It was the wrong side of midnight in the Hawley Arms in Camden when Amy Winehouse grabbed hold of me and dragged me behind the bar. As a young showbiz reporter in the mid-noughties, interviews often happened at strange times, but even by those standards this felt surreal.
With bemused drinkers looking on, she started talking about her love life while expertly pulling what looked like the perfect pint. She was magnetic company: every answer came with another joke, another cig, or another burst of laughter.
That’s the Amy I still find myself thinking about on the 15th anniversary of her death this week. She bears almost no resemblance to the tragic figure who would eventually dominate so many front pages, including plenty of my own in the Mirror.
Back then, Amy was impossible to ignore. I remember covering her tiny Dublin Castle gig in Camden, as I squeezed into a packed backroom as she played the Back to Black album.
It’s one of those mythical gigs that everybody now insists they attended. Those of us who really were there knew within minutes we were watching somebody extraordinary. Of course, that’s not the Amy most people came to know.
As her fame exploded, so did her addiction, and the chaos around her became a story in its own right. I found myself following her across Scandinavia on one tour where the music increasingly felt like only half of what we were there to report.
There were drugs, police call-outs and stories filtering back from hotels of wrecked rooms after she’d checked out. Every day seemed to bring another drama or crisis. The performances too began to falter.
A spectacularly bad gig in Copenhagen springs to mind where she spent the entire show fidgeting with her beehive, clearly under the influence. Another time, I remember standing inside her VIP area at the T in the Park festival in Scotland as complete pandemonium unfolded around her.
Over the course of a few hours I ended up filing a story saying she’d “scrawled erotic notes to husband Blake, flirted and swapped numbers with another man, caused chaos in the ladies’ loos and went bonkers over a bottle of mayo.”
At one point she handed me the note she’d written to Blake Fielder-Civil, then in prison. “Dear Blakey,” it began. “I am having such a lovely time in T in the Park with all my friends. I can’t wait to see you soon and f*** you senseless. I f***ing love you.”
I am not sure what she intended me to do with it, but it was Amy all over: hilarious, outrageous, affectionate and operating at a hundred miles an hour. Saying that, she could also be spectacularly rude.
On one occasion I watched another tiny show at the Proud Galleries, in Camden, where she mingled with fans afterwards. Wellwishers – including my girlfriend (now wife) – were given short shrift. After saying how much we enjoyed the gig, she rolled her eyes, snarled “whatever” and stormed off. We still laugh about it now.
All credit to Amy for living her life in full, and not hiding away. Back then, it was easier for celebs to let their hair down: social media barely existed, and camera phones weren’t yet everywhere.
Celebrities still went to pubs, festivals and clubs believing that what happened there might stay there, or at least remain within a relatively small circle. However because Amy refused to disappear from public view, an entire ecosystem grew around her. There were low-life dealers always circling, so-called friends who claimed to have her best interests at heart, but invariably didn’t. Imagine her family’s horror when Pete Doherty later arrived onto the scene.
Her circle was so leaky that I wasn’t surprised when pictures emerged of her smoking crack, which sent her team into freefall. Looking back, it’s fair to say Amy understood the media world better than most. Before she became famous she’d briefly worked for entertainment agency WENN as a showbiz reporter.
It felt – at first – that Amy acquiesced in the process. She would often play up to the press pack who used to assemble in her favourite pubs, and give us a fun quote. But somewhere along the way the balance shifted.
I remember walking past her home in Camden one afternoon and being shocked by the banks and banks of paps stationed outside.
Pictures of her walking through Soho with blood-soaked ballet shoes, with bruises to her neck and bandages on her arms felt particularly intrusive. Increasingly, it felt like we were witnessing a tragedy unfold in slow motion.
It’s easy, fifteen years on, to ask why somebody didn’t help her but the truth is that many of them were trying, often desperately. I remember sitting down with her dad Mitch in 2009 as he described resorting to faking a heart attack in a bid to shock Amy into giving up heroin.
“I pretended I was seriously ill and even got our doctor to tell Amy that I was dying,” he told me. “Amy’s not stupid and she wanted to see my medical records proving I was actually ill.”
Looking back now, it’s astonishing that we were having such an intimate conversation about a young woman who was still alive. We discussed her addictions, her physical health and her mental health in forensic detail.
After Amy passed away in July 2011, I spoke to Mitch again. Searching for answers as to how she died ahead of her inquest, he talked openly about the seizures he believed had been brought on by binge drinking.
“I was there once. It was pure fluke. She just hit the floor,” he recalled. “A couple of times her face swelled up. She’d had a series of seizures before… What else could it have been?”
In fairness to Mitch, he was a father trying to make sense of the unimaginable, and I remain grateful that he trusted me enough to speak so openly. But reading those interviews back today, I can’t escape another thought.
Namely that there seemed to be almost no part of Amy’s life that wasn’t eventually laid bare. Perhaps that’s why, when I think of Amy now, I always find myself back in that pub, dreaming of her and that perfect pint….
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: mirror.co.uk
