Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [56]
‘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