The Lipster

In early January 2007, Amy Winehouse sat in a scruffy pub in New York and couldn’t wait to tell this journalist all about her fantastic boyfriend, 21 year old chef Alex Claire, finding much romance in the circumstances they first met in, one year before, in a different scruffy pub in Camden, north London. That night, Alex had bought Amy tequila on the sly after her local pub banned her from drinking spirits, for her own good, having been hospitalised the night before in a sambuca-related incident involving attempting to punch her best friend before falling over on her head, unconscious. Sometime after telling this story, she fondled the tattoo above her left breast of a pocket motif which bears the word "Blake’s", the inky tribute to her on-off boyfriend of two and half years previously. She said she’d no intention of removing it. “Nah, there’s no point,” she mused. “I need reminding of what a fucking idiot I am all the time.”

Even later she told another story, also referring to Blake, to let us know how hilariously funny she thought he still was. “My friend Blake,” she grinned, “we were talking the other day and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a drinking problem,’ and just went like this...” Here, she feigned throwing a glass straight over her shoulder without looking back and guffawed like a demented banshee. The last time we saw that kind of manoeuvre, I thought, it was a glass over a balcony onto someone’s head as thrown by unreconstructed Glaswegian madman Begbie in 1996 smack-classic ‘Trainspotting’...

In May 2007, Amy Winehouse married Blake Fielder-Civil in Miami, a back-together whirl-wind scenario you could no more see coming than the rest of the relentless front-page events of 2007 playing out daily like some goth-art epic b-movie. The sudden pan-dimensional drug use, the midnight brawls, the hospitalisation-level overdose, the cancelled shows, the cross-family feuds, the bloodied shoes and the continually catastrophic on-stage appearances – and the odd great one – until Blake’s arrest and “incarceration” over bribery allegations on a GBH charge saw Amy finally cancel the remainder of her UK tour on November 27, stating she couldn’t go on “without my Blake”.

Back in New York, Amy was no drug addict. She was what she always says she is, “a nutter”, the kind of drinker who doesn’t know “when to stop”, who loves to be “out of my fucking nut”, is prone to blackouts, “I hate the blackouts” and declared herself “the spokesperson for people who don’t give a fuck, yeah?” She was also brash, bawdy, constantly distracted and tremendous, erratic fun, teetering on stage for her debut New York performance with a whiskey sour in one hand and an inspired joke for the whooping crowd. “Hello, alright?” she twinkled, “I’m Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys...”

In early January 2007, Back To Black (Amy's second album after the promising soul-jazz curiosity Frank in 2003), was still a burgeoning phenomenon. Released in late October 2006, its lead single, the hilariously defiant Rehab, was ignored by mainstream radio as Christmas approached. Things started to take off when You Know I’m No Good, all slinkiness and sashaying soul, peaked at No. 18 on January 14th, the week Back To Black finally reached No.1 on the UK album chart. Rehab quickly re-entered the top 20 and You Know I’m No Good was chosen as Single Of The Week as a free download on the U.S iTunes store. From here on in, it was Amy’s year.

Back To Black was the album of 2007 by some distance, arguably the lone true soul classic this decade so far and no wonder, perhaps, as it pulses with such fathomless depth. It was obviously inspired both atmospherically and lyrically by the seeming final end of her relationship with Blake, which left her scattered all over her own Camden floor-boards, surrounded by booze, fags and dope, a picture she’d paint in You Know I’m No Good with the lyrics, “I cried for you on the kitchen floor/I cheated myself like I knew I would/I told you I was trouble”.

In February, she won Best British Female at the Brit Awards, performed a rousing ‘Rehab’ and wore at least two separate lounge-queen cocktail frocks (fluorescent yellow, red ‘n’ black) with her beehive scraping infinity.That summer, as she married Blake, the now eerily prophetic Back To Black single was released with a video of funereal brilliance, the last frame fading into blackness where the gothic script appears, ‘RIP, The Heart Of Amy Winehouse’. Love Is A Losing Game, meanwhile, the ballad which seemed to literally put the world on pause at the Mercury Awards in September and the fourth single out of the stalls, was described by a studio colleague of producer Mark Ronson as “one of the best songs I have ever heard”. There might have been a world-class video for this song too but, in early November, she failed to show up to make it. And the world wondered, once again, as the immortal line from Back To Black’s Me And Mr Jones goes, “what kind of...fuckery is this?”

Amy never, of course, stopped loving Blake and remains deeply bedazzled by what we assume is an edgy charisma, like some emotionally addicted gangster’s moll in thrall to the dangerous renegade. She married him at 23 and turned 24 this September, young enough to do a lot more damage and young enough to survive the lot. Then again, perhaps someone should tell Amy Winehouse another story, the one about the single cocaine/heroin speedball which killed the equally gifted River Phoenix back in 1993 at the age of 23. Amy is a nutter alright, the very essence of rock ‘n’ roll, but she also has ambition.

“I’d like to be...great,” she beamed back in January. “My actual goal, on paper, is, do another two albums. Do a bunch of EPs. Bunch of covers EPs. Go and have 20 kids. And then, when I’m about 60, The Las Vegas Tour. I can’t wait! I’ll have Elton’s hair, yeah, like at his 50th! And live at the top of some casino and just come down for the show every night and they wheel me on stage. And my kids will all be like, "Mum you’re so embarrassing". It’ll be great!”