by Daphne Barak
‘It is very tricky being a parent’, I comment.
‘I couldn’t be taught it,’ Janis agrees. ‘I am the mother that I didn’t have and would have liked,’ she adds.
This comment from Janis really strikes me as very interesting. In my experience, any parent who is asked if he or she has been a good father or a good mother, would, of course, like to respond ‘Yes’, but that person would also usually have some doubts (whether vocalized, or not) about that.
With Janis though, there is no doubt in her mind. She is a great mother. And while, in many ways, I’m sure that she is a very good mother to her children, her lack of any doubt is, I have to say, in my experience quite unusual.
As most of the media focussed on Amy’s problems, others, perhaps surprisingly, ignored them, stressing instead Amy’s edgy rock chick style. A source was reported to have told the Daily Mirror, for example, that American Vogue editor Anna Wintour had cried ‘get me Amy’ for the cover of the September 2007 issue as the musician oozed cool. When that particular issue hit the newsstands, however, Sienna Miller graced its cover.
Despite all this, and even after further cancelled concerts, Amy’s fans and many of her music peers made it clear that they still appreciated her talent. Amy received several nominations in 2007 for key music awards. Early in September of that year, she appeared at the Mercury Music Prize awards ceremony at London’s Grosvenor House in Mayfair, giving, by all accounts, a breathtaking performance of ‘Love Is A Losing Game’, accompanied by just an acoustic guitar. Nominated for the award, along with the likes of the Arctic Monkeys, Bat For Lashes and Dizzee Rascal, Amy lost to the Klaxons. Afterwards she announced to a London evening paper that she was well after her holiday with Blake and couldn’t see what all the fuss had been about.
A few weeks later, on 19 September, she appeared at the MOBO (Music of Black Origin) Awards at the 02 Arena in London’s Greenwich. This time nominated for several awards, including Best R&B, Best Song (‘Rehab’) and Best Video (‘Back To Black’), Amy won the Best UK Female award. She also performed at the awards. Looking painfully thin, a seemingly distracted Amy sang out of time and stared into space, as she performed ‘Me and Mr Jones’ and ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’, an appearance for which she was subsequently panned in the press.
Although Amy was reported to be on a downward cycle, she was still winning awards for her talent. On 8 October 2007, she won the Best Album award at the Q Awards. Mark Ronson picked it up on her behalf, but during the partying afterwards ended up misplacing it. The slightly bemused general manager of Bar Soho, a Central London bar, subsequently discovered it in the venue’s toilets.
In October, Ronson released a cover, with Amy on vocals, of the Zutons’ song ‘Valerie’ from his album Version. The single shot to No. 2 in the UK single charts. Otherwise, however, Amy wasn’t doing so well. On a tour of Europe, Amy played Germany and Denmark, before performing in Norway, where she and Blake were arrested in Bergen on 18 October. According to reports, they were released the next day, after being fined for possession of marijuana, after which Amy continued her tour.
After Amy won the MTV Artists’ Choice award in November, one of the most coveted music awards, Island released a deluxe version of Back To Black and a DVD called ‘I Told You I Was Trouble: Live in London’, which included interviews with Amy, Island’s Darcus Beese and Mitch Winehouse, driving around in his taxicab. It also showed a live performance at Shepherd’s Bush earlier in the year.
But while Amy was winning awards, on a personal front things were about to get much worse. Her relationship with Blake was still up and down and Blake had an assault charge hanging over his head from an alleged encounter with a barman in Hoxton, East London, in June 2006.
Mitch says of that time, ‘Amy and Blake’s relationship was very much up and down … and we knew … [that] he [Blake] had a serious criminal case pending …
‘He [had] assaulted somebody or allegedly assaulted somebody and he knew he had this hanging over his head and he knew they would have this court case [going] on for sometime. This is all we knew. We didn’t know anything about anything else, and Amy and I were talking about [it]. He felt that he might go to prison for a considerable amount of time and I would sit and talk to them about what we would do … you know, how we could resolve the problems and everything else. But basically there was not an awful lot we could do. Because we knew at some point he would have to face the consequences of his actions. And he had a date to appear in court and it was cancelled and he had another date and it was cancelled and … while all this [was] going on, there [were] problems occurring of varying degrees – Amy giving performances that weren’t great … Amy doing great performances but … you know it was inconsistent.’
On 9 November 2007, Amy’s ‘Baby’, Blake, was arrested. Photographs of a tearful Amy kissing a handcuffed Blake appeared on the front pages of many newspapers. Blake, it seemed, was being charged with perverting the course of justice by attempting to fix the outcome of a trial.
After receiving a tip-off and secretly filming some meetings at which Blake was reported to be present, the Daily Mirror alerted the police that Blake and his friend Michael Brown, both accused of assaulting a barman, were allegedly trying to pay the victim £200,000 to drop the charges and were planning to whisk him out of the country so that their case would be dropped. Police subsequently raided Amy and Blake’s home in Camden, using a battering ram to knock down the door, but the couple weren’t there. Blake’s arrest took place later at a flat in Bow, East London.
A distraught Amy later tried to visit her husband, only to be turned away, as Blake’s mother had already been to see her son and prisoners were only allowed one visitor a week.
Friends and family worried about how Amy would react without Blake at her side with all the media attention she was receiving, but Amy, perhaps surprisingly, decided to carry on with her biggest British tour. The opening night on 14 November 2007, however, at the NIA venue in Birmingham was a shambles, ending with Amy being booed by loyal fans among the 13,000-strong crowd. She responded by telling them to wait until Blake got out of ‘incarceration’. She eventually walked off stage halfway through a performance of ‘Valerie’. Her spokesman later explained that Amy had had a particularly bad day after visiting Blake for the first time at Pentonville Prison in North London.
As if it could not get worse, Amy’s tour manager, Thom Stone, later resigned during the Glasgow leg of the tour; stories began to circulate that he had had enough after heroin that he had ‘passively inhaled’ while on Amy’s tour bus was found in his system.
A UN senior official also accused both Amy and model Kate Moss of glamorizing cocaine use, which could, he said, in turn, lead to Colombian drug barons carving more of a path into Europe’s cities and causing devastation to parts of Africa. Around the same time, a video appeared on YouTube of a gig in Zurich, in which Amy was accused of allegedly retrieving drugs from her beehive. It was later claimed that the singer had just pulled out a tissue to wipe her nose, which she stuffed up her sleeve afterwards.
Amy played a show at Newcastle Academy on 18 November 2007 and got fantastic reviews, but further scandal broke when she was allegedly photographed after a gig in Blackpool on 20 November with white powder visible in her right nostril, leading to such headlines as ‘Winehouse goes back to white’ from the Sun.
Island released Frank for the first time in the States on that same date. It immediately went to No. 61 on the Billboard charts, showing that even a lot of bad press and a cancelled tour couldn’t hurt Amy’s sales over there. In England, Amy played just a few more dates, before cancelling her tour at the end of November.
She said in her statement, ‘I can’t give it my all on stage without my Blake … My husband is everything to me.’
Her label insisted that the cancellation had nothing to do with Amy’s alleged drug problems but that the touring and the emotional toll of recent weeks had meant that Amy had to take a complete rest to
deal with ‘health issues’.
‘You know where you go to Al Anon and … they say “My name is …?” Can you say, “My name is Janis Winehouse and my daughter is addicted?”’ I ask Janis at our meeting at the London Intercontinental hotel in November 2008.
‘No,’ she replies. ‘Because she [Amy] has to. It has to be … [that she can] say “This is the problem that I have”. … She has not said to me … “Can you help me?” She has never said that to me – and I have never pushed her to do anything, because it’s got to be what Amy wants. And I respect that.’
I ask her how she thinks Amy will take that first step towards urgently needed recovery.
‘… I don’t know. It’s something that Mitch and I talk about all of the time. It has to be that Amy has to acknowledge that. And it’s a bit like, you can’t take a horse to water and make it drink. If it doesn’t want to, it won’t.
‘… As a mother I’m there for my baby … Amy says she’s an addicted personality …’
‘She says, “She’s an addicted personality”? I repeat.
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘But she doesn’t at this moment see it as a problem? What she’s addicted to?’ I am trying to understand Janis’s perspective on this.
‘… She doesn’t say anything about anything.’
I can’t help but wonder why Janis doesn’t push Amy further to discuss such key issues with her. When talking to Janis, I have the strong impression that she would love to have closer and better communication with Amy, but as Janis is not able to be with her daughter all the time, like Mitch, she doesn’t know how to create a more intimate mother-daughter relationship. I think that Janis would be very happy if Amy would open up to her but she doesn’t know how to ask the questions – she is scared of being rejected by her daughter.
Further reports of Amy’s erratic behaviour were printed in the press, particularly one photograph of Amy stumbling around the streets of East London at 5.40 a.m. in freezing temperatures, dressed in just a red bra and jeans, that was printed in most papers in Britain; the story even made the New York Post. But still the accolades for Amy’s talent kept coming, never more so than when she received six Grammy nominations (for Best New Artist, Record and Song of the Year for ‘Rehab’, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Album of the Year for Back To Black) competing against such artists as Kanye West and Beyoncé.
A distressed Janis had seemingly had enough though. In an Open Letter to her daughter, which was published in the British Sunday paper the News of the World on 9 December 2007, Janis begged Amy to seek help. She wrote that the letter was her way of making sure that Amy knew that all she needed to do was ‘take the first step’ and tell Janis what was troubling her and then Amy’s family would help her. She commented that Amy had always been as ‘stubborn as a mule’ and that early fame had dizzied her, muddled her mind, but that she was just an ordinary human being, ‘no stronger’ than any of the rest of them.
She added that Amy thought that she could get through her problems by herself but she couldn’t, and if she came to Janis first, Amy’s family could help her. She wrote, ‘You are still my baby’ and ‘I want you back’. She also stated in the letter that Amy was a brilliant talent and if she got herself well enough again, she would go on to fulfil her destiny.
It’s not only Janis who has attempted to communicate with Amy through the News of the World – both Blake and his mother, Georgette, have spoken to the paper. Blake used his interview in November 2008 as a tool to reach out to Amy – and he knew exactly which buttons to push. Blake said all the right things, claiming that he introduced Amy to hard drugs and that he was willing to leave her so that she would recover from her addictions.
Mitch, too, says very intimate things about his daughter to the media – he even wants to tell me details about Amy’s periods. It does make me wonder how Amy feels about this. If my mother or father or boyfriend sold a story about my private life to the press, I would be devastated. It would seem like such an invasion of privacy. I feel a lot of sympathy for Amy. But it seems to me that newspapers and the media play a special role in the Winehouse family’s daily life and also in their communication with each other. In a way, I think this family feels that if it airs its problems in public, then at least it puts everything on the record. This certainly seems to create a lot of emotion within the family – but for them, it’s just quite natural.
‘If I were to ask you to put the Amy Winehouse story into one sentence [what would that be]?’ I ask Janis.
‘It would be Amy Winehouse, living life to the edge,’ she replies.
‘That is scary,’ I comment.
‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘but that is what she does. Always. Always.’
‘Does she do it intentionally or … subconsciously?’ I say.
‘… I don’t know … she just does [it].’
‘When I am listening to you,’ I continue, ‘… I am very intrigued. What I hear from the Amy Winehouse story is that she is from a very loving, united family but very lonely people. She is lonely; you are lonely. Basically [are you] very lonely people looking for love?’
‘Yes!’ Janis agrees. ‘We are unfulfilled and we are seeking the fulfilment.’
‘What is the one sentence, the one line from Amy’s songs that you think is about you?’ I say.
‘It is the one “I can’t help you, if you don’t help yourself.”’1
I ask if she repeated this back to Amy when she was in trouble.
‘No,’ Janis tells me but she adds, ‘It is always there at the back of my mind. … I can’t help her if she doesn’t help herself. And, … that is Amy. … [She] is in denial all the time.
‘“Oh Mum,”’ Janis says, putting on her daughter’s voice. ‘“I am okay. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.”’
After Blake’s arrest, Amy moved out of their home in Camden to Bow in East London. The world’s media seemed to camp outside her door, catching Amy’s every move and encounter on camera. Friends alleged that Amy’s house move was prompted by her wanting to get away from the bad memories of her overdose and Blake’s arrest, which were associated with the Camden house she had shared with her husband.
Others, however, were quick to comment on Amy’s choice of company, such as musician Pete Doherty, who himself reportedly had a drug problem, and reports emerged that Amy’s behaviour was getting worse, if anything. Blake’s mother is alleged to have stated that Amy was taking more drugs than ever.
Amy seemingly told friends that if she didn’t deal with her problems over Christmas she would check into rehab in the New Year. She spent the holiday period in the Caribbean with friends and a newly blonde Amy was seen in London in early January 2008.
In the end, however, it seemed that matters were perhaps taken out of her hands when a video was posted on the web of Amy allegedly smoking crack cocaine at a party at her home in Bow. In the Daily Mail, Mitch said that the video ‘may well be the best thing that has ever happened to her … it may finally be the thing to focus her mind and convince her to get the help she needs to quit for good’.
On 24 January 2008, Amy, accompanied by her friend Kelly Osbourne and Mitch, checked into a rehab facility, the Capio Nightingale Hospital, near Marylebone, London. Universal released a statement saying that after talks with her label, management, family and doctors, Amy had come to realize that she needed ‘specialist treatment to continue her ongoing recovery from drug addiction’.
The move, while hailed by many Winehouse fans, also brought much speculation about whether Amy would attend the Grammys.
Sure enough in early February 2008, the BBC, among others, reported that Amy’s application for a US visa had been declined. A spokesman for Amy commented that she was disappointed but was concentrating on her recovery. At the final hour, the US embassy reversed its decision, but Amy was now set to appear in front of a select audience made up mostly of family and friends at the Riverside Studios in West London.
Her perfor
mance was to be broadcast live via satellite to the awards, a decision that she stuck to, singing ‘Rehab’ and ‘You Know I’m No Good’ to a standing ovation from the LA audience. The Grammys were a huge success for Amy, who picked up five of her six awards (Herbie Hancock picked up the Album of the Year for River: The Joni Letters).
A visibly shocked Amy thanked Island Records, her parents and Blake, her incarcerated husband – and, also, London because ‘Camden Town is burning down’, a reference to the fire that was destroying large parts of the area where she and Blake had lived.
Afterwards, Amy returned to the Capio Nightingale hospital and rehab.
‘Do you think Amy knows how much you love her?’ I ask Janis and Mitch. ‘She cries out for more attention [from you]. She basically takes all your attention.’
‘I think that is possible,’ Janis replies. ‘That is what she does. The thing is, it is there for her. It is unconditional.’
‘But does she know [that]?’
‘It is funny you should say that … Maybe it is Amy’s way of attention seeking,’ Mitch says.
‘It is like saying “Hey guys! Me! Me! Me!”’ I throw up my hand.
‘Well …’ Mitch responds. ‘She has got our attention.’
‘As a parent … do you have your moments when you say “What have I done – what did I do wrong?”’ I ask them both.
‘No! No! No!!!’ Janis says emphatically. ‘I don’t go down that road. … You have just got to … move on. [There] is no question of “It is my fault that this happened” and looking for [someone to] blame. That is a guilt thing. No. No. Everything I have done it was all in place.’
‘You have been a good mum?’ I ask Janis.
‘Yes!’ she replies without any hesitation whatsoever.
‘She is a wonderful mother,’ Mitch interjects, although it is my perception that he is saying this because he left Janis alone with the kids when he married Jane. Mitch had been conducting his affair with Jane for years and so even before he left, he was only half there for Janis. So I think he wants to jump in to say that Janis is a wonderful mother – it’s the gentlemanly thing to do and, of course, it eases his guilt.