Amy Winehouse (10 page)

The story was quickly put out by Amy’s people that her ill health was not alcohol-related but was actually the result of food poisoning. She told a journalist the following morning as she nursed a smoothie, ‘I haven’t had a drink in a few days.’ Not that many folk were in a mood to believe this story. As journalist Kitty Empire quipped in the
Guardian
, ‘The nation’s water coolers, Soho pubs, message boards and gossip websites rattled with a collective snort of derision.’ Instead, many
preferred to believe the other explanation doing the rounds: that Amy had spent the day drinking heavily with Kelly Osbourne. The pair have certainly been known to enjoy sinking a few glasses together. Osbourne said, ‘You should watch out. We call ourselves Team Evil. We like to go around causing trouble.’ I
T’S BARF TIME FOR
A
MY
, ran the
Sun
headline. It certainly had not been Amy’s finest hour.

The following month, she was able to atone for her first G-A-Y appearance when she was booked to return to the Astoria for an appearance under the
NME
banner. During the
NME
performance, while trying to locate Mitch in the crowd, she suddenly realised she had been singing towards the wrong man. ‘You’re impersonating my dad! I’ve been singing to you all night,’ she laughed. Particular highlights on the night were ‘Love is a Losing Game’, ‘You Know I’m No Good’ and ‘Back to Black’. However, the one-hour set was brought to a punctual end because, following the concert, the venue was turning into another G-A-Y night at which Amy was due to perform, to make up for her premature exit in January. ‘I’m surprised they let me in,’ she quipped with a hearty chuckle. ‘I thought there would be crowds of angry homosexuals at the door, waiting to batter me! I know I look as though I can handle myself, but…’

By the time she bounced back on the stage in front of the G-A-Y crowd, Amy was ready to prove her doubters wrong and was suitably sheepish and repentant when she told the crowd, ‘Thank you so much for coming. I can’t believe you had me back.’

They had her back again, in April, when, wearing a white vest and appearing particularly lucid, she gave a fantastic
performance and once more won the audience over. At the end of the performance, host Jeremy Joseph offered her the choice of a bunch of flowers or a bottle of champagne. She quipped, ‘I don’t drink.’

News then broke that Amy had been shortlisted in two categories for the forthcoming BRIT awards. How far she had come since her days at the BRIT Performing Arts & Technology School in Croydon, which was funded by the body that ran the BRITs. ‘Amy is really pleased to be shortlisted and honoured that some are tipping her to win,’ said a spokesperson, adding cheekily, ‘She’ll probably go out now and have a pint or two to celebrate.’ Amy’s first words on the matter were typically
down-to
-earth. ‘There’s going to be all these really cool people at the BRITs show, but me and my dad will be looking for the Terry Wogans and Fern Brittons,’ she smiled.

On the night, she arrived at the awards wearing a yellow dress. However, once it became time for her performance, she had changed into a fetching red number. She gave a faultless performance of ‘Rehab’. The worst the critics could say the following day was to express their disappointment that she wasn’t drunk or chaotic at all. The evening kicked off with a fantastic performance of ‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancing’ by the Scissor Sisters. Ten garishly dressed dancers bopped behind the band and before long the venue was warmed up, with even some of the stiff suits letting themselves go.

Russell Brand was the compere for the evening and he kicked off the proceedings with a joke that the stage set ‘looked not unlike an Amy Winehouse tattoo’, a quip that he
later credited to Oasis guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher. When it came to introducing Amy, he said she was ‘a woman whose surname sounds increasingly like the state of her liver’. He added that her acceptance speech could ‘easily have come from a London cabbie’.

She had walked a little unsteadily to the stage and said in her distinctive cockney twang, ‘Thank you very much. I’m glad my mum and dad are here, to be honest.’ Later on, looking back at the night Amy was more loquacious, saying, ‘I was flattered to even be nominated, let alone win. It was very exciting, actually. I hadn’t seen my mum in ages, so it was nice to see my mum. My dad was pissed. My dad was so funny. It was a good night, I really enjoyed it.’

Amy got fantastic reviews for her performance of ‘Rehab’ on the night and also for what she and Lily Allen wore to the event. ‘Amy, Lily and the rest of the Brit pack staged a spectacular fashion show on the biggest night of the pop music calendar,’ said the
Daily Mail
.

Speaking of Allen, there were reports that she and Amy had a huge row on the evening of the ceremony. Allen had been up for a number of awards but ended up winning none of them. According to an eyewitness at Heathrow airport, she admitted, ‘I had a real slanging match with Amy Winehouse. We had a really bad row. It was terrible. I’m miserable and don’t want to talk about it.’ An onlooker at the airport added that Lily waited alone for a flight to Washington, DC: ‘She had tears streaming down her face and she seemed as though she hadn’t slept a wink. She
looked really rough and hung over. Someone asked if she was all right and she said she’d had a bust-up with Amy Winehouse. She was sniffing and wiping tears from her cheeks. She looked like a little lost schoolgirl.’

However spokespeople for both women denied the incident. A representative for Allen said, ‘I don’t know anything about an argument. As far as I know they’ve always got on OK.’ Amy’s camp added, ‘Lily was crying because she was tired and emotional after her big night. They didn’t have an argument – they’re friends.’ Allen herself added, ‘The story about me being in tears either because I didn’t win a BRIT or had a fight with Amy is complete rubbish. She and I are friends and we were hanging out at the BRITs and at the Oasis party afterwards. I was talking to her for ages. I always said that I wasn’t expecting to win, and that if I wasn’t going to win then I hoped Amy did. I’m very pleased for her.

‘The pictures of me crying in the papers were taken when I was saying goodbye to my boyfriend, who I haven’t seen much of recently. I’ve been working really hard and travelling a lot and I only got to see him at the BRITs, so the tears were just because I was leaving to get on yet another plane.’

Reports vary as to just how hard Amy’s celebrations after the ceremony were. The
Daily Star
said, ‘Winehouse claimed she would party all night, but she was later seen walking around the Mocoto bar and the Cuckoo Club looking seriously sober, saying she just wanted to celebrate with family and friends.’ However, Mark Ronson says that he and Amy partied hard after the BRITs. ‘We got wasted together
after the BRITs and I passed out on her floor hugging an animal rug at 7 a.m.,’ he recalls.

The final word on the night goes to Amy, who managed to take the time to offer her sympathy to Robbie Williams, who had recently gone into a clinic to address his demons. ‘I feel gutted for him. Addiction to prescription drugs is a really hard thing. I hope he comes out OK,’ she said. The following day she and a companion were spotted out and about. One onlooker said, ‘They kept their heads down and didn’t say too much. It must have been a very good time the previous night.’

HMV’s Gennaro Castaldo puts into perspective what a BRIT triumph meant for Amy’s career: ‘Aside from the kudos that it gives you, winning a BRIT or performing at the awards ceremony can seriously enhance an artist’s recording career. The profile that it gives you means that successful artists can break out of their immediate fan base to connect with a much wider audience. This is happening right now to Amy Winehouse.

‘It will help take her to that next level of stardom, as we have seen in the past with the likes of Robbie Williams and Coldplay.’

Back to Black
, which had slipped to Number 5, went to Number 2 in the wake of the BRITs, with sales up nearly 200 per cent at HMV, and downloads of her single ‘Rehab’ shot up 40 per cent during the show itself.

Within months came Amy’s performance at the Glastonbury Festival. Although she began the set nervously, it proved to be a memorable and enjoyable performance. Sauntering onto the Pyramid Stage just after 3 p.m., Amy expressed her gratitude that fans were willing to stand in the rain to listen to her sing.
She was utterly entertaining: swinging her hips seductively, singing her heart out and even muttering to herself and giggling at times. It made for quite a spectacle.

Then the bizarre: someone flew over the crowd in a paraglider. Soon after this the rain packed it in and was replaced by the sun. The track which heralded this dramatic brightening of the conditions?
Back to Black
, what else? Before long a beautiful rainbow framed the stage, and Amy jubilantly reminded the audience that she had promised them sun and delivered them the sun. Rosie Swash said of Amy’s performance that ‘she bares more than a passing resemblance to a rabbit caught in the headlights… she never quite loses the slightly traumatised expression’. Another observer described Amy as resembling ‘an extra from
Star Trek
’. What concert where they at?

She also appeared at the Isle of Wight festival that summer. Wearing a vest and shortcut jeans, she gave an extraordinarily accomplished performance. The
Spectator
review seemed to be of another concert:

Later in the festival, when the veteran rockers the Rolling Stones took to the stage, Amy joined them to duet with Mick
Jagger on the Motown classic ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’. This 1966 hit for the Temptations has also been covered by Rick Astley, Willie Bobo, Count Basie and his Orchestra, JJ Jackson, the J Evans Band, Ben Harper and others. Amy and Jagger were perfect together. It was a great performance all round by Amy and one she enjoyed, even if she almost missed it.

‘I’m not very ambitious at all,’ she said soon after the show. ‘I almost didn’t come to this concert. I almost didn’t go to the gig in Sweden yesterday. I almost didn’t go to the Isle of Wight, I almost didn’t do it.’ Citing Blake’s worries as the reason for her near-misses, she added, ‘I just want him to be happy. And, if for some reason he’s unhappy, then it just floors me.’

These words scarcely did justice to the drama and controversy that Amy and Blake’s relationship was to cause in the coming months.

O
ne day, while talking to friends, Blake Fielder-Civil received a text message on his mobile phone from Kelly Osbourne. The text informed him that Amy was in a hotel room in Los Angeles, wearing
his
underpants. As strange moments in his relationship went, this was small fry. Their relationship has been utterly wild. It’s been described as everything from a modern-day Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, to a dangerous,
Fatal Attraction
-style pairing.

Blake met Amy in 2005. He recalls, ‘We met at a pub called the Good Mixer in Camden. I’d just had a good win at the bookies so I went to the pub to celebrate, opened the door and Amy was the first person I saw and that was it. The drinks were on me for the first and last time! And from that night onwards, we began our tortuous love affair.

‘When we met we were attracted to each other instantly and
we’ve never stopped being that way,’ he said of their love-
at-first
-sight encounter. ‘I know me and Amy are going to be together. She’s the love of my life.’ Within a month, that love was expressed in artistic form, as Amy got a new tattoo. Inked on her chest, over her heart, is a button pocket with the word ‘Blake’s’ on it. Hence, she was expressing that he’ll always be close to her heart. Blake, too, loves tattoos and even has the word ‘Sailor’ inked on the inside of his lip.

However, this initial courtship was not to last long because Blake already had a girlfriend. How inconvenient! As we were subsequently to hear in one of Amy’s best-loved songs, Blake quickly went back to his girlfriend and Amy, well, she went back to black. To deal with her heartache, Amy quickly took up with a new man, Alex Claire. Claire was twenty-one when he met Amy and was quickly taken in by her ‘very striking face with big brown eyes that suck you in’.

As for Amy, she recalls, ‘I made him buy me a tequila because they were refusing to serve me on account of a
golf-ball
-sized lump on my head from the previous night. A few drinks later I was sat on his lap.’

The venue for this tequila moment was the Hawley Arms in Camden. Within eight weeks, chef and musician Claire had moved in with her. Claire has spoken of their wild sex romp. They were once almost thrown out of a cinema in north London as their passionate clinch became more and more passionate. Presumably
V For Vendetta
hadn’t grabbed their attention, then. They also had sex backstage at a concert in Southampton, minutes before Amy strolled onto the stage.

In his torrid kiss-and-tell interview with the
News of the World
, entitled B
ONDAGE, BEATINGS AND BITINGS
, Claire claimed that Amy ‘loved being dominated as well as dominating’. He said she once pushed his head under the bathwater during sex. ‘I was under for several seconds. I couldn’t breathe and started freaking out.’ Then there was the time he was ‘clobbered by her huge beehive during a romp’. Never a dull moment, then!

During their year-long affair, they split three times but each time they would get back together after making up. However, the main issue facing their relationship was Blake. Claire found it hard to believe that Amy and Blake really were history. She would promise to have her ‘Blake’s’ tattoo removed but then, hours later, would be spotted not having it removed but hanging out with her former lover. One night, in March 2007, she was spotted enjoying a passionate moment with both Claire and Blake in one single night. Confusion reigned not just in Claire’s mind but in the minds of Amy’s friends, too. ‘I saw Amy when she was on
The Sharon Osbourne Show
back in October 2006,’ says one friend. ‘She had Blake with her. All the time she was talking about her “boyfriend” – Alex – but was sitting on Blake’s lap and snogging him. She was saying, “Read me out those text messages I sent you – the filthy ones.” It was all pretty gross.’

Later on, Amy and Blake confirmed that many of these suspicions were justified. ‘Our relationship never really stopped, did it, babe?’ said Blake. ‘I was sneaking around making phone calls and we’d meet up for five minutes or ten minutes and in the end we just couldn’t carry on doing that.’

‘Yes,’ replied Amy. ‘There was a time when we didn’t talk to
each other but that was because we realised it was better not to talk than talk and cause irreparable damage.’

Amy said of Blake, ‘I’m still really close to him as a friend – though Alex doesn’t like me seeing him, which is understandable.’ By this time, she had written ‘Back to Black’, about her initial break-up with Blake, and was surprised that the theme of the song didn’t cause more of an issue with Claire, who was instead a big fan of the song. ‘I told him the song was about Blake but he didn’t care. Weird, I know!’

So, few were surprised when Amy returned to Blake. However, while Claire may not have been surprised, he was heartbroken, as he revealed in a dramatic outburst on his MySpace page:

His outburst – slammed as ‘pathetic’ by one of the tabloids – continued, ‘A friend gave me a little something I hadn’t had in a while – MDMA. I always forget how enjoyable everything was after you taste that rank shit, especially with a couple of Valium, three lines and a little dark rum to wash it down.’ Amy says she understands why Claire felt hurt but adds, ‘Something tells me he’ll be all right.’

Her father Mitch said that Amy’s busy schedule caused problems with her relationship with Claire. ‘It’s like she cut out my heart, bit a chunk out of it, threw it on the floor and stomped all over it,’ said Claire. ‘She’s scared to be happy. I hope she finds happiness one day. She needs looking after but I’m glad that’s not my responsibility any more.’

Amy’s relationship with Claire might have seemed eccentric but her tryst with Blake was to prove spectacularly unconventional, wild, controversial and newsworthy. Upon hooking up with him for a second time, Amy declared, ‘He’s the one.’ But who was he? Having been described as everything from a ‘rock’ for Amy, to an evil man, the source of all her woes, where did this young man appear from?

There were a few hints of the drama to come when Blake was a fresh-faced pupil at the strict Bourne Grammar School in Lincolnshire. ‘He was a bit geeky, to be honest,’ says one former classmate. ‘He wasn’t really interested in working hard but he seemed to have lots of mates and was fairly popular with the girls.’ Another fellow pupil, Mark Stoker, said, ‘Blake was cheeky and cocky but not enough to get into trouble. He wasn’t thick but just didn’t have the application to work. When he left school he moved down to London and we lost touch.’ Having tracked Blake’s infamous life since, Stoker reflects, ‘He has obviously been influenced by the music scene. He certainly never dressed like he does now when we were at school.’

Blake was, however, showing some interest in style while at school. He took an interest in hairdressing – no doubt attracting a few jibes from his fellow male pupils – and
photographs of him at school reveal he had an angelic, floppy centre-parting style. His creative side also stretched to his devouring literature and dreaming of becoming a journalist. After school, he set off for the bright lights of the capital city and sent a dispatch of his glamorous new lifestyle back to his former schoolmates via the nostalgic Friends Reunited website. ‘Live in London innit,’ he wrote on his online profile. ‘Cut hair for fashion shoots, go out in town and enjoy my girlfriend lots. Academia never my forte but taking a fashion design degree at Chelsea this year and a ND in history of art. Would quite like to hear from some people and I hope I do.’

However, Blake did not need to rely on old friends from school because he had a new set of pals in the capital. One, who used to go clubbing frequently with Blake says, ‘He’s kind of a charming bad boy. He’s the sort of bloke who’s got all the chat – who’s got a little twinkle in his eye. He’ll go out and misbehave and do who knows what, but he’d never let a woman go through a door second. He’s always called a “music video assistant”, or a “gopher” but I don’t know about that. I don’t know where he gets his money from.’

He’s said to have had a number of jobs in shops and bars in north London. It was of course in a bar that he first met Amy, who was said to have been drawn to him ‘as a moth to a flame’, attracted to ‘a bit of rough’. Then came the tattoo on her chest, and, by the time she was reunited with him following her split with Claire, it looked as if the relationship was finally living up to the serious billing it received when the pair had first met. She and Blake seemed inseparable. ‘It’s
like they can’t live without each other,’ said one friend. At the time, this seemed a beautiful expression of the romantic depth of the couple’s bond. It would soon take on a whole new and sinister resonance.

The first thing that Blake had to adapt to once he started dating Amy was the glare of publicity. Amy admits that he found it a challenge. ‘There’s no point in being pissed off about things you can’t control. It’s cool. It causes problems with my husband, though. He doesn’t like it,’ she has said since her marriage to Blake in May 2007. The most visible and brutal expression of this came in the shape of the paparazzi, who would follow the couple around. ‘I’m protective of Amy as any man would be of his wife,’ he has said. ‘It’s natural. To have a scrum of photographers shouting, thrusting cameras and flashing them in your face can be quite intimidating but Amy seems to have accepted this is the way her life is going to be from now on.’

Amy agrees: ‘Yes, you’re right, it can be intimidating. And it can be scary sometimes when people I don’t know seem to know me, but that’s about it really.’

Many celebrities have found that they have lost otherwise promising relationships because their non-famous partners have found living in the public eye was too much to take. It is to Blake’s enormous credit and a hugely positive sign of the couple’s prospects of future happiness that he has striven hard to come to terms with the pressures of Amy’s fame.

Amy admits that she is a high-maintenance girlfriend to have, ‘in that I expect my boyfriend to come to my house and sleep with me every night. I’m an all-or-nothing person, but I
also like to look after my man and make him feel like a king.’ Prior to meeting Blake, she had spoken of the difficulty of balancing her career and a boyfriend. ‘At the moment I don’t have the time to be able to respect a boyfriend properly, and I can’t expect a boyfriend to respect and honour what I do right now, so I am not looking for anything on a surface level.’

Amy and Blake went out for one of their typical nights on the tiles in April 2007. Drinks were enjoyed; laughter, chat and much more besides were shared. Then, when they got home, Blake turned to Amy and asked her to marry him. He didn’t get an instant answer, as Amy revealed: ‘I took a day to finally agree.’ Not that she was in two minds. ‘I am so pleased Blake proposed. It’s fucking amazing, fantastic,’ she beamed, flashing her £3,000 Tiffany engagement ring to her friends. Speaking to reporters on the steps outside a Camden pub, Amy said, ‘I’m a very lucky girl to have found someone I love so much. I hope to be with him for the rest of my life. We haven’t set a date yet or anything like that. Obviously, we’re both young and it’s frightening. But it’s the right thing to do. That’s why I agreed.’

Soon the plans for the wedding were under way – as was the inevitable press speculation. One report claimed that Amy was demanding that her fiancé convert to Judaism in order to marry her. ‘He isn’t religious so it’s no skin off his nose,’ said a source. ‘He will do anything she wants and has spoken to her dad about it.’ However, one eyewitness on the day of their wedding on 18 May suggests he wouldn’t do anything Amy wants, at all. As he strutted down the hotel corridor, he was
said to be singing to himself, ‘They tried to make me sign a prenup but I said no, no, no.’

The hotel in question was the Shore Club Hotel in Miami, where Amy and Blake booked a £2,500-a-night room for their wedding trip. While there, they certainly celebrated in style. It is estimated that they spent £1,000 on room service, including countless bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne at £90 a time. They even had the in-house masseur visit them.

‘Amy told Blake that she’d spare no expense – she’s working so hard now that they tried to cram two weeks’ worth of fun into two days,’ said a friend. ‘They locked themselves in and wouldn’t even leave to let the chambermaids change the linen! Every few hours, they’d call and ask for bubbly and occasionally French fries. They seemed far more interested in booze than food!’ It is estimated that the bill for their stay eventually came to £9,000 all in.

The events of the day of the wedding are still somewhat mysterious. It is known, though, that Amy wore a short floral-patterned sundress and Blake wore a retro grey suit for the brief ceremony at the Miami-Dade County Marriage License Bureau in Florida. Marriage clerk Sammy Calixte, who conducted the ceremony, said, ‘They came in to get married and they were alone. I read the vows and each one said “I do.” When I pronounced them man and wife, they hugged and kissed.’

Amy then changed into a white vest top and denim shorts and, with her new husband in tow, went to the Big Pink Diner restaurant for a celebration meal. The Big Pink Diner had
recently been patronised by Tony Blair while he stayed at Bee Gee Robin Gibb’s beach mansion. The married couple arrived back at the hotel separately. Confronted by reporters, Blake said, with a wink, ‘We had a good day but I can’t really talk about it.’ Back together, they repaired to the pool bar and carried on the celebrations. When they tried to head out for another walk, they were caught in a tropical downpour.

With Blake and Amy initially being so coy towards reporters about whether they had indeed wed, the first confirmation came when Blake changed his status on the MySpace website from single to married. Then a spokesperson for the singer confirmed, ‘Amy and Blake got married [on Friday]. They are both very happy.’ Amy then confirmed the marriage herself, during a concert back in London. ‘I don’t know if you heard, but I just got married to the best man in the world,’ she announced, smiling, to rapturous cheers and applause from the audience, which included Elton John and his partner David Furnish. She also said, with a grin, ‘I broke my tooth – it’s not pretty. At least I can just about sing.’ Also during the concert she ribbed Mitch, who was in the audience, with jokes that he now had to pay for her second wedding.