Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [70]
The drama kicked off when Amy reportedly locked herself in a backstage toilet, prior to her appearance. ‘I can’t go on without Blake,’ she screamed from inside the cubicle. ‘How can I live without him? I need him. I need my baby.’ According to an eyewitness, ‘Her aides and our staff went into panic mode as Amy refused to leave the loo. We could hear her sobbing from outside. She was saying she couldn’t go on without Blake. It made everyone worry she would do something stupid to herself. Eventually, aides convinced her to come out and that everything would be OK, but it was touch and go for a while.’
Then Amy finally took to the stage, wearing a see-through black top and a miniskirt. She was more than half an hour late and some in the audience had already grown restless and frustrated while waiting for her. A slow handclap had started up minutes before she took to the stage. Some started booing her. Introducing ‘Wake Up Alone’, she told the audience, ‘This is for my husband.’ As the song ended, she said, ‘Nothing’s going to bring my husband back.’ As the performance became increasingly shambolic, more members of the audience turned on her, with heckles and boos being thrown. Shocked, she said, ‘Let me tell you something. First of all, if you’re booing you’re a mug for buying a ticket. Second, to all those booing, just wait till my husband gets out of incarceration. And I mean that.’ She then added that the audience were ‘monkey c**ts’.
Also during the set, she dropped her microphone and stumbled into the guitar stand. Finally, she seemed to shed tears prior to singing ‘Valerie’ and then walked out before the song had finished. By this time, it is reported, hundreds of fans had already walked out of the venue in disgust. Some of them were demanding refunds. The tabloid press had descended like vultures to the venue, many of their number openly wishing for some tragedy and drama in the evening. There was plenty of that on stage and some of it off. A tattooed, cross-dressing stalker turned up to the venue, promising to follow Amy everywhere on tour to ‘take care of her’. He was evicted, yelling, ‘I can take care of her now that Blake isn’t around. I love her.’
Many of the more normal fans were quoted in the press during the following days. One said, ‘She came on stage half an hour late. She managed four songs but was slurring her words and swaying all over the place. It was atrocious. The song dedicated to her husband was so bad it was like swinging a cat round your head.’
Another moaned, ‘Her singing was awful, out of tune and slurred. She sang for around fifty minutes – drinking throughout. I have never seen so many people leave a show. “Valerie” was my favourite song – she massacred it!’
Kinder sentiments were forthcoming, though. One fan, Zoe Giorgio, said, ‘When she did sing she sounded phenomenal but she was not ready to be up on that stage. She was so weak, so vulnerable.’ Another fan said, ‘If my husband was in prison I wouldn’t have the bottle to stand up on stage and do that, so I think fair play to her I really do. Her fans should support her.’
They should indeed. It must be asked what these disgruntled fans expected when they bought their tickets to the show. As Helen Brown wrote in the Daily Telegraph,
The 24-year-old’s troubles have been fodder for months now. She has been photographed drunk and bloody. She cancelled shows due to ‘health issues’ and confessed to chemical addictions, bulimia and bipolar disorder. Then this week her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, was arrested.
If the ‘appalled fans’ had bought their £20 tickets to see a slick, wholesome pop show, they’d have had cause for complaint. But they can’t pretend that was the case. Whatever else Winehouse might be accused of, the self-proclaimed ‘ugly drunk’ can’t be charged with mis-selling herself. She lives a life of high drama. And she has used that troubled experience to create an excellent album’s worth of highly dramatic songs about desperate love, alcohol addiction and drug smoking. Her ‘appalled fans’must have heard them