Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [47]
With Blake and Amy initially being so coy towards reporters about whether they had indeed wed, the first confirmation came when Blake changed his status on the MySpace website from single to married. Then a spokesperson for the singer confirmed, ‘Amy and Blake got married [on Friday]. They are both very happy.’ Amy then confirmed the marriage herself, during a concert back in London. ‘I don’t know if you heard, but I just got married to the best man in the world,’ she announced, smiling, to rapturous cheers and applause from the audience, which included Elton John and his partner David Furnish. She also said, with a grin, ‘I broke my tooth – it’s not pretty. At least I can just about sing.’ Also during the concert she ribbed Mitch, who was in the audience, with jokes that he now had to pay for her second wedding.
The couple’s parents had neither been informed of nor included in the marriage. Blake’s father Giles seemed philosophical about this: ‘I spoke to them and they are very happy. We will support him and Amy in whatever they decide to do.’ However, Amy’s parents were said to be far more hurt at their exclusion. ‘I’m not angry, just sad,’ said Mitch. ‘I would have liked to walk her down the aisle.’
It cannot have been easy for the parents to be excluded and Amy confirms that Mitch was most upset not for himself but for her mother. She hinted that they would try to make it up to them with a second ceremony back in England. ‘We’re gonna do the whole big thing for everyone over here. But we always knew our ceremony was going to be just about me and Blake. We just wanted to go away and do something with no fuss.’ Janis, meanwhile, admits, ‘I thought she would lose interest in him. I didn’t think they would actually get married.’
On their return to England, the couple went out with Blake’s parents to an Indian restaurant, the Mint Leaf, which stands near the A46 road between Lincoln and Newark. Amy’s presence raised plenty of eyebrows among the customers and also prompted the Sunday Mirror to headline the story with an extraordinary pun: CHICKEN JAZZFREZI, AMY? ‘They had booked the Saturday before and the Civils are regular customers, so there was nothing unusual about that,’ said the waiter who looked after Amy, who was wearing a green top and tight jeans, and her in-laws. ‘It was the first time Amy had met her parents-in-law and we think it’s great that they brought her here. I didn’t realise who it was at first but customers kept asking and one of our staff members recognised her. After that I was a bit nervous and tried to make everything perfect.
‘There was a real buzz in the restaurant that evening and everyone was talking about it,’ he added. ‘She was fine with all the attention and was getting on very well with the in-laws all night. Everyone left the restaurant with a smile on their face that evening – it was really exciting for all the people there.’
Amy and Blake, too, left the Mint Leaf with smiles on their faces. However, their married bliss was interrupted cruelly on Wednesday, 8 August. It should have been one of the happiest nights of Amy’s life. She discovered she had been nominated in three categories at the MTV Video Music Awards. However, she was instead rushed into A&E at University College London Hospital at 1 a.m. A spokesman for Island Records said, ‘Amy Winehouse was admitted to UCLH this morning suffering from severe exhaustion.’
However, a fuller story soon emerged. On the Monday she had touched down at Heathrow Airport, after performing at a music festival in Chicago. She and Blake immediately began drinking their way through pubs from Hounslow to Camden. Thus started a three-day binge, during which Amy was said to look ‘like a zombie – white as a sheet and trembling’. Towards the end of the session, Amy is said to have taken a drug overdose and later described the experience as ‘one of the most terrifying moments of my life’.
She told the News of the World, ‘I don’t know how to explain what happened. I can’t remember what I looked like. I couldn’t recognise myself. It