Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [59]
It also emerged that Amy was used by police as an example to a rookie officer of how people look when they are under the influence of drugs. ‘They are very strict about drug taking in Norway,’ said a police source.
With her past record they thought there was more than just a couple of spliffs. When she opened the hotel room door it was obvious she was wasted. She was mumbling and no one could understand her. Amy and Blake were put in separate cells but Amy couldn’t be interviewed straightaway because she was totally incoherent. She was cooperative and even let an officer in training look in her eyes so he could recognise how a person high on drugs looks.’
She returned to the hotel and quickly recovered from the ordeal – she ordered champagne in the hotel spa. Mitchell reflected, ‘Well, you know, I try to speak to her every other day but, you know, every day I’m in contact with the tour. I went to Norway last week because there was a problem out there. Again, it was in all the newspapers that they found cannabis. It didn’t belong to her: it belonged to someone else on the tour. They arrested Blake, Amy and the person who was responsible. And they only released them after they signed a form, which they were told was a release form – it was in Norwegian. It was actually a confession, so this is being dealt with now by the Norwegian authorities and the British Consulate because the ramifications of that is that she now can’t get into the States and she was meant to go next week.’
Amy was far from being the first pop star to get on the wrong side of Scandinavian law in recent times. Rapper Snoop Dogg was arrested in March for suspected drug use, and Pete Doherty was arrested and fined in Sweden the previous year. In Doherty’s case, he was fined £1,000 after police found traces of cocaine in his blood, following a performance by his rock band at the Hultsfred music festival. Police detained the twenty-seven-year-old Babyshambles frontman after the concert because ‘he showed signs of being under the influence of narcotics’, Ulf Karlsson, a police spokesman in the city of Kalmar on Sweden’s southeastern coast, said.
Amy shrugs off her brushes with the law. ‘Life’s short,’ she says, ‘and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I was quite self-destructive. I was just doing one destructive thing after the other. I always say I don’t regret things and I don’t say sorry, but I do really. I believe everything happens for a reason.’
A source close to her said, ‘This tour started pretty much as the last one ended. Berlin was a difficult time for everyone and we thought it was going to turn into another tour full of drunken and missed shows. But she’s now said that she will not drink before her gigs for the rest of the tour. She stuck to it in Amsterdam, amazingly, and gave her best show of the tour yet. Everyone just hopes she keeps it up.’
Amy told the organiser of her Amsterdam concert about her new pre-gig booze ban. Jan Willem Luyken said, ‘She wasn’t drunk when she came in and she did not drink backstage. I don’t think she was stoned, either. People were joking about her sober performance. They said, “Has the wine bar been closed today?” But, no, she was sober till after her performance. She said she won’t drink before shows any more – only afterwards.’
So much for the European leg of her tour. Any hopes Amy had of remaining sober once she returned home took a hit when she learned that Girls Aloud’s Sarah Harding had bought a new pad in Camden Town. Harding has long been a mainstay in the tabloid press’s ‘caner leagues’. She says, ‘I have a bit of a binge but I think everyone does, get smashed,