No more tears left to cry

Although perhaps inevitable, it was still a hell of shock when word first filtered through to Hot Press at 4 o’clock last Saturday that Amy Winehouse had been found dead in her Camden flat.

The story broke, as it always seems to nowadays, on Twitter and within 30 minutes had been confirmed by Sky News who were soon giving the 27-year-old the full-blown Princess Diana treatment.
I immediately thought back to my two meetings with the potty-mouthed, but really rather lovable North Londoner, which took place either side of Christmas 2006 when her Back To Back album was really starting to take off.
Our first time hooking up was in Dublin 4’s Berkeley Court Hotel a few hours before she performed – or more accurately slurred – her then new single, ‘Rehab’, on Tubridy Tonight.

Despite having already done a full afternoon’s worth of press, Winehouse was full of beans and keen to regale me with her decidedly un-PC Bono joke, the punchline of which was a yelled: “Then stop fucking clapping, you cunt!”
Realising that her Sarah Silverman-esque quip – I always sort of thought they were kindred spirits – had gone down like a lead balloon with the blue rinse brigade in the hotel tea-rooms, she winked at me and said, “fuck ‘em!”
Neat Stoli ordered – she downed at least three doubles in the hour or so we were together and was decidedly wobbly on her pins heading to RTÉ – Amy proferred: “If Noel Gallagher or Robbie Williams mouth off, it’s considered a bit of fun, but if it’s me or Lils (Lily Allen) we’re ‘gobby cows’. It’s a complete double-standard. That said, I’m trying to cut down on the insults so that I don’t have to spend all my time either justifying or apologising for ‘em!

“The thing about me and Lils is we don’t give a fuck. I don’t care about breaking America or Mars or wherever – if it happens while I live my life the way I want to live it, fine. If it doesn’t, you won’t find me going boo-hoo.”
In the couple of months running up to our chinwag, Amy had delighted the red-tops by enthusiastically dissing Katie Melua (“The singer of shit songs her manager writes for her”); Madonna (“An old lady who should just give up”) Dido (“Rubbish!”) and the aforementioned Mr. Hewson (“He’s so self-important”).
Interview seemingly completed, I was somewhat taken aback when Amy suggested that we should continue it the following week over a few more Stolis in London, and summonsed her tour manager over to key my phone number into his mobile.
Sadly, her frantic schedule – by now North America and Australasia were both wanting a piece of the Back To Black action – meant that our afternoon on the rip never happened, but a month later I got a call from Mr. T. Manager saying Amy was coming over for the Meteors and would I like to hook up?
Having really enjoyed her company and good quote the first time, I was only too happy to make a window for her in my Filofax (these of course being pre-Blackberry days).

This time she was billeted in the Four Seasons in Ballsbridge where heads didn’t so much turn as spin 360° at the sight of Amy wandering round the bar in a hip-hop-style tracksuit and the most killer heels you’ve ever seen. Though she must have done at least a hundred interviews since we’d previously met, the singer instantly remembered me and my mum back in Kent who I’d told her about.
“Did she have a good Christmas?” she asked. “I hope you gave her something good!”
Master of diplomacy/coward that I am, I hadn’t planned on mentioning her horrendously drunken Tubridy Tonight turn, but once sat on a sofa Amy brought it up herself.
“It wasn’t great, was it?” she winced. “Do you know if it’s on YouTube?”
It is now, but wasn’t then.
“Thank God for that!” she resumed. “I’ve knocked the drink on the head a bit ‘cause I was starting to feel like a freak show – y’know, ‘Let’s stick the telly on and see how pissed Amy Winehouse is’.”

Had somebody from management or the record company had a word in her shell-like?
“Nah, it’s something I worked out for myself,” she insisted. “‘What do you want to be known for, girl, singing good songs or being pissed all the time?’ I’ve not turned into Sting or anything, but it’s nice to be taken a little bit seriously.”
Illustrating her point, a waitress arrived a few moments later with a pot of tea and a glass of finest Dublin tap water for Madam and a pint of beer for Sir.
People have spoken of Winehouse having some sort of live fast, die young deathwish, but the impression I got that day was of a young lady eager to keep her life in check – and in the not-too-distant future to have kids.
“I have this notional idea of it happening when I’ve done another three albums and can take time out to be with them when they’re young,” Amy ventured. “There are a lot of good working musician mums who’ll disagree with me, but I don’t necessarily think you can do both.”

Talking afterwards to one of her male backing-singers, I learned that everybody on the road with Winehouse called her Mum.
“I was at home in bed recently with the ‘flu when the doorbell rang and there was Amy on the step with a bottle of Lucozade and a chicken casserole,” he told me. “She’s the typical Jewish mother, albeit without her own kids yet.”
Later on as her entourage prepared to leave for the Meteors, I was treated to the sight of Amy getting out her hankie, spitting on it and rubbing a bit of dirt off the same backing-singer’s face.
How did Amy Winehouse go from that to becoming an enthusiastic user of crack cocaine in six short months? A few hints were dropped that evening when Amy’s P.R. man, a grizzled veteran who’d served time with both U2 and those masters of dysfunction as well as puppets, Metallica, spoke of the 24/7 pressure she was under to promote Brand Winehouse. Unlike U2 or Metallica who had four members to share the burden, it was her who had to do all the interviews, radio sessions, meet ‘n’ greets, weenie roasts and shaking of regional record company hands in
Boise, Idaho.

“Bands get to split the pressure three or four ways, but there’s only one of her,” concurred Back To Black producer Mark Ronson when I met him in September 2007. “She’s a smart girl though, she’ll work it out. There are a lot of good people in her life, so I’m confident she’ll come through it.”
Being young, female and expected to deliver day in/day out is something I discussed with Dolores O’Riordan a couple of years after the Cranberries hit their commercial peak.
“The key to all of this,” she suggested, “is learning how to cope with it. “There are a lot of very fucked-up rich people around. In fact, I was halfway to becoming one myself before I
got married.
“When I came off the To The Faithful Departed tour, I thought I’d never sing again. I really hated singing and I really hated what had become of the band because it was just a work machine. Every day, every hour, there was something scheduled. It was just so crazy, I couldn’t sleep.
“At the time, I thought I was heading to the loony-bin, but now I realise it as the transitionary period that anyone my age – and faced with those pressures –
goes through.”

There are those who sum up Winehouse’s descent into full-blown Class A substance abuse in three words – Blake Fielder-Civil. Hooking up a few months after our second meeting, it was Fielder-Civil who by his own admission introduced his future wife to heroin and crack cocaine and re-awakened her penchant for self-harming. While undoubtedly the wrong bloke at the wrong time, I think it’s too easy to blame the boy. Amy made a conscious decision to not only have Blake in her life, but also to share in his recreational habits. It’d be sexist to suggest that as a woman she was incapable of independent thought, however much of a malevolent force Fielder-Civil may have been.
Winehouse’s last public appearance in Ireland was at Oxegen 2008 – another car crash, which while not as horrendous as this June’s trip to Belgrade left any right-minded punter feeling short-changed.

“Arriving on site so late that she apparently had to change in a van, Winehouse looks confused, bordering on distressed as she kicks her 14-song set off – irony of bitter ironies – with ‘Addicted’,” I wrote in my review. “The days when she nailed tunes with a Billie Holiday meets Dinah Washington precision are (temporarily we hope) gone, replaced by a train-wreck of bum notes, forgotten lyrics and bigging up her lovely husband Blake who we’re informed is ‘out in
nine days.’
“Gulping from what could be a pint glass of Ribena but is more probably red wine, Amy tries to pick the pace up with the closing salvo of ‘You Know I’m No Good’, ‘Rehab’ and ‘Me And Mr. Jones’, but they’re mere shadows of the gilt-edged classics that grace Black To Black.”

Reading that back now, I’m pretty sure I was being kind. Despite periodic reports these past two years of her going into rehab, there was zero evidence of the treatment actually working. As for the long overdue follow-up to Back To Black, depending on who you believe the album is either fully mixed and ready to go or remains little more than embryonic demos. You’d like to think that her legacy will be properly managed, but no doubt we’ll be subjected to such posthumous indignities as Michael Jackson’s Michael, and the substandard leftovers that have been served up under Eva Cassidy’s name.
Listening to Back To Black as I write this, there’s no doubting its status as a flawless classic that deserves its place on the shelf alongside Sgt. Pepper’s, Pet Sounds, Ziggy Stardust, London Calling, Nevermind, Loveless, Screamadelica, The Joshua Tree et al.

Of all the tributes, it was Dita Von Teese who hit the nail on the proverbial when she described Amy as being “the closest thing we’ve ever had to Billie Holiday, she was a true soulful talent.”
The same Twitter that broke the news of her death was soon swamped with mean-spirited people saying things like, “Why are we bothered with a washed-up junkie when there are over a hundred dead in Norway?”
To that I’d simply say, “It’s not a competition.” If people feel they made a personal connection to Amy through her music they’re entitled to grieve, as I’m sure they’re grieving for those in Oslo and the Utoya Island Youth Camp who had their lives so brutally stolen from them.
It’d be wrong to deify her, but Amy Winehouse’s was a once in a generation talent worthy of celebrating.