy was crying, gesticulating wildly and shouting while the man with her was trying to calm her and get her through the gate. She mentioned Blake’s name more than once.
‘Eventually they went through security, but then Amy came running back. She hurdled the security gate then ran up the escalator, shouting and screaming, into Waterloo station concourse. It was quite a sight – this tiny girl with a massive beehive leaping over a barrier. It was pretty clear she was not keen on getting on that train to Paris.’
As Amy ran off, a policeman chased after her. A London Transport Police spokesperson confirmed, ‘We spoke to a twenty-four-year-old female at the Eurostar entrance yesterday. She wasn’t detained and no further action was taken.’ In the end Amy was persuaded to travel after all and she got on the train to Paris.
On her return to England, Amy hit the headlines again when she and Blake hung out with fresh-from-rehab Pete Doherty at his pad in Wiltshire. As he recorded an interview with the radio station Xfm, Doherty said, ‘Apparently I have self-esteem issues.’ Once more, rumours went around that Amy and Doherty planned to work together, prompting further concern in the press at the thought of two such hedonistic artists joining forces. ‘She plays better than James Brown playing acoustic guitar. She thinks she’s shit, but she’s not,’ said Babyshambles guitarist Mick Whitnall of Amy’s guitar skills. ‘I’ve never met a girl who plays like that, let alone a man,’ he added.
Doherty said that a track entitled ‘1939 Returning’ was one of the new songs he had been working on. ‘I’m going to try to get Miss Winehouse to help me with it, hopefully,’ he said. Soon there were rumours that she and Pete would duet at an MTV awards ceremony. A source said, ‘MTV have been trying to persuade Amy to go for ages. When she heard Pete was doing it she thought it could be a laugh. Amy and Pete are going to get together and see if they can work out a duet and get it on the schedule. The organisers wanted to add a bit of danger to what is the squeaky-clean boy band of award shows. They’ve certainly done that. I just hope they know what they’ve let themselves in for. They’ve been jamming for ages with the plan to perform together. This would be a pretty high-profile place to do it.’
Pete Doherty was asked what advice he would offer Amy during her hour of need. ‘I wouldn’t give her any,’ he snapped. ‘She’s fine. It’s all bollocks. People should leave her alone. I went for a drink with her earlier today and she’s totally fine. Perfectly healthy and happy. People are saying she’s out of control, but she’s not. She’s a sensible girl and she knows what she’s doing. She ain’t doing nothing wrong.’
However, Doherty’s words of reassurance could do nothing to stop the avalanche of concern that was coming down on Amy’s head – particularly when reports threw up fresh concern that she was self-harming again. A tabloid photographer snapped her while out shopping in Covent Garden and noticed some red lines on her hands. It was hard to tell whether they were just lines of lipstick or scars. Another snapper around the same time pictured her retrieving a cigarette she had accidentally dropped into the gutter. NO BUTTS, AMY… THAT’S FILTHY! screamed the Daily Mirror, unaware that many consider the tabloid press itself to be firmly positioned in the gutter.
Asked about these latest reports, Mitchell revealed, ‘I wrote a eulogy for Amy myself last month. When she had her seizure and was taken to hospital, I really thought that could be it. The doctors told us even a whiff of another drug could kill her.’
By this time, tabloid fascination in Amy was huge. Even her buying some McDonald’s food while out on tour in Germany was deemed worthy of a story in the newspapers. Earlier in the month, a visit to McDonald’s by Amy and Blake in London had also hit the newspapers. On that occasion she had been travelling to a photoshoot in Hoxton and was laden with boxes of Betsey Johnson shoes. Then she was spotted eating in a Soho restaurant. ‘Amy came in really good spirits and ordered an extra-large portion of brown stew chicken, which she polished off in minutes,’ said a fellow diner. ‘She was looking really healthy and it’s clear she’s putting on weight again.’
She was also spotted pounding away on a running machine shortly before her Berlin concert. Her health kick also involved one-on-one tuition with yoga guru David Sye, who is based in her hometown of Camden and has previously trained the likes of the fashion designer and actress Sadie Frost.
‘Amy has been having regular one-on-one sessions with David for five weeks now,’ said a source. ‘It’s been a big step for Amy and one that could play a huge role in her eventually beating her demons. She pops into his studio for sessions but has also been calling him regularly on the phone for spiritual advice. Her health has improved over the last few weeks and she has been looking a lot more glowing and healthy. She has started to worry about her health, so she’s lucky to have found something that works for her right on her doorstep.’
Her European tour hit a snag when Amy arrived in Norway. She and Blake were relaxing with a friend in the SAS Hotel, in Bergen, in southwestern Norway, when police knocked on the door. The police claim they found seven grams of cannabis in the room and arrested the trio. According to one person present, ‘When the police entered the hotel corridor, they quickly noticed a heavy marijuana odour. They knocked on the hotel room door and were met by a very wobbly pop star.’
Another eyewitness described the scene as ‘like something from the action movie Lethal Weapon, as most of the city’s police force turned out – with an ambulance’. The source added that Amy ‘had problems remaining on her feet when she opened the door and saw the uniformed police. Making matters even worse, [she] was so intoxicated she experienced great difficulties communicating with the police officers.’ Indeed, it is believed that police were forced to wait until 11 p.m. before interviewing her, such was her state.
They were kept in police custody overnight and then fined and released. Amy and Blake were ordered to pay £350 between them, while the other arrested man was fined £240. Prosecutor Lars Morten Lothe explained how the police came to be knocking on Amy’s door and what happened next: ‘We had a tip from a good source, which led to police checking up on the tip. She spent a few hours in custody from Thursday evening to early Friday; she got a fine and then she was released. They signed a ticket, a fine, at the police station some hours ago. It is a closed case.’
When Amy left police custody she was reportedly in a confused state and asked for a cab to take her back to her hotel. Instead, she was given directions for the short walk back to the hotel.
Mitchell had flown to Bergen to offer his support but the trio had already been freed by the time he arrived. Despite the prosecutor’s valiant attempts to prevent the matter being blown out of all proportion, the press naturally went to town on the story. AMY WINEHOUSE GOES TO POT, yelled E! Online. WINEHOUSE ARRESTED OVER DRUGS, screamed the Daily Star in a story that included yet more predictions that she is ‘heading for an early grave’. Even the hotel trade media got in on the act, with a journalist for the online Hotel Chatter saying, ‘What is shocking is that it was just weed. Doesn’t Amy do like harder Class-A type of drugs? And we also learned that Amy doesn’t mind shacking up in Radissons but perhaps in the future Amy should check into more drug-friendly hotels.’
Immediately there were fears that the arrest might lead Amy to cancel the following evening’s appearance at the Bergen Live rock festival. However, as we’ve seen often, she genuinely adores performing live and sees it as the best part of her job. Frank Nes, head promoter of Bergen Live, said she had been quick to reassure him that her performance would go ahead. ‘We spoke to her management this morning and there isn’t anything that would indicate she won�
�t sing tonight. It’s not that dramatic, but it’s not a pleasant situation for anyone involved.’
It also emerged that Amy was used by police as an example to a rookie officer of how people look when they are under the influence of drugs. ‘They are very strict about drug taking in Norway,’ said a police source.
With her past record they thought there was more than just a couple of spliffs. When she opened the hotel room door it was obvious she was wasted. She was mumbling and no one could understand her. Amy and Blake were put in separate cells but Amy couldn’t be interviewed straightaway because she was totally incoherent. She was cooperative and even let an officer in training look in her eyes so he could recognise how a person high on drugs looks.’
She returned to the hotel and quickly recovered from the ordeal – she ordered champagne in the hotel spa. Mitchell reflected, ‘Well, you know, I try to speak to her every other day but, you know, every day I’m in contact with the tour. I went to Norway last week because there was a problem out there. Again, it was in all the newspapers that they found cannabis. It didn’t belong to her: it belonged to someone else on the tour. They arrested Blake, Amy and the person who was responsible. And they only released them after they signed a form, which they were told was a release form – it was in Norwegian. It was actually a confession, so this is being dealt with now by the Norwegian authorities and the British Consulate because the ramifications of that is that she now can’t get into the States and she was meant to go next week.’
Amy was far from being the first pop star to get on the wrong side of Scandinavian law in recent times. Rapper Snoop Dogg was arrested in March for suspected drug use, and Pete Doherty was arrested and fined in Sweden the previous year. In Doherty’s case, he was fined £1,000 after police found traces of cocaine in his blood, following a performance by his rock band at the Hultsfred music festival. Police detained the twenty-seven-year-old Babyshambles frontman after the concert because ‘he showed signs of being under the influence of narcotics’, Ulf Karlsson, a police spokesman in the city of Kalmar on Sweden’s southeastern coast, said.
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