Amy Winehouse (13 page)

He continued, ‘I don’t read the papers myself. A friend of mine, a guy called Ginger Norman, he reads them for me. Because I can’t bring myself to read the papers every day and he kind of vets the news for me every day because I just can’t face it. He asked me to have a look at this particular piece, which I did do. I phoned the newspaper in question, spoke to the newsdesk. I told them what had happened. They said they had no interest in what I have to say on this subject.’

Soon after the interview, speaking about Blake, Mitchell also told the
Star
,

Better news came in the shape of Amy’s settlement with songwriter and producer P*Nut over a claim for copyright infringement. P*Nut, whose real name is John Harrison, said he and Amy co-wrote the song ‘He Can Only Hold Her’ in his studio in 2006. P*Nut’s solicitor, Bob Page, of Jayes and Page, said, ‘This represents a very satisfactory outcome for P*Nut, who considered his contribution to the song to be perfectly obvious. He was therefore extremely disappointed not to receive the credit he deserved on Amy’s album and furthermore at the extent of the resistance he encountered in securing his fair share of the copyright. Whilst Amy and her publishers took the matter to the brink, P*Nut is pleased that common sense has prevailed and he is now looking forward to seeing his contribution properly recognised on future exploitation of this song.’

There was also a light-hearted moment when Amy complained that her songs were being used in scenes during the TV soap
Emmerdale
, in the Woolpack pub. ‘Amy’s very image-conscious. When she licensed her songs for commercial use, she probably wanted a lucrative advertising campaign – not a soap full of Yorkshire farmers,’ said a source.

In October, Amy was up for yet another gong. This time she was nominated for the Best Album category in the Q Awards. Previous Q winners include U2, the Rolling Stones, Oasis,
Coldplay, Radiohead, The Who and Arctic Monkeys. Down the years, there have been plenty of exciting moments at Q Awards ceremonies: Pogues hellraiser Shane MacGowan set Bono’s hair alight; Oasis singer Liam Gallagher attacked photographers with a steel pole and had pops at both Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Robbie Williams; Elton John had a pop at Madonna.

She was up against some formidable opposition: the previous year’s winners in this category, Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’; Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘Yours Truly, Angry Mob’; Arcade Fire’s ‘Neon Bible’; Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Send Away the Tigers’.

Amy didn’t attend the lunchtime ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel due to illness. Naturally, this raised eyebrows and headlines far out of proportion. The
Now
magazine website screamed, A
MY
W
INEHOUSE STICKS TWO FINGERS UP AT
Q A
WARDS
. Mark Ronson collected the award on her behalf and said, ‘That’s Amy – taking her pain and turmoil and making it into music we enjoy.’

Television star Jonathan Ross took the opportunity to crack a few jokes in the absence of Amy. He said, ‘I was on a
three-to
-one bet that Amy would die before Pavarotti. I’m really annoyed with Amy that I lost.’ Later on in the evening, he also joked about Led Zeppelin’s forthcoming December 2007 reunion at the O2, saying, ‘There were millions of hits on the website to register for tickets to their gig. It was probably all the Parkinson’s sufferers clicking the mouse more than they should.’ Nice!

Other winners on the night included Kate Nash, who won Breakthrough Artist; the Q Lifetime Achievement went to Johnny Marr of the Smiths; and the Q Idol was Kylie Minogue. There had been precious little controversy on the night. The best the following morning’s papers could muster was that the name of Arctic Monkeys was misspelled on their gong.

The award that Amy won became the subject of something of a mystery following the ceremony, when it went missing. Mark Ronson seemed to lose it and then there were varying reports of who had last seen it with comedians Alan Carr and Ricky Gervais rumoured to have been the last people who had laid eyes on it.

The award finally emerged and in the strangest of places. Andrew Morris, owner of Bar Soho in Old Compton Street in London’s West End, found it in the toilets of his bar in the early hours of the morning following the ceremony. ‘I thought it wasn’t real when I first saw it,’ he revealed. ‘But then I looked at the newspapers and saw the Q Awards were on last night and Amy Winehouse didn’t collect her prize.’ Then he recalled seeing Ronson partying at his bar and it all fell into place. ‘I’m sure the state Amy’s in these days I’m sure she doesn’t care too much,’ he said of his find. ‘But I’m sure the Q Awards organisers wouldn’t be too happy if it’s been left in a bar. If Amy’s getting an award she should really be there to pick it up.’ The story was run in the
Metro
newspaper under the headline T
HE
Q
FOR THE LOO
.

Around this time, two men from the music industry took the opportunity to have a pop at Amy about her personal life.
Both instances reeked of hypocrisy. Francis Rossi was one of the co-founders of the rock band Status Quo. He sang lead vocals and played lead guitar with the band. Now approaching his sixties, he likes to think of himself as an elder statesman of rock. Rossi said, ‘Amy is supposed to be great but I can’t stick her. I like a couple of records but I’m not sure if people will like her in three years. I’m not knocking her for the sake of it. But I have been subjected to so much of Amy and her antics that I just think, “Fuck off”.

‘What message does giving her Woman of the Year send to young people? There has to be some responsibility somewhere, surely. Everyone knew what was going on with her. She’s not a good role model. They should have said to her, “You’re not getting it. You would have done but you’re not cutting it any more.”

‘She may be able to sing, but what gets through to the kids in the street is the fact that she’s out of her tree, falling over and not being able to keep her hands out of her knickers. She should straighten herself out.’ He then turned to Pete Doherty, saying, ‘He, on the other hand, isn’t even worth entertaining. At least Amy has serious talent. Pete hasn’t got anything. There’s no talent there, otherwise he would do something. He doesn’t count. He seems quite intelligent but the records are grim.’

Next to have a dig at Amy was Ian Brown. Having first come to public attention as the frontman of the Mancunian band the Stone Roses, Brown is nowadays a solo artist. Of Amy, he said, ‘I think she’s an absolute sucker. The girl’s got all those tattoos in the last few years – and one day she’s gonna go, “Oh,
no!” Suckers. Anyone who drinks to that condition is a sucker. They’re scared of living.’

Perhaps what really sucked, though, was the hypocrisy of Rossi and Brown. Rossi has long boasted of his own
drug-fuelled
exploits during the band’s heyday. Asked if he enjoyed cocaine use, he boasted, ‘Fucking right. By the mid seventies I had an astonishing cocaine habit. I’d go out for the night, come back, go to bed at some godforsaken hour and my head would be going like a steam hammer.’ He has also admitted that he lost part of the septum of his nose, watching it wash down a plughole as he showered. Brown, too, has made no secret of his extensive drug use, though his drug of choice is cannabis.

Therefore, for either of these men to criticise Amy for her partying was as clear a case as one can imagine of the pot calling the kettle black. Perhaps there was also an element of envy in their words: seeing an artist and human being in her prime firing up the green-eyed monster in artists who had long since seen their best days. More reasoned, measured and admirable words came from the mouth of another veteran rocker, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Jagger dabbled with drugs during the heyday of his own band but there was no hypocrisy in his statement about Amy.

Jagger said, ‘Amy is a brilliant artist who makes fantastic music. She has class. But I’m worried she might die if she goes down the road that she’s taken. If only she would sort herself out. It’s hard, as your mind has to make that switch. If my mind hadn’t always told me that I should not do too much, I
could have ended up like Amy years ago. But I always had that voice in my head that kept me on my toes and told me to stop altogether in the end. I realised I didn’t want to die young.’

Duran Duran’s singer Simon Le Bon had similar thoughts. ‘I’d like to sit her down, put some warm clothes on her, get her out of her bloodstained crap, give her a bath, put some food in her. Even if she doesn’t die of a drug overdose, she’s going to die of malnutrition. That’s what worries me. What happened to those fabulous tits?’

On the evening following the Q Awards, which Amy had missed due to illness, she seemed to have recovered when she appeared at Harvey Nichols for the launch of a new collection by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen called the Row. ‘The twins were really looking forward to meeting Amy,’ said a source. ‘They spent all night chatting.’ Amy then embarked on a
three-hour
shopping spree in the posh clothes store. She bagged clothes and toiletries for her and Blake.

‘The shop stayed open until 1.30 a.m. for her,’ said an employee. ‘She was having a great time. Blake was running around after her.’

However, according to a different eyewitness, Blake had got bored of the shopping and ducked off in a taxi with Lily Cole and another mystery girl. Another onlooker sourly commented that, during the dinner with the Olsen twins, Amy’s fingers had looked dirty and stained.

Amid growing fears that she was going off the rails, she did exactly that – but not in the way people expected. She was on her way to Paris to attend some fashion shows and, after going
through the security barrier at the Waterloo Eurostar, she seemingly had a change of heart and decided not to travel. She illegally leapt over the station’s security barrier and ran back into the main concourse of Waterloo station. Amy had arrived at the station looking tearful and it is thought that her change of mind came about because she did not wish to be parted from Blake.

A passenger said, ‘Amy was crying, gesticulating wildly and shouting while the man with her was trying to calm her and get her through the gate. She mentioned Blake’s name more than once.

‘Eventually they went through security, but then Amy came running back. She hurdled the security gate then ran up the escalator, shouting and screaming, into Waterloo station concourse. It was quite a sight – this tiny girl with a massive beehive leaping over a barrier. It was pretty clear she was not keen on getting on that train to Paris.’

As Amy ran off, a policeman chased after her. A London Transport Police spokesperson confirmed, ‘We spoke to a twenty-four-year-old female at the Eurostar entrance yesterday. She wasn’t detained and no further action was taken.’ In the end Amy was persuaded to travel after all and she got on the train to Paris.

On her return to England, Amy hit the headlines again when she and Blake hung out with fresh-from-rehab Pete Doherty at his pad in Wiltshire. As he recorded an interview with the radio station Xfm, Doherty said, ‘Apparently I have self-esteem issues.’ Once more, rumours went around that
Amy and Doherty planned to work together, prompting further concern in the press at the thought of two such hedonistic artists joining forces. ‘She plays better than James Brown playing acoustic guitar. She thinks she’s shit, but she’s not,’ said Babyshambles guitarist Mick Whitnall of Amy’s guitar skills. ‘I’ve never met a girl who plays like that, let alone a man,’ he added.

Doherty said that a track entitled ‘1939 Returning’ was one of the new songs he had been working on. ‘I’m going to try to get Miss Winehouse to help me with it, hopefully,’ he said. Soon there were rumours that she and Pete would duet at an MTV awards ceremony. A source said, ‘MTV have been trying to persuade Amy to go for ages. When she heard Pete was doing it she thought it could be a laugh. Amy and Pete are going to get together and see if they can work out a duet and get it on the schedule. The organisers wanted to add a bit of danger to what is the squeaky-clean boy band of award shows. They’ve certainly done that. I just hope they know what they’ve let themselves in for. They’ve been jamming for ages with the plan to perform together. This would be a pretty high-profile place to do it.’

Pete Doherty was asked what advice he would offer Amy during her hour of need. ‘I wouldn’t give her any,’ he snapped. ‘She’s fine. It’s all bollocks. People should leave her alone. I went for a drink with her earlier today and she’s totally fine. Perfectly healthy and happy. People are saying she’s out of control, but she’s not. She’s a sensible girl and she knows what she’s doing. She ain’t doing nothing wrong.’

However, Doherty’s words of reassurance could do nothing to stop the avalanche of concern that was coming down on Amy’s head – particularly when reports threw up fresh concern that she was self-harming again. A tabloid photographer snapped her while out shopping in Covent Garden and noticed some red lines on her hands. It was hard to tell whether they were just lines of lipstick or scars. Another snapper around the same time pictured her retrieving a cigarette she had accidentally dropped into the gutter. N
O BUTTS,
A
MY… THAT’S FILTHY
! screamed the
Daily Mirror
, unaware that many consider the tabloid press itself to be firmly positioned in the gutter.