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Posted November 10, 200717 yr

Chasing Amy

Over the past months, chart-topping tabloid magnet Amy Winehouse has wandered bloody through the streets of London, checked in to (and out of) rehab and slipped into a coma. Blender trails the diva through Europe to learn firsthand that “no, no, no” still means no.

Jody Rosen

Blender November 07 2007

Amy Winehouse is concerned about her hair. Backstage at a taping for La Musicale — a French TV show filmed on a soundstage in northern Paris — the 24-year-old singer putters over to the mirror in her tiny, windowless dressing room and begins fussing with the Cruella De Vil–style peroxide-blond shocks at the front of her bouffant. She’s sporting her usual goth-barfly look: raccoon mascara, low-rider jeans hitched with a gold belt and a cropped T-shirt revealing her rail-thin midriff and her copious tattooage, including the legend blake scrawled above her heart, a tribute to her husband of six months, Blake Fielder-Civil. She’s never exactly been a picture of health, but tonight she looks especially worse for wear: hunched, heavy-lidded and frail.

“There used to be just one small ginger bit,” she says, tugging at her coiffure. “Now there’s this whole big blond bit. I hate it.” Her words are slow and drawling — she sounds as if she’s trying to speak through a mouthful of molasses — her eyes are clouded.

“Why don’t you just dye it all black?” asks her stylist, Naomi.

“No … ” she says hazily. “One small bit of ginger is what I want.” She sighs and plops down on the couch. She lights a cigarette and turns a drowsy gaze toward Blender; she’s ready to talk. We start by asking if she’ll be recording the follow-up to Back to Black anytime soon.

“Yeah, we’ve got a couple of more bits … I’m writing … ” she mumbles. “On the whole … ” She trails off.

Um … Back to Black was such a personal record — the songs were clearly about your relationship with Blake. Are you still writing confessionals?

“I’m still writing about the dynamics of being in a relationship … Would you like some wine?” she asks, fetching two glasses and beginning to pour. “I believe in relationships,” she continues, “whether it’s your grandmother or your dog … ”

Now her words are slurred, her eyelids drooping. Her head wobbles into a nod. She falls asleep for a second, wakes with a start, mutters and drops off again. The smoldering cigarette in her left hand falls to the floor.

“Oh, God, what is wrong with me?” she asks, coming to. “There’s something wrong with me … ”

We inquire about her brief rehab stint in August. What was it like there?

“You go in and you’re just sat down. They looked at me and said, ‘You’re an alcoholic.’”

And are you?

“No … I don’t know.”

Are you clean these days?

“I take, like, anti- … I take stuff for my depression. Prescriptive stuff. But I don’t take it.”

And you don’t do any other drugs?

“I don’t have time.”

You don’t have time?

“I’m a really big drinker,” she says in response. “I used to be there before the pub opened, banging on the door.”

She nods off again. Across the room, Naomi looks stricken.

It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Over the past year, Amy Winehouse has emerged as one of the world’s biggest pop stars. Her second album, Back to Black, announced the arrival of a superlatively talented singer-songwriter with a unique retro-futurist musical blend: ’60s girl-group pop, jukebox soul and Billie Holiday–style torch balladry, filtered through the hard-boiled sensibility of a Jewish cab driver’s daughter from the North London suburbs. The music soared, and Winehouse made the big leap overseas, cracking the Billboard Top 10 with Back to Black and its smash single, “Rehab.”

But by the summer of 2007, Winehouse’s tabloid-magnet exploits were threatening to eclipse her musical success. Amy and Blake had become the latter-day Sid and Nancy: a scary-skinny couple careening around London, supplying a near-constant stream of lurid photo-ops and tales of deathwish-level partying. There were stories of rampant drug use, eating disorders, self-mutilation. There were mass-media interventions by parents and in-laws. As summer turned to autumn, Winehouse was poised for a career apotheosis, likely to garner a slew of Grammy nominations. But her friends and handlers feared that she might be too high, too drunk, too lost — or worse? — to reap the glory. So the singer was put on the shelf for the month of September, to recuperate in time for her big fall coronation. With this in mind, Blender traveled to Europe at the beginning of October to conduct the first interview with a reborn Amy Winehouse. But things aren’t quite working out as planned.

Back in the dressing room, Winehouse snaps awake with a jerk and begins apologizing.

“I’m just really drowsy at the moment,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

Maybe we should continue this later.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Naomi offers.

“I’m so sorry,” Winehouse says.

Amy Winehouse has always had music in her life. She was born on September 14, 1983, in the London suburb of Southgate, to dad Mitch and mom Janis, a pharmacist. But uncles on her mother’s side were jazz musicians and her paternal grandmother was a singer who dated the legendary British saxophonist Ronnie Scot. Mitch Winehouse was himself an amateur crooner and ardent fan of American jazz vocalists — Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington — whose records he played nonstop when Amy was a child.

Amy’s parents separated when she was 9, and she and her older brother Alex went to live with their mom. Amy’s musical taste skewed decidedly mainstream — until she fell in love with hip-hop. “I listened to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection every day until I was about 11,” she has said. “And then I discovered Salt ’n’ Pepa and TLC.” At 12, she enrolled in the Sylvia Young Theatre School, a prestigious performing-arts academy, but was expelled three years later; she enrolled in another London performing-arts school but soon dropped out to spend most of her free time indulging a favorite new hobby: smoking weed.

It was music that yanked Winehouse out of her stoner’s lassitude. The five-foot-two girl had a voice many times her size: a brassy, blues-toned sound that carried echoes of her father’s vocal heroes, but with a rugged, contemporary edge. She taught herself to play her brother’s guitar and began to write songs. As a 15-year-old high school dropout, she started doing occasional singing gigs with local jazz bands. It was on one of those dates, in 2001, that Winehouse was spotted by an associate of Simon Fuller, the Svengali behind American Idol. At 18, Winehouse signed a deal with Fuller’s management company and landed a recording contract with EMI a short time later.

The result, released just a few months after Winehouse’s 20th birthday, was her debut album, Frank, which earned critical raves — but she wasn’t satisfied. She called the record overly slick and declared herself unable to listen to it. In late 2005 an EMI executive introduced Winehouse to the star DJ and producer Mark Ronson, who shared her love of vintage soul and R&B. Winehouse had been hanging out in a pub in her Camden neighborhood listening to oldies on the jukebox — Shirley Bassey, the Shangri-Las, the Angels — and arrived in Ronson’s New York studio determined to infuse her new album with the vast, echoey sonics and romantic sturm und drang of early-’60s pop.

Winehouse’s new inspiration reflected a fresh emotional immediacy in her songwriting — and the melodrama of her personal life. “There’s no artifice in Amy’s music,” Ronson tells Blender. “A lot of people sing about heartbreak and strike a rebellious pose. But Amy lives it.”

In early 2003, Winehouse met Blake Fielder-Civil at a local bar. At 19, Fielder-Civil was handsome, charismatic and, like Winehouse, a self-styled rebel: tattooed, foulmouthed, a heavy drinker and — as an occasional gopher on music-video shoots — only marginally employed. The couple fell in love and embarked on a stormy affair replete with fights, betrayals and torrid reconciliations. Most of the songs that would later emerge on Back to Black — sexually frank, doom-laden depictions of lost love — date from a hiatus in the relationship, when Fielder-Civil left Winehouse and went back to an old girlfriend. “He left no time to regret/Kept his dick wet/With his same old safe bet,” Winehouse wrote in the lyrics of the album’s bruising title track.

Released in the U.S. in February 2007, Back to Black entered the Billboard album chart at No. 7, the highest debut ever by a British woman. At a time of fractured musical taste and niche marketing, it has shown remarkably broad appeal: Jay-Z and Ghostface Killah have recorded Winehouse remixes, while the album’s retro stylings and traditional songcraft have made it a big hit with baby boomers. Meanwhile, with celebrity rehab becoming a media obsession, Winehouse inadvertently captured the zeitgeist with the first single from Back to Black.

“Rehab” was inspired by a 2003 incident in which she refused to heed the pleas of her management to seek treatment for alcoholism. The track name-drops two of Winehouse’s musical godheads, Ray Charles and Donny Hathaway — soul legends who famously battled drug dependency and depression, respectively. In recent months, it’s become apparent that Winehouse is following in her heroes’ footsteps, musical and otherwise.

Back at La Musicale, Winehouse takes the stage for the first of her pair of two-song sets, backed by her nine-piece group. They make an impressive tableau — Winehouse in a vintage cocktail dress, the all-male band in natty black suits and ties — and they sound great, too, sliding into crisp, crackling versions of “Back to Black” and “Rehab.” Winehouse is in fine voice — but she stands nearly stone still at the mic, wearing a vacant expression. Her eyes roll back in her head as she sings.

When she finishes, La Musicale’s perky host mounts the stage and attempts to conduct an interview. But Winehouse can barely muster a syllable in response. She is hustled offstage, with two songs still to perform. Outside of Winehouse’s dressing room, her manager, Raye Cosbert, pulls Naomi the stylist aside and hisses: “Go back in there and get rid of that wine.” Then Blender is ushered inside for another audience with the singer. Winehouse is back on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. She looks like she could use a nap.

Your life has changed so much in the last year. Is it difficult dealing with the press chasing you everywhere?

“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.”

Let’s talk about Blake. How did you two meet?

“It was 2003. January 23, 2003. No, January 31, 2003 … at the pub … ” But she’s gone, words trailing off, eyelids fluttering, falling asleep mid-sentence.

She shakes awake again.

“It’s too dark in here — it makes me drowsy,” she says finally. “There’s no windows. Maybe we could do it another time in a corridor with windows. Some place with more light. I’m really, really sorry. From the bottom of my heart.”

In spring 2007, the state of the Winehouse nation was uncharacteristically calm, even idyllic. On May 18, during a U.S. promotional tour, Blake and Amy went before a justice of the peace in Miami and were married. That weekend, the newlyweds were photographed poolside looking happy and healthy — as healthy, at least, as can be expected of a couple of emaciated, ghostly-pale confessed alcoholics.

But Winehouse had married against the wishes of her parents: The day before the wedding, her father begged her not to marry Fielder-Civil; her mother simply didn’t believe she would go ahead with it. “I thought she would lose interest in him,” Janis says now. “I didn’t think they would actually get married.”

Members of Winehouse’s extended family maintain that Fielder-Civil introduced his wife to a darker world of drug use, including heroin and crack. “Amy’s no saint,” one relative tells Blender. “But she wasn’t into heavy drugs until she met Blake.”

In the months following the nuptials, the self-destructive episodes began piling up. In late June, Winehouse disclosed that she had carved the words I LOVE BLAKE into her stomach with a piece of broken glass. In early July, she canceled a string of concert dates, citing illness and “exhaustion.” When she did turn up for shows, things got even weirder. At a July 24 gig in Cornwall, England, tabloids reported the singer ran offstage after just two songs. She returned some minutes later but appeared disoriented, mangling her song lyrics and conking herself on the head with the microphone. According to witnesses, she turned her wrath on the audience, spitting into the front-row seats.

Finally, on August 8, Winehouse was admitted to University College Hospital in London after the U.K.’s News of the World reported she had slipped into an overdose-induced coma after smoking, snorting and otherwise ingesting a combination of heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy and ketamine, topped off with vodka and whiskey quaffed on an evening pub crawl. “I don’t know how to explain what happened,” said Winehouse, who was released after having her stomach pumped. “I can’t remember what I looked like. I couldn’t recognize myself. It was terrifying.”

On August 13, at the urging of both Winehouse’s and Fielder-Civil’s parents, the couple checked into The Causeway, a $20,000-a-week detox clinic in Essex, outside of London. Less than 48 hours later, following what London papers described as “blinding” marital arguments, the couple left rehab. Winehouse’s family now squarely blames Fielder-Civil for this. “He refused to cooperate with the staff,” says one of her relatives. “They said Amy had been willing to work with them but that Blake wasn’t interested. He knows that he’s lost if they both clean up.”

A week after leaving The Causeway, Winehouse was photographed stumbling and bleeding in the streets of London’s West End in the wee hours. Earlier that night, she and Blake had been seen fighting at the posh Sanderson Hotel, where they’d rented a suite. A source close to Winehouse tells Blender that the reason for the fight was Amy’s insistence on returning to rehab: “Amy was determined to do it. She was making a stand against Blake, so they came to blows.” In the end, the Sanderson Hotel reportedly billed the couple for damage totaling more than $18,000.

In the last week of August, the decision was made to temporarily pull the plug on Amy Winehouse’s career while she “addressed her health concerns.” Her upcoming North American tour was canceled. Winehouse and Fielder-Civil decamped to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia for a restorative beach holiday; Winehouse’s reps have denied accounts that the singer vomited blood in her vacation hotel room. By mid-September, Winehouse was declaring her time off a success, telling the NME: “I’m sorted out. Nothing’s wrong with me … A lot of fuss has been made about nothing.”

And yet in early October, when Blender first arrives to meet the new, cleaned-up Winehouse at a London photo studio, little seems to have changed. Winehouse arrives nearly five hours late, eats lunch from a McDonald’s bag then disappears into the bathroom. She emerges a few minutes later looking woozy and passes out while having her makeup done. Winehouse is helped to a waiting car. “Amy’s not feeling well, she’s going to head home,” her label rep announces. “It must have been the McDonald’s.”

The official story from Winehouse’s camp is that there is no story. Raye Cosbert, her manager, will say only that Amy “takes prescription medication, which makes her drowsy.” What medication, exactly? “That’s between Amy and her physician.” Is Blake a bad influence on his wife? “Blake and Amy love each other very deeply. And love is a good thing.”

But Mitch Winehouse, for one, is not so reticent about the state of his daughter’s health. “We know she’s on hard drugs — heroin and cocaine. That’s why we’ve been trying to get her into rehab,” he says. “Janis and I worry that she will seriously harm herself, but mercifully that hasn’t happened yet.”

Beyond that, Mitch allows himself little optimism. “I don’t know what they’ve been doing for the last month or so. We’d like to think that she and Blake have stayed clean since they went to St. Lucia,” he says. “But the thing with drug addicts is that they rarely tell you the truth.”

An hour after our last aborted interview, Winehouse is due back on the La Musicale stage. A few minutes before showtime, she appears in the greenroom, wading through a crowd of gawkers, looking more awake than she has all night. The band takes to the stage and crashes into “You Know I’m No Good.” Winehouse is transfixing: rocking on her heels, gesticulating, shimmying, swaying. Her singing is magnificent. She lingers behind the beat and unspools jazzy syncopations, purrs low, burly blue notes and rears back to deliver rolling melismas that would give Mariah Carey pause.

You cannot help but be struck by the ease of her virtuosity: For Winehouse, living is evidently exceedingly difficult, but singing is as natural as breathing. For the three-plus minutes of “You Know I’m No Good” it is possible to forget the spectacle of the past hours, days and months — to look past the awful toll inflicted by too little food or too much drink or McDonald’s milkshakes or “prescription medication” or whatever else Winehouse is putting into her body. When the song ends, the studio audience erupts into the biggest ovation of the evening, a burst of sheer relief, and Winehouse is whisked backstage. The throng gathered there cheers and reaches out to shake hands, but she doesn’t pause to soak up the adulation. She strides down a hallway, up a flight of stairs and straight into her dressing room, clapping the door shut behind her.