Saving Amy (12 page)

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.”’