A slow, lonely and predictable death: the last days of Amy Winehouse
On July 23, 2011, her bodyguard found her dead in her bed. Even though she was 27 years old, no one was too shocked by the news.
As soon as Frank appeared, her first album, a journalist asked Amy Winehouse:
"How famous are you going to be?"
My music doesn't fit that scale. I don't think I'm going to be famous. I don't think I can stand it, either,” answered the young singer.
In light of the facts, it is clear that Amy failed only 50% of her predictions. She was a celebrity, very famous. But she couldn't resist it.
On July 23, 2011, her bodyguard found her dead in her bed. Even though she was 27 years old, no one was too shocked by the news. Her fall had been predictable and immensely public. Every binge, every excess, every breach of contract had been in the eyes of the whole world.
Amy Winehouse was a huge singer. Her voice was a force of nature. The first recordings of her are surprising. A twenty-year-old girl who sings with the depth of a veteran, with a unique voice color and a dazzling technical handling. In the fullness of her faculties she was noted with total control of her art, an innate ability. It was something real, emotional, authentic. There were no artifices. There was an ancient pain in her song. She once recognized that it had never crossed her mind to be a professional singer because her singing was natural, everyday, something that was always by her side. The first public appearances of her showed a girl of great frankness, with a wild naturalness and an unusual frontality.
In her early days she considered herself a jazz singer, but with her two official albums (after her death the record company released some uneven albums with outtakes) she became the great R&B singer, soul and pop of the 21st century. Back to black is a small masterpiece, the pinnacle of her art, of her scarce legacy. In addition to being a critical success, it was a huge sales success. Millions of copies around the world and prizes of all kinds. Five Grammys, Mercury Prize and several Brits Awards.
When did her downfall begin? Impossible to say exactly. The accusations began the same day of her death. Who were the main culprits? Her father, her ex-boyfriend, the press, the industry? Amy from her early youth suffered from depression and bulimia. Her eating disorder was hidden for a long time. Then came alcohol and drugs. in industrial quantities.
Frank, her first album, had a good reception, the impact of the unexpected. A voice that seemed to belong to someone much older. The artistic search was permanent, she wanted to be authentic. The lyrics of her songs make up an autobiography, an anthology of small failures, a catalog of love frustrations. Already in those years the scandals began to stalk her. An erratic behavior in several public appearances, some suspended concert, recitals with vocal performances far below her possibilities. What she didn't know at the time was that her drug and alcohol problems were severe. She had had collapses and hospitalizations due to an overdose that put her on the verge of death on several occasions. In one of them they found in her blood, oddly enough, traces of alcohol, cocaine, crack and heroin. Those were the times when she was dating Blake Fielder-Civil, a young man somewhat older than her whom many of the singer's entourage blamed for having immersed her in drugs. It seems difficult to reach such a strong verdict. Blake was, like Amy, a broken person. They sabotaged themselves just as effectively. And those needs, those shortcomings made them get together and recognize each other as peers and fall in love. Then there would be separations and reconciliations - they always came back - until Blake was jailed for almost two years. One of those ruptures provided all the lyrical content to Back to black, the consecration work of Amy.
On that album, Amy's voice, her unique phrasing, was joined by the production of Mark Ronson. This gave the songs a soulful air, a mixture of the productions of Phil Spector with Motown, with all the advances of the new century, which catapulted the album and its singer to the top of all the charts. The album sold, worldwide, more than 20 million copies. The theme that had the greatest diffusion was "Rehab". The one in which the singer tells him no, no, not to go to rehab.
In Amy, the Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Asif Kapadia (a specialist in documentary biopics who concocted the masterpiece Senna and is finishing one on Maradona) we see another of those identified as guilty emerge and who, after Amy's death, did not hesitate to go out to fire accusations on all fronts: Amy's father, Mitch Winehouse. Denier, he did not recognize his daughter's problems until quite late (he was one of the main opponents of his daughter entering rehabilitation centers for a long time). Absent from much of her daughter's life, he made her appearance at the least appropriate time. Fascinated by fame, by flashes, he did everything possible not to lose his presence and to obtain the greatest possible benefits from this new situation: being the father of the new star of the moment.
The tabloid press also has an important presence in the film, trying to keep one more piece of that body that was disintegrating in full view of everyone. The singer's vulnerability elicited no pity from them; quite the contrary, it fed her voracity. The paparazzi, dozens, were permanently stationed at the door of her house. Capturing an image with smeared makeup, blood on her clothes, witnessing a marital fight or, perhaps, a physical collapse, was an ever-present possibility in Amy's chaotic life. And no one was willing to miss it. The soundtrack of each public appearance of the singer was the clicks of photographic flashes. Amy was breaking down in real time before the never frugal paparazzi. A cloud of photographers came to accompany her until the entrance of one of her hospitalizations.
Amy Winehouse was the last to get the unwanted admission to the exclusive 27 Club. This is how the list of rockers who have died at that age is known. Her predecessors: Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and even bluesman Robert Johnson. The phrase is often repeated: "Live fast, die young and you will have a good looking corpse". As ingenious as the phrase may seem - some attribute it to James Dean, others to Truman Capote - it is absolutely false. Most of these famous dead seemed older at the time of her death. They bore on their faces the mark of excess, which often exacts a heavy toll. Pain pierced them, the impossibility of stopping the inertia of self-destruction. Amy was no exception.
On the day the Grammy nominations were announced, Back to Black received accolades in most of the major categories: best album, best song, best recording, best producer, breakout. In one of those items, the one in charge of announcing (several figures rotate to make the nominations known to the press) was the comedian George Lopez. After announcing that Amy was up for yet another prize, he made a joke that was much celebrated by all present: "Can someone wake Amy up at around 6 in the afternoon to let her know?"
The night of her greatest glory, the one in which she won five Grammys, came from one of her detoxification periods. She appeared via satellite from London. Drug problems had kept him from traveling; the United States did not grant her visa until the last minute and it did not seem wise to interrupt her rehabilitation at that time. She had to present herself to the world, she knew that she would be one of the main stars of the evening and she had to be sober. That night she unseated, among others, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Justin TImberlake and Taylor Swift. On that glorious night, in full lucidity, she couldn't enjoy it either. She told one of her assistants, "This is so boring without drugs."
Once upon a time, Félix Frascara, a great sports journalist, used a verse from a tango to title the obituary of Justo Suárez, a boxer with a short career -perhaps the first great popular idol of Argentine sports-: "The light of a match was ". So brilliant, so fleeting was Amy's career too. Just two discs. Three years in which her physical and musical faculties shone; then the fall.
His musical career ended at the age of 23. After the second album there were almost no recordings for the next four years. The only notable thing, a duet with Tony Bennett, the standard Body and soul. Her recitals were a gamble. You never knew what could happen to them. If she would perform, if they would finish, or even if she would be able to sing an entire song without the backup singers having to come to her rescue. In several videos of these performances, Amy is seen, who just four years ago, dominated each stage with a presence rarely seen and who captivated the audience with each of her notes, wandering aimlessly among her musicians, her gaze absent, without even being able to approach the microphone, babbling incoherently, while the initial applause of the public mutated into whistles and boos when discovering his condition. That happened at her last recital. It was June 18, 2011 in Belgrade. It was a little over a month before her death.
Amy's last days were very similar to any of the previous four years, to everything that came after Back to black. Her boyfriend was someone else, Reg Traviss, an unknown and long-winded film director, her problems, the same. His closest affections were torn, as always happens in this type of situation that becomes chronic, between commiseration and boredom. The treatments failed. Amy was away from drugs but back to alcohol. In July 2011 she was at that stage.
She wanted to re-record an album. The offers of more than a million dollars per recital that she had known to have were not repeated: the producers no longer trusted her. Those who had invited her as the main musical number on her television program, mocked her at every opportunity. After the paper in Belgrade she suspended the tour that was going to represent her musical revival. She gave up drugs. Those around her noticed her more focused, trying to get out of the hole in which she found herself. Relapses did not alert them. There had already been many and she had always recovered, or at least she had survived. On July 20, she attended the presentation of her artistic goddaughter, Dionne Bromfield. She went on stage to accompany her on a song, but she couldn't even sing her chorus; she just limited herself to dancing, with forced, jerky movements. The day before her death, she was visited by her mother to her surprise. She found her a little out of it, incoherent, but she wasn't alarmed: it was a scene she had witnessed hundreds of times.
Alcohol seemed more harmless than drugs. A lesser evil. At sunset that day she was visited by her doctor. She noticed her tipsy, with several drinks on her, but she didn't care too much about it either. It was about Amy, after all, and for that moment, at least, he was able to have a meaningful conversation with her. They even talked about a next album. That piece of information, that the patient was thinking about the future, seemed to reassure the doctor, that she retired to her house.
Amy at that time had gotten used to a certain loneliness. Reg Traviss, her filmmaker boyfriend, had left her a few months earlier -although after her death he was another of those who tried to take advantage of her spotlight to gain prominence-; Blake, Amy's eternal and toxic love, was still imprisoned; her childhood friends had moved away after several fights with her entourage for trying to get her to change her lifestyle; her parents seemed to live in her world with denial as their banner. That night of July 22, 2011, not even the paparazzi were at the door of her house in Camden.
Only her bodyguard, who said goodbye to her around midnight. At three in the morning, Amy texted a friend: "I'll be here forever, how about you?" At ten o'clock in the morning, the bodyguard came to her door and heard nothing. He was not surprised. Nor when he repeated the movement at 12 noon. At three in the afternoon, alarmed by the singer's lack of response, he entered her room. She had been dead for several hours. At the side of the bed were three empty vodka bottles. Toxicological tests showed that there were no traces of drugs in her blood, only alcohol. Very much. An inordinate amount. 4.16 grams per liter of blood. The limit before alcoholic coma is 3.5. No one showed much surprise. Amy had come undone in public. As she had written in the title track of her album that consecrated her, Back to black: "I died hundreds of times." That July 23 was the last and definitive of her. A slow, lonely, predictable and early death.
