27 Read online

  27

  Also by Howard Sounes:

  Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney

  Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan

  Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life

  Bukowski in Pictures

  Fred & Rose

  Heist

  Seventies

  The Wicked Game

  27

  A History of the 27 Club through the Lives

  of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin,

  Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and

  Amy Winehouse

  HOWARD SOUNES

  DA CAPO PRESS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  First Da Capo Press edition 2013

  Reprinted by arrangement with Hodder & Stroughton Ltd.

  ISBN 978-0-306-82169-1 (e-book)

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.dacapopress.com

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  10987654321

  ‘Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to …’

  Kurt Cobain’s mother

  CONTENTS

  Part One: LIFE

  Prologue: Exit, Gate 27

  One: The Young Dionysians

  Two: Daddy’s Girl

  Three: The Mad Ones

  Four: Success

  Five: Kurt and Courtney, Amy and Blake

  Six: Excess

  Seven: Distress

  Part Two: DEATH

  Eight: In Which Brian is Entirely Surrounded by Water

  Nine: Nodding Out

  Ten: The Crack-up

  Eleven: The Secret House of Death

  Twelve: One Little Drink, Then Another

  Thirteen: The Glass is Run

  Epilogue: The Dance of Death

  Appendix: 27 Long-list

  Acknowledgements

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Life

  Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

  Dante

  Prologue

  EXIT, GATE 27

  You departed from that busy gate, the so-called stupid one.

  Eric Erlandson, Letters to Kurt

  1

  It was just after six p.m. on a summer’s evening when Amy Winehouse’s doctor visited the star at home in London. It was a routine house call, routine in as much as Amy’s life had become so troubled in recent years, so precarious, that her doctor visited her at home almost as often as the postman delivered the mail.

  Dr Cristina Romete saw at once that Amy had been drinking. She was tipsy and she smelt of booze. The doctor asked when Amy had started again, after two weeks of sobriety. Amy replied, shame-faced, that she didn’t know. But her live-in bodyguard, Andrew Morris, said that she had begun on Wednesday. It was now Friday, 22 July 2011.

  Doctor and patient proceeded to have a frank conversation, talking together in Amy’s light and airy home in Camden Square. Dr Romete asked Amy why she had started drinking again. Amy’s explanation was that she was ‘bored’.

  The doctor asked Amy whether she planned to stop drinking. Amy said she didn’t know.

  Dr Romete reminded Amy of how serious this was. Only two months ago she had warned Amy in writing, the letter copied to her father and her manager, that her habit of binge-drinking was putting her in ‘immediate danger of death’. Amy assured her that she did not want to die. There were things she still wanted to do with her life. She didn’t give the impression of being suicidal, though her behaviour was evidently reckless and self-destructive.

  The doctor tried to persuade Amy to consider therapy, to deal with her alcoholism, as well as her underlying psychological problems. Amy shook her head. She had always resisted psychologists and psychiatrists, fearing that if she let such people into her mind, she would lose touch with the mercurial part of her brain that allowed her to create original work. Dr Romete knew this, and knew her patient to be a stubborn, yet intelligent woman, who always ‘wanted to do things her own way’. In her most famous song, ‘Rehab’, Amy sang about when her family and colleagues first tried to get her into a rehabilitation clinic, to dry out, to which suggestion she gave an emphatic: ‘no, no, no.’ This simple but memorable repetition of words had become a catchphrase. It was also the story of her life.

  After their talk, Dr Romete left the house. She would never see her patient alive again.

  Amy had a history of substance abuse and self-destructive behaviour stretching back to when she was a teenager. The serious problems began, however, in 2006, when her album Back to Black was released. It won five Grammy awards. As Amy became a star she also became addicted to crack cocaine and heroin. Although she quit hard drugs in 2008, she did so by switching to alcohol. Amy was a small woman, five foot three inches tall and slightly built, but she drank like a sailor on shore leave, drinking herself into a coma in May, and into hospital as a result. Dr Romete wrote her a warning letter after this incident, but Amy didn’t take it seriously. She joked that her doctor thought she might be dead soon. And she carried on binge-drinking, getting out of her mind before a show in Belgrade just five weeks previously. Between binges Amy had periods of self-realisation and guilt when she quit the bottle. But when the thirst returned she bought vodka at corner shops in Camden Town, stashing the booze in her room.

  Amy was a Londoner who had lived her whole life – all 27 years and ten months, save vacations and tours – in north London. Her various homes from childhood until she died were within a few stops of each other on the London Underground. The Camden Square house was her grandest residence yet, a large Victorian property that had been gutted and refurbished to her taste. The décor was sparse and bright, with black floors and white walls, apart from the basement music room, which was red. The ground-floor kitchen was styled like an American diner. A vintage juke box had pride of place in the lounge. A gift from Amy’s ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, the juke box, like the marriage, had never worked properly.

  Amy shared her home with friends and staff. Andrew Morris, her ‘close protection officer’, a huge young man of West Indian background, slept in one of the guest rooms upstairs. During the four years he had worked for Amy, Andrew had grown close to the star, like brother and sister. ‘She was a diamond person … not a regular person,’ he says fondly. ‘She was the sort of person, if you met her once, you would never forget her. She was very honest. If she didn’t like you, she’d tell you. If she loved you, she’d tell you.’

  Amy’s stylist, Naomi Parry, also stayed at the house on occasion, as did a friend named Tyler James, whom Amy had known since drama school. But Naomi and Tyler were away at the time. In fact, after Dr Romete left the house on Friday evening, Amy was home alone, save her minder and her cat, Anthony Jade.

  Many of her friends were at a summer music festival. There were other friends whom Amy would once hav
e called upon for company, but was estranged from at the end of her life. Amy was lovable, but demanding. She’d recently lost her temper with two of her band members, and had fallen out with several girlfriends over the years. The drinking didn’t help. Lauren Franklin, who had known Amy at school and then drifted apart from her friend, had recently reconnected with her on Skype, and was shocked by the state Amy was in. ‘She was terribly drunk,’ she says, of the last time they spoke online. ‘She had a bottle in her hand. I was, like, “What are you doing?”’

  So, for one reason or another, Amy was on her own as the week came to an end. ‘Basically, everyone was out,’ says her friend Doug Charles-Ridler. ‘She hated [being alone]. That’s why everyone’s feeling really guilty.’

  Amy’s father, Mitch Winehouse, a former London cabbie, was normally around, but he was in New York to perform his nightclub act. Mitch sang saloon-bar standards in the style of Tony Bennett. It was a semi-amateur career he’d revived on the back of Amy’s success. He had visited his daughter at home on Thursday, just before his trip to the United States, and found her in an introspective mood, looking at family photographs.

  Amy’s mother, Janis, who was divorced from her father, had called in at lunchtime on Friday. Janis had multiple sclerosis, which made her seem older than her 56 years, but she was remarkably similar in looks and character to her famous daughter. Both exuded a charming mixture of intelligence, good humour and childlike innocence.

  ‘I love you, Mummy,’ Amy said, as Janis left the house.

  Janis said that Amy seemed ‘weary’ at their final meeting, but that wasn’t unusual. Her daughter kept rock ’n’ roll hours, and she was on medication. For some time now Amy had been taking diazepam for anxiety and Librium to help her cope with alcohol withdrawal. And she had been drinking on top of her medication. Dr Romete had refused to prescribe any more drugs when she discovered that Amy had gone back on the bottle, but autopsy tests revealed traces of Librium in Amy’s blood, along with high levels of alcohol.

  Although everybody knew about Amy’s drink problem, and she admitted to being an alcoholic, nobody seemed able to stop her drinking if and when she wanted to. Some of her nearest and dearest took the view that if Amy wanted ‘a little drink’ it was up to her because she could handle it. This was a dangerous delusion. ‘Even I, to a degree, I must be guilty,’ admits her boyfriend, Reg Traviss. ‘[I] said to her several times, I said, “Look, darling, if you want to have a drink, just have a drink. It’s no problem. You can curb it.”’

  Reg and Amy had been dating for sixteen months, and they had talked about getting married. But Reg didn’t live with Amy. He had his own flat in Marylebone and he was often busy with his work, writing and directing feature films. Reg rang Amy from his office in Holborn a little before eight on Friday evening to say he would be over later to see her, and suggesting that he bring a takeaway. ‘She had had a drink … I could tell on the phone. She wasn’t roaring drunk, but she was a bit tipsy.’

  Amy decided not to wait for Reg. She told Andrew Morris that she fancied an Indian takeaway, just like they’d had the previous evening. They placed their order by phone, and when the food was delivered they took their meals up to their respective rooms.

  Amy spent most of her time in her bedroom on the top floor of the house. The walls had been knocked through to create an interconnecting suite with a raised ceiling to give a spacious, loft-like feel. Amy’s dressing room was at the back, with doors to her bedroom at the front of the house and an en suite bathroom in grey marble. Her windows overlooked the front yard, which was protected by a high wall and an iron gate with an intercom. Andrew was punctilious about keeping the gate locked and the house secure. In the past drug dealers and press photographers had swarmed around Amy like flies, and Amy had connived with the dealers to smuggle drugs past her bodyguards. There had been no trouble of that sort at the new house. A court order was in place, keeping the most troublesome paparazzi away, Amy was seemingly finished with drugs, and few fans knew her new address.

  One fan had shown up during the week, however, an eighteen-year-old girl from Italy. After watching the house for a while she had tried to get into the garden. Andrew intercepted her. Amy asked Andrew to bring the girl to the front door where she gave her an autograph. It was the last she ever signed.

  Beyond the gates, on the other side of the street, there was a small park, the green lung of Camden Square. Amy’s neighbours were walking their dogs under the trees in the twilight. There were no fans or press outside tonight. Tomorrow there would be hundreds.

  Amy flopped onto her bed. She wore a tracksuit for comfort, as she often did at home. She looked around for something to occupy her mind. Andrew Morris heard her upstairs, ‘laughing, listening to music and watching TV’. There was terrible news on television from Norway where a fanatic named Anders Behring Breivik had set off a bomb earlier in the day, then gone on a shooting spree, killing dozens of people. This horror would dominate the news until Amy provided a rival sensation the following day.

  Filled with nervous energy, Amy banged on a snare drum, part of a drum kit she had in the basement, and fiddled with her mobile phone and laptop. When she was alone, she would typically reach out to friends by text, Skype or Facebook, looking for distraction, desperate for company.

  Just after ten o’clock she found some footage on YouTube of a man she used to date and ran downstairs to Andrew’s room to tell him to come and look. They spent the next few hours together in her room, watching YouTube.

  At around eleven thirty Reg Traviss switched off his computer at work and called Amy to say he was finally ready to come over, but she didn’t answer her phone. This wasn’t unusual. ‘[She] just misplaced her phone. Then she would forget where it was, or it would fall down the back of something. She used to do that a fair amount.’ Yet Reg had a sense of foreboding. ‘I was really alarmed by it.’ Still, he stayed in his office, rather than going directly to Camden Square. ‘In a weird way there was something preventing me from going there. That’s something I can’t really go into too much, because I don’t want to sound silly. [But] it was like there was something saying, Get over there. Just go over there. And I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I was literally rocking backwards and forwards going, I’m going to go there now … No, I won’t. And this went on through the night. And I kept checking the phone. She hadn’t called. It was just unreal.’

  Around midnight Reg sent Amy a text message asking her to call him. ‘What I didn’t want to do was go over there if she was asleep. In which case what I would have done is go home first and wait until she’d wake up, which could be at one in the morning, and then go over, [which] we’d do quite a lot. But something was bothering me. And it was bothering me right there and then at the moment. I just sat [in my office] thinking, What shall I do? I thought, This is weird. I left a really long message. In the message I actually said, “If I don’t hear back from you I’ll probably just come over anyway” … That was a weird thing for me to say.’ Reg had bought a book he knew Amy would be interested in: a history of Jewish London. He sat in his office and looked through it, hoping she would call. ‘She didn’t. And she didn’t and she didn’t. I just thought, this is really, really odd.’

  Finally Reg walked into Soho where he had a late-night drink, still checking his phone in case Amy had rung. She hadn’t. He hailed a cab. ‘I said to the taxi driver, “Camden Square.”’ On the way to Amy’s house he changed his mind and told the driver to take him to Marylebone. When the cab arrived at his flat, he felt he ought to go to Amy’s after all. ‘[I] sat in the taxi outside and I said [to the driver], “You know what? Maybe take me to Camden Square.” And he went, “Whatever you want.” And I went, “Er, er, er. No, it’s all right.”’ Reg paid the driver and went inside. ‘I just can’t explain how uneasy I was and how indecisive I was. It was really, really strange. It was just one of the weirdest fucking feelings I’ve had ever.’

  Reg put on a DVD of an old TV series and sat watc
hing an episode, still hoping that Amy might ring. For reasons he cannot explain he didn’t think to ring the landline of Amy’s house or to call Andrew Morris on his mobile. ‘I wish I had …’

  Amy watched YouTube with Andrew until two thirty a.m., during which time she either didn’t hear Reg’s calls and texts or chose to ignore them. In her last few hours Amy looked at pictures of herself online. This was something she didn’t do as a rule, but had been doing since her disastrous concert in Belgrade. Later Andrew said that looking at images of herself was the only unusual aspect of Amy’s behaviour at the end, though nothing was ever quite normal with Amy. As he said, ‘Amy was pretty normal – for Amy.’

  By looking at herself online, and studying old family photographs, as she had been doing during the week, Amy revealed a sense of introspection and reflection, as if she was assessing her life. Jim Morrison of the Doors had behaved in a similar way the night before he died in 1971, aged 27.

  Finally, Andrew left Amy to her own devices and went downstairs to his bedroom where he watched a film until sometime between three and four in the morning. Up until the point where he fell asleep he could still hear Amy moving about upstairs.

  Amy may have dozed off for a while – she tended to catnap – but she was awake at three thirty and had evidently found her phone because she texted a friend, Kristian Marr. ‘I’m gonna be here always xx BUT ARE YOU OK? XXX.’ Interestingly, she didn’t reply to Reg’s texts.

  Having drunk steadily all day and every day since Wednesday, Amy seemingly drank more when she was alone in her bedroom in the small hours of the morning. At some point she went into her bathroom and threw up in the toilet, possibly on purpose. Amy was a bulimic who drank and ate in binges, then made herself sick.

  Finally she kicked off her shoes and lay on her bed, face down on the mattress with the duvet thrown back on a warm night. She was still dressed. Her laptop was open, and nearby were three empty bottles of Smirnoff vodka.