Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [77]
Fans were quick to send Amy messages of support. One wrote, ‘We’ll miss you for the little while you’re out of the limelight, but we know you’ll be back and wonderful and better than ever.’ Another wrote, ‘Do the right thing by your health. You’ll come back stronger than ever! We’ll all be here for you!’ Writing on Amy’s MySpace profile, a third said,
I am so glad they finally cancelled it. It is heartbreaking to see her like this. I’ve been lucky enough to see her live twice this tour (once in Belgium and once in England), but I can honestly say that if it got cancelled right before these gigs, I would have been ok with it. Cancelling has been a good thing to do. I hope she will get better soon. I love Amy with all my heart.
However, in an online debate on the BBC website, one user was less sympathetic, saying,
I think that she’s killed her career off now. Fair enough if doctors are telling her that she needs to rest or go to rehab or whatever but saying you can’t perform because your husband is in jail is just sheer lunacy. The public don’t have much sympathy for [Blake] anyway so cannot understand why she should be so bothered. As far as most are concerned she’s probably got a better chance of sorting herself out without him around.
Blake’s arrest had interrupted a much-needed rest for Amy over the festive break. Before he had been arrested, it was reported, Blake planned to take Amy to India for Christmas. ‘So the beehived singer has agreed to fly to Miami with pals immediately after Hanukkah celebrations with her Jewish parents Mitch and Janis,’ said reports. Her hairdresser Alex Foden confirmed this: ‘Amy told me Blake wants her to go away for Christmas to get away from it all. She’s not on top of the world. But speaking to Blake on the phone helps. She’ll go to Miami if Blake keeps going on about it because she loves him and wants to make him happy.’
In the meantime, Amy stayed in London and was photographed on the capital’s streets in the early hours of the morning in December. Wearing just her jeans and bra on a freezing London night, Amy appeared confused and worse for wear as she was snapped at 5.30 a.m. wandering the streets of Bow. ‘She came out of the house, walked down the drive and wandered around on the pavement for a bit,’ said a local who witnessed the episode. ‘She looked upset and agitated, but there was no obvious reason for her to have come outside. It was weird.’
Amy’s camp put out a statement trying to stem the tide of hysteria that was increasingly surrounding this fragile young woman:
Amy had been asleep and heard a noise. She went outside to investigate. She didn’t realise the time. She was not on an all-night-bender. She heard all these noises, and she went outside to look and there were all these photographers… of course she looked startled. In light of recent reports, it’s easy to make false assumptions, but she’s getting better and she needs the space to do that.
Paolo Hewitt has some sympathy for Amy, who he believes would have had a far more pleasant ride with the press had she been born several decades earlier. ‘Bob Dylan was probably doing just as much gear as Amy but the press just weren’t on it,’ he says. ‘The Beatles and everybody were going ballistic but there was a gentleman’s agreement that you didn’t report that side of things. When Hunter Davies wrote about the Beatles in the sixties, although there were orgies of debauchery going on, none of it surfaced in the biography because you just didn’t report that kind of thing. Amy is unfortunate in that she lives in a media-obsessed age. If she’d have come along in the 1960s, we’d just be talking about her music. That’s what’s been lost because of all this media attention. Instead, it’s “Amy Winehouse the drug addict” and “Amy Winehouse the broken wife of Blake Fielder-Civil”. It’s not “Amy Winehouse, what a fucking great artist!” I think that’s a shame.’
However, Hewitt