When Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning on July 23, 2011, she had
not released a new album in five years, since she put out her landmark,
multi-Grammy-winning classic Back to Black in 2006. That
Winehouse was just 27 years old when she died underscored her sheer
natural brilliance, the meteoric nature of her rise and the wrenching
tragedy of her downward spiral and ultimate fall.
Winehouse knew it was her destiny to make music
Winehouse was always a rebel, bent on doing things her way; in the Oscar-winning documentary Amy,
her mother Janis admits that she was determined and stubborn even as a
small child. When her parents split up, Winehouse declared her own
independence, collecting tattoos, smoking marijuana and cutting school.
The only future she saw for herself was as a musician, and she poured
her soul into writing deeply confessional lyrics and singing around
London, her hometown. She was a unique talent, a jazz fanatic with the
voice of a soul singer, and she was quickly signed by Island Records.
Frank, Winehouse’s first album, came out in 2003 when she was
only 20-years-old. It was an instant hit, rising to No. 3 on the British
Billboard chart and earning her both awards and financial freedom. It
hinted at her propensity for drinking and indulging in other vices — the
song “Mr. Magic,” the hidden last track of that album, was about
substance abuse — but it was in the aftermath of its success that
Winehouse truly began the struggle with narcotics and liquor that would
inspire her greatest work and then steal the generational talent that
had made it so transcendent.
She thrived in the chaos of her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil
Suddenly flush with a six-figure advance that would soon be followed by
much larger paychecks, Winehouse bought her first apartment in London’s
Camden neighborhood, long the mecca for punk musicians, drug dealers and
people who enthusiastically consumed both their products. With little
to do but work on her music, she embraced the local scene with open
arms, becoming a regular at its pubs — her drink of choice was the
Rickstasy, unique to the pub The Hawley Arms. It was during this time
that she met Blake Fielder-Civil, a charming addict who became the
center of Winehouse’s world and her most dangerous addiction.
“Amy changed overnight after she met Blake,” her first manager, Nick Godwyn, told The Times
in 2007. “She just sounded completely different. Her personality became
more distant. And it seemed to me like that was down to the drugs. When
I met her she smoked weed but she thought the people who took class-A
drugs were stupid. She used to laugh at them.”
Pain was Winehouse’s muse and her combustible relationship with
Fielder-Civil provided plenty of inspiration. He introduced her to
heroin and other hard drugs; she had his name tattooed over her right
breast and he inked hers behind his right ear. Theirs was an on-and-off
relationship at first, as they were frequently separated by his
infidelities and stints in prison.
“If you’re a musician, and you have things you want to get out, you
write music,” she told an interviewer in 2006. “You don’t want to be
settled, because when you’re settled you might as well call it a day.”
To put a finer point on the idea that she sought out chaos, whether
through impulse or conscious focus, she also told an interviewer that
year that “it sounds such a wank thing to say, but I need to get some
headaches goin’ to write about.”
The grief and turmoil fueled her creativity, and the tumult with Fielder-Civil would inspire many of the lyrics in Back in Black,
her heartbreak, frustrations, and unhealthy addictions belted out over
the sounds of ‘60s girl groups. The most famous of the songs, “Rehab,”
would prove to be apocryphal.
Despite several attempts to go to rehab, Winehouse continued to spiral out of control
In the fall of 2005, Godwyn had seen enough of his client and close
friend stumbling through Camden and closer and closer to the edge of
squandering her talent, not to mention her life. He tried to convince
her to go to rehab, but she swore up and down to her father that she
didn’t need the detox time, so the effort itself was very short-lived.
The song it prompted, however, became Winehouse’s most iconic tune, an
anthem for her way of life and ultimate demise.
Winehouse did eventually agree to go to rehab, and more than once, but
the months and years in between her brief attempts at sober living were
increasingly sordid and sad, filled with private chaos performed for the
public. Back in Black was released in the United States in March
2007, at which point she was fully in the grip of drink and drugs.
She’d dated a chef named Alex Claire for nine months, which provided a
bit more stability, but she ultimately reunited with Fielder-Civil in
February, just before her album’s stateside debut.
Magazine profiles documented her inebriated storming of the United
States, where she played festivals and made TV appearances that were
increasingly erratic and then disastrous. Her U.S. tour was canceled due
to “exhaustion.” In October 2007, Winehouse and Fielder-Civil were
arrested in Norway for marijuana possession, and in December, she was
photographed wandering around Camden in just her bra and jeans, looking
emaciated. Soon after, in January 2008, footage of the singer smoking
crack showed up in the English tabloid The Sun.
The arrested prompted her first stab at rehab, though not before she
performed for the live telecast of the Grammys via remote satellite, as
her growing legal problems meant it was impossible for her to get a work
visa in time to come back to the U.S.
That night at the Grammys would prove to be the pinnacle of her career,
as she won five awards, including the two biggies, Record of the Year
and Song of the Year. During the broadcast, she thanked her “Blake,
incarcerated,” which served to introduce the rest of the world to her
husband, who was in jail due to a bar fight in 2006. Winehouse herself
would be arrested several times, for charges that included assaulting a
fan, though she never spent time in jail.
Winehouse' blood alcohol level was more than five times the legal limit when she died
The world watched as Winehouse malfunctioned, her saga growing sadder by
the month. She fainted in the summer of 2008 and was diagnosed with
emphysema, a shocking warning that more smoking and drinking would
permanently ruin her natural gifts.
The message didn’t take; Winehouse was booed off the stage at gigs
around the world when she was too drunk to perform and canceled more
concerts than she played. She left the stage in the middle of a
performance in St. Lucia in early 2009, unable to remember lyrics and,
in her own words, “bored.” Winehouse’s commitment to record a song for
the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace fell through, and while she claimed to have quit doing drugs in 2008, alcohol became her constant companion.
There were bright moments, including performances for Nelson Mandela’s
birthday and stretches of sobriety, when she’d begin working on new
material and perform in successful concerts and TV broadcasts. But then
she’d fall back into her old ways, with more assault charges and
personal drama. Fielder-Civil filed for divorce in 2009, citing
Winehouse’s infidelity. A new album promised for 2010 never transpired,
and aside from a song she recorded with Tony Bennett, she never did
record more music.
Winehouse checked back into rehab in the spring of 2011, emerging in May
with hope of putting it all back together. But her final performance
was a shambolic disaster in Belgrade, Serbia in early June and she was
found dead in her dirty, dingy home on July 23. That fall, the coroner
announced that she’d died of accidental alcohol poisoning, as her blood
alcohol level was .416% at the time of her death.