January 20, 2022 • 32 mins
Five years had passed since her last album. Her ex-husband was facing jail time for burglary. But Amy Winehouse chose to focus on the positive. She may not have been entirely sober, but she was no longer using. She had found a new person to love, and one who loved her. And then...the bottom dropped out.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, what's up, everybody. Jake Brennan here. I hope you've
been enjoying these stories about Amy Winehouse in season four
of Seven Club. While you're digging into the downfall of
one of the greatest modern divas, I wanted to share
a story about another queen of the pop realm, Taylor Swift.
You can hear all about Taylor's disgraceful fans and Interstate
Stockers in the season nine premiere of disgrace Land, my
(00:22):
other music and true crime podcast. You can hear that
episode on January eighth wherever you listen to podcasts, or
you can hear it along with every single other disgrace
Land episode right now exclusively at Amazon dot Com slash
disgrace Land. The Seven Club is a production of I
(00:42):
Heart Radio and Double Elvis. Amy Winehouse died at the
age of seven, and she lived a life that was
quickly running out of time. I can give you twenty
seven reasons why that statement is true. Eleven would be
the date in July of nine teen fifty one when
one of her musical heroes was briefly jailed for being
(01:04):
in the wrong place at the wrong time. Five more
would be the number of years have passed since the
release of her career making second album, five long years
during which she never delivered a follow up. Another two
would be the number of years her ex husband, Blake
Fielder Civil would receive when he was sentenced for stealing
(01:24):
four thousand pounds worth of someone else's stuff to support
his drug habit. Seven more would be the hour of
the evening when Amy sent what would be her final tweet,
a nebulous missive that got the Internet in the world talking.
And two would be the hour of the morning on Saturday,
July eleven, when her living bodyguard unsuspectingly saw her alive
(01:49):
for the last time, all totally on this our ninth
episode of season four, the wrong place, at the wrong time,
four thousand pounds of someone else's stuff, getting the world
talking in Amy Winehouse, I'm Jake Brennan and this is
(02:10):
the twenty seven cars. Sara Van held the sheet music
(02:57):
in her hand and felt her heart sink. The song
was Ship, probably taken from the top of a whole
pile of ship songs, songs that Columbia Records owned outright
and therefore could easily parlay into easy money. Frank Sinatra
wasn't demeaned with ship songs from this throwaway pile. No
(03:19):
one at Columbia was forcing Frank to slum it with
a song like the gas Pipe She's Leaking Joe, And
just look at that stupid goddamn title, the gas Pipe
She's Leaking Joe, condescending as hell offensive. Even more offensive
was that Columbia wanted her, Sara Van, a black woman,
to sing a song that essentially lampooned black culture. And
(03:42):
don't even get her started with the cheesy whitewash Calypso arrangement.
The whole thing was a cluster. You know what would
happen if Columbia a and R man Mitch Miller told
Frank Sinatra to sing something like that, a song that
parodied Italians, the opposite of More for starters. Fork would
either tear Mitch new asshole in front of the entire orchestra,
(04:03):
or he just bounce leave Gaunsville. Baby. Sara Van didn't
now the luxuries that Frank Sinatra had. Rosemary Clooney didn't either,
but Rosemary always did what Mitch Miller told her to do.
She didn't put up a fight. Sara Van, on the
other hand, not so much. She knew that she was
(04:24):
above the material. She had a four octave range, never
got horse, never ran short of breath on stage. Hell,
she could have been an opera singer. And yet Sarah
Van was also smart enough to know that she had
to get creative when it came to putting up a fight.
If she refused to perform the material, Mitch Miller would
gladly fire her on the spot and find someone else
(04:47):
to replace her. Fine, Mitch Miller could make her sing
the song, but that didn't mean he could make her
sing the song well. So for the gas pipe, She's
leaking Joe, Sarah did one take decent at best on purpose.
She took the session about us seriously. She took the
song which was zero percent, and there was no passion
(05:09):
in the performance, no nuance, just the right notes in
the right places, and honestly, a dilettante like Mitch Miller
probably didn't even notice the difference. She claimed it as
a little victory in a larger battle. She also bristled
at those on the other end of the spectrum, the
jazz purists who expected her to sing a particular way.
(05:30):
She didn't mind it when they called her by one
of her nicknames like Sassy or the Divine One, but
don't call her a jazz singer, That just pigeonholder. She
loved jazz, no doubt. She lived it, breathe it. She
was the vocal equivalent of birds or disease horn. But
she wanted her instrument to be free, not beholden to
one genre or style or expectation. Inmates at a Detroit
(05:53):
prison and heard that trademark sound of freedom on the
evening of July eleven, when they were unexpectedly treated to
Sarah's voice ringing from cell to sell all through the night.
She had been nabbed as part of a police raid
at a private home that doubled as an after hours club.
Detroit cops smell of the potential violation of the state's
(06:14):
liquor law. Thankfully they didn't smell the reefer. They busted windows,
they broke the door down, They took Sassy's prints, and
held her for nearly twelve hours, but they didn't have
anything on Sarah Vant. Just like a grand jury in Washington,
d C. Didn't have anything on Sarah Van. The next
year in Charles, Ireland and the United States Attorney General
(06:37):
wanted to know what happened in pounds of reefer that
literally disappeared during a drug bust. That was a fun
ton of drugs up in smoke, And Sarah was one
of a handful of musicians who were suspected of having
intimate knowledge of the whereabouts of the missing marijuana, and
they asked her to testify, but she had no clue,
and even if she did, she wasn't telling. She did
(06:58):
tell her attorney about the things she was really concerned about,
and it wasn't Pettie buss By the fuzz at private
house parties. It was a thing with Columbia. Sarga tossed
all these ship songs, even though she was of the
same caliber as a label so called top artists, all
of whom happened to be White, Doris Day, Joe Stafford,
Danny Fucking Kay and Frank. And despite the fact that
(07:21):
she was artistically and commercially up on that top shelf
with her label MATS, Sarah didn't get the same top
shelf material or the same top shelf promotional schedule, and
her attorney agreed and they filed a letter of complaint
with Columbia. She was one of the record labels top artists,
and she demanded to be treated as such. Columbia's lawyers
advised the label to see the error of their ways,
(07:43):
and soon they made sure Sarah got top billing. Soon
after that her fight not just fought, but one. Sara
Van made an unexpected move. She bailed from Columbia to
go to do her thing, first at Mercury Records, and
then at Roulette Records and elsewhere. She made moves like
a star because she was a star. She knew her worth.
(08:04):
The labels didn't tell her what she was worth. She
told them. She refused to be defined by the name
of the label on her records or by the material
she was given to perform. Decades later, more than ten
years after Sara Vant's death, Amy Winehouse made her own moves.
She resisted definitions. She performed the material she wanted to perform,
(08:27):
much of it written by herself, and it didn't matter
if it was sanitized for radio. Didn't matter if the
song was titled Funck Me Pumps, or if the song
was told from the perspective of an anti hero who
resisted the call to go to rehab. Amy Winehouse modeled
herself after her musical heroes, heroes like Sarah Van, not
(08:48):
only in the way she sang, but in the way
she did things her way. Most twentysomethings Amy's age had
no clue who Sara Van was. Maybe they knew Ella
or Billy's name, but not Sarah's. Didn't matter. Sara was
always in fashion. Amy knew that in her music and
her attitude where a guide post for Amy along the way,
(09:10):
Because maybe her generation didn't know who Saravan was, but
they were definitely going to know who Amy Winos was
and they were never going to forget her. Honestly, at
this point in summer of two thousand eleven, her career
could tank and she would still remain one of the greats,
or so she hoped. But Amy's confidence was at an
(09:30):
all time low. It had been five years since Back
to Black, and although she talked a big game about
her upcoming third album, the reality was that nothing was happening.
She had already done the hard part. She had made
her Saravant Stand, that defiant stand where she decided what
material she would produce and how it would be produced.
(09:52):
The floor, as it were, was hers. But now you
couldn't even see the floor in the studio and the
lights were dimmed. The tape was blank, the songs weren't ready.
Her focus was off, her game was off, and it
was clearly time to reclaim her life in her career
before she was made immortal for all the wrong reasons.
(10:36):
Amy Winehouse was trying to decide what to wear. She
and her boyfriend, the English film director REDG Travis, We're
due to attend a wedding on Sunday, two days away.
It was leven. Amy and Redge had managed to patch
things up since pictures of Redge hand in hand with
his ex girlfriend have been splashed all over the tabloids.
(10:59):
Regge's new cry of films, Screwed, had been in theaters
for a month then. So far the reviews weren't much
better than Psychosis, the horror film he directed the year before.
But even if his films didn't achieve the kind of
critical acclaim he hoped for. As the romantic partner of
England's most notorious singer, redd received time marks. He had
his ship together, unlike Amy's x Blake Fielder civil who
(11:22):
continued to fall apart on an absurdly regular basis. Only
a month earlier, Blake was sentenced to two years and
eight months in jail, this time for a burglary he'd
committed in order to scrounge up bread for junk. He
was carrying a gun when he did it, too, and
never mind the fact that the gun wasn't loaded, it
wasn't even real. And Blake and his accomplice, Christopher Silvester,
(11:44):
broke into a house in Rotten, a suburb of Leeds,
turned the place inside out, and they carried a hammer,
some tape, ski masks, and gloves. The fake gun was
to make Blake feel about seven stone larger in case
he encountered some real fucking colums. And the duo pulled
roars from cabinets, They empty cupboards, They turned over tables
and stuck their fingers and every nook and cranny, and
(12:05):
they got away with jewelry. They hauled out a television,
Xbox DVD player. All told, the duel was busted with
four thousand pounds worth of someone else's stuff when they
were pulled over by local police. The cops also found
Blake's gun, which turned out to be fake. At least
they couldn't get him on a legal possession of a
firearm and to thank Jimmy thought I was married to
(12:28):
that one marriage. The weight of that union hungover Amy's
head as she thought about the weekend wedding that she
was attending. Her marriage to Blake had been an A
plus disaster from the start. Even though they had been
divorced for two years and Blake had a new flame
with a baby on the way, Amy couldn't shake the
notion that he had been her soul mate. She couldn't
(12:49):
explain it. How did you explain an attraction to the
person who had tragged you down so far that was
beyond opposites attracting, especially now when she was involved a
relationship that was every bit as healthy as her time
with Blake had been toxic. The fact that Blake's name
was still tattooed directly above her heart likely didn't give
(13:09):
Red Travis the warmest of fuzzy feelings. Amy was just
glad that it wasn't her own wedding she was getting
ready to attend. The only thing she had to concern
herself with this particular weekend was what to wear, and
she wanted to wear what she wanted to wear, not
what someone else wanted her to wear. She was over
being pressured by others into doing things for them, like
(13:32):
the show in Serbia. Amy heard the rumors that followed
the show, the ones that a tour manager or a
bodyguard or even someone in her family had literally pushed
her onto the stage in Serbia forcibly made her perform
when she clearly was not in the right state to
even be around that many people, let alone sing for them.
But it wasn't like that. She hadn't been strong armed
(13:54):
to sing, not physically at least, she probably wouldn't have
gone through that if it had been her to sit,
or if she hadn't been so fucked up that she
couldn't make her own decisions. To be honest, given the
option of back to back shows in front of crowds
of thousands or a simpler fate of frequenting pubs in
Camden Town, it's just another face, a face that would
(14:15):
have go out a tune on a tiny stage every
now and then. Jamie Wins would have chosen the ladder.
She didn't need all of this, all this pomp, all
this circumstance, oceans of people, nor does she need every
single action she took in every single decision she made,
picked apart by the world, as if her life was
nothing more than fodder for nine to five ors congregating
(14:35):
around water coolers. Then, of course, the show in Serbia
led to more questions. Was she well? Was she high?
Should she really continue on with her tour? Was this
all indicative of a larger problem, a problem with her
manager or perhaps even her label Island Records. Did anyone
close to Amy actually care for her? Oh? She just
being used to make a quick bucket every turn. She
(14:57):
was done with questions. She we have had some answers,
but she was just as tired of replying to the
questions as she was of the questions themselves. And she
was tired, tired, physically exhausted. She picked out a dress,
just pointed at one in the rack. Seconds after she
pointed at it, she couldn't even remember what it looked
like anymore. She took a swig from a glass, and
(15:20):
then she logged onto Twitter. She stared at the prompt
on the screen, what's happening? Good question, Twitter? What was happening?
She took another swig. Fuck it was late. She typed oinca, oinca,
oinca while you awake, and then click the tweet button.
Why was she awake? What time was it really and
(15:42):
where was redg It? Replies to her tweet started coming
in fast and furious. She knew they would, and that
trademark was a notification. Sound another and another, each whistle,
stumbling over the last and then being cut off by
the next. People wanted to know what it meant. Oint
up oink up at an inside joke? Was she speaking
in code to someone? Was she talking to herself? Was
(16:05):
she once again beyond funked up? This was online gibberish
from a fucked up mind, Jamie laughed. All she had
to do was write some stupid phrase online and they
all devoured it. Some bullshit news site. Maybe even Perez
Hilton was probably already making clickbade out of this tweet
right now. If they could only see her now at
(16:26):
home doing funk all. She wasn't endlessly fascinating like they
all thought. Being endlessly fascinating was nice and all, And
that is until you were the one they were all
endlessly fascinated with. The Next Saturday, July eleven, Amy continued
to shrink away from doing anything a superstar would do.
(16:47):
It was a wonderfully prosaic day. She met her mom,
Janice for a lunch, and they took their time, and
there were no paparazzi on site to shove camera lenses
in her face, which, of cour respect the question that
was being asked around this time. If Amy Winos did
something and the paparazzi wasn't there to document it, had
she actually done something? She returned to her home on
(17:10):
Camden Square. She hadn't hallucinated tiny mice for days. She
was no longer afraid to look into mirrors for fear
that a figure would emerge from them. She was beginning
to embrace a feeling of being quite simply normal, or
something like it. At least the semi detached Victorian she
was living in wasn't exactly normal. It's set her back
(17:31):
two point five million pounds when she bought it in
two thousand nine. She had only recently moved in, seeing
as she sank another two d thou pounds into it
to build a gym in a recording studio on site.
And the doctor who showed up that night for what
was essentially a glorified proof of life check, maybe that
wasn't so normal either. Dr Christina Romata was there at
(17:53):
the behest of Island records sent weekly to make sure
Emy's health was on the open up. Dr Roome toy
knew that Amy wasn't about to follow anyone's advice or
instructions but her own. No offense stock. But Amy did
things her way, and no, not like Frank Sinatra, but
like Tony Bennett and Saravana. Damie told Dr Romatay, she
(18:14):
was born and that's why she was drinking. She would
stop drinking for a few weeks until the boredom get
the best of her, and then she'd start again. She
wasn't sure if delibrium was helping. She took it for
alcohol withdrawal and anxiety. If only librium cured boredom. Drinking
past the time, and there was a lot of time
to pass, so much time. Time didn't feel finite. It
(18:37):
felt like it just went on forever, that it would
never end, and sun days and some nights Jesus, time
just board the ship out of you. Time used to
be more fun back when she could pass the time
with a crack rock or some junk. That ship you're
floating in time, the whole space, time continuum itself. Whatever
(18:57):
the funk that was black holes that went on wherever
you weren't a body. You didn't have a brain, you know,
the very concept of time was a non concept. But
she was clean now and there was none of that
jump to fuck with time. She kept drinking. She wanted
time to feel finite. She wanted to be able to
measure it, to look at it from one end to
(19:18):
the other, the dawn of time to the end of time,
and really hold its measurement in her hands. She looked
at her hands, no time, just skin and knuckle wrinkles
and the fingerprints on her digits. She took another drink
and her eyes went a little glassy dr romance. He
asked Amy if she was planning on not drinking at
some point that evening. Was she stopped once the doctor left.
(19:42):
Amy said she didn't know. But she didn't know. She
just wasn't answering questions anymore. We'll be right back after
this word word word. Amy Winehouse slept in late. That
(20:03):
was standard operating procedure, completely ordinary, especially when she'd been
up late the night before, which she had been. Andrew Morris,
Amy's living bodyguard, knew exactly how late. He listened to
her for hours, hold up inside her bedroom well after
dr Christina Romatay had left earlier that evening, Andrew listened
(20:24):
from elsewhere in the Camden Square house as Amy watched television, laughed,
spoke loudly to friends on the phone. Even louder was
her new drum set, which she was inspired to play
in the wee hours of the morning. Drums were something new,
scratched or creative itch, maybe even more than singing at
this moment, or maybe it depended on the moment, And
(20:47):
a few times she played the drums in front of
a crowd weren't what she expected. It was like when
you try to play a brand new song in front
of a huge festival crowd and they all wanted to
hear the same old hits. The small pub crowd didn't
want to hear Amy said, tempt to coax out a
reggae or a dub rhythm on a kid. She was
a singer, not a drummer. The audience couched their disapproval
(21:07):
and drunken requests sing Amy, Sing, Sing rehab Amy. She
was no one hit wonder, But nevertheless the truth remained.
She was that song, and that song was her. It
continued to define as she was five years after its
release A tragic caricature. Amy worried that she needed to
(21:30):
come to terms with the possibility that she would never
escape that role for as long as she lived. Now
at home in Camden Town, Andrew Morris was the one worrying.
He was concerned that Amy's late at night drumming would
disturb the neighbors reminded her to keep it down. The
last time Andrew spoke to Amy before he hit the
(21:52):
sack was around two in the morning. She had her
laptop out. She was watching clips of herself performing online
and she glanced up at and true, boy, I can sing,
she said, in a rare, unguarded moment of confidence. Damn right,
you can sing. Andrew responded, and then she made a confession.
She would gladly give it all up, every last bit
(22:12):
of it. The Grammy Awards, the brit Awards, the Avenuvello Awards,
the v M A moon Man, the duet with Tony Bennett,
her POSH Camden Address, the money, every last quid if
it meant that she could go back back seven eight
years or so even earlier, back to a time when
she could walk down the street, any street, any street
in London at all and not be mobbed. Back to
(22:33):
a time when her name wasn't easily found in any
given paper, or when unflattering and unsuspecting photos of her
werener mainstay on TMC or Cocker before she had to
get used to being demeaned with the nickname why No,
and then she was being honest with herself. That would
also be back to a time before she ever laid
eyes on Blake Field her civil but maybe even that
couldn't have been avoided. Whether her path in life had
(22:55):
led her to worldwide celebrity status or not. She wondered
if she would have met Blake regard this as if
it was fading. Just because things were meant to be
did not mean that they were meant to be perfect.
There were plenty of things in this life that were
meant to be doomed, like the jazz hip hop supergroups
she wanted to assemble, Request Love on the drums, Raphael's
(23:15):
Sadiq on Base, most deaf joining her own vocals. They
couldn't seem to get that project off the ground ship.
Maybe it wasn't even on the ground yet. Amy had
trouble remembering if she had legit talked with those guys
about it, or if it was just some fantastical notion
that lived inside her brain and some days okay, or
more like most days, her looming third album felt like
(23:37):
even more of an illusion than the supergroup Idea ever
did her long awaited follow up to Back to Black.
The pressure was at times unbearable, not just to deliver something,
but to deliver something on the level of the last record.
It had to be better than great. Maybe it would
never happen. She had written some songs, so a dozen
or so. She had to live her songs before she
(23:59):
wrote them. Everyone knew that Salam Remy knew that she
didn't write that ship overnight. She was keeping the songs
close guarded. It would be like letting people read her
diary if she started sharing them everywhere. Titles like You
Always Hurt the Ones You Love made that clear. You know,
as soon as I wanted the year ways people all
over London, We're going to say how it was all
about them. Then she remember that she had booked some
(24:20):
upcoming studio time, both with Salam and with Mark Ronson.
That gave her hope. Maybe she would figure out this
third album predicament. After all, Andrew let Amy try to
get some sleep. He had returned from vacation only a
few days earlier, but in the time following his return,
as he would later explain, he was well aware that
(24:42):
she was drinking on the regular. He could tell by
the way her words sounded when she spoke. But he
didn't see Amy over drink. She appeared to have drinks
for the pleasure of having drinks, not to maintain a
seven drunk buzz. He didn't see her binge. Nothing was
out of the ordinary, nothing seemed wrong. Still, Andrew's job
(25:03):
was to keep tabs on amy winos at all times
of the day, no matter how ordinary things appeared. So
around ten am the following morning, Saturday, July eleven, Andrew
quietly made his way to Amy's bedroom. The house was quiet.
He found Amy lying in bed, out cold, sleeping. It
(25:24):
off completely ordinary standard operating procedure. Andrew closed the door
as quietly as he had opened it, and then Amy
continued to rest. He passed the time and turned on
the news. A car bombing and then seventy seven people
killed on an island in Norway. They were saying it
was a terrorist attack. The news fucking sucked. He switched
(25:46):
the set off time didn't stretch that day. The hours
went by quickly, and before long it was the afternoon,
after three pm. Actually, Andrew still hadn't heard Amy make
any noise. Probably time to check on her again. He
went back to her bedroom and opened the door. She
was still there, how cold, sleeping it off wellly. Amy
(26:10):
was still in the exact same position that she had
been in earlier in the morning. When Andrew checked on her,
Who's eerie like he was looking at a carbon copy
image five hours later, Amy's arms and legs and the
exact same spots as they were before. Absolutely nothing had changed. Fuck.
(26:31):
Andrew ran to her side. She wasn't breathing. Fuck, no pulse.
She was out cold still. Two Voca bottles around the
floor next to the bed. They were empty. Andrew grabbed
his phone and dialed emergency services, and when he got
through the dispatch, he couldn't believe the words coming out
of his mouth. Amy Winehouse was dead. On the evening
(27:16):
of July eleven, the news traveled fast, and so did
the rumors. Rumors that Amy Winehouse had taken her own life,
Rumors that the stale rock and roll adage hope I
die before I get old was very much alive and well.
There was also a rumor that quickly became conjecture in
(27:36):
both printed and television news, and it was this Amy's
death was due to a drug overdose. That one was
bolstered by a story told by a fifty six year
old London fixer, the kind of guy you went to
when the kind of people you were looking for weren't
simply listed in the white pages. And this story had legs.
(27:58):
Tony as her party said It was around eleven thirty
in the evening on Friday July, the day before Amy
was discovered dead. That was the last time he ever
saw her. He was walking past a pulp called the Eagle.
A taxicab rolled up, the window rolled down. Amy stuck
her head out. Tony has a party, knew people, so
(28:19):
of course he knew Amy Winehouse. Amy Winehouse knew that
Tony was the guy to get you what you were
looking for when you weren't exactly sure where to look
for it. Amy asked him to get in the cab.
She was looking to score, but Tony get the hook up.
Tony was a bit surprised. He thought she was off
of it. It was all over the papers how she
had kicked the stuff, not exactly, She told him she
(28:41):
still dabbled when she felt like it, and tonight she
most definitely felt like it. Tonight she had been fielding
phone calls from Blake from prison where he was currently
doing time for the whole fake gun burglary bullshit. It
was fucking annoying, straight up harassment was what it was.
So yeah, not exactly off of it, And there were
nights to dabble in. Tonight was sure ship one of them, right.
(29:06):
Tony could call this guy no sweat, Mr Big was
what they referred to him. As they drove to a
telephone box. When Tony stepped inside, it was like he
was stepping inside of a time machine or whatever the hell.
That doctor who thing was called Tony made the phone call.
Amy awaited impatiently in the cab. Soon after a car
(29:26):
pulled up, dealer stepped out. Amy handed over a lot
of bills pounds by Tony's count, and the dealer handed
or some crack and some heroin. Afterwards, Amy had the
cab dropped Tony off in the nearby Archwaye neighborhood of
North London. She gave him a kiss on the cheek,
on his way out the door. I want Amy's family
(29:47):
to know the truth about what happened, Tony said only
days later, when his story hit the press. I want
to help them out. Tony's story seemed credible, not only
due to Amy's history of drug use and re apps,
but because by telling it to the press and the police,
he faced retaliation from the dealer who came through with
the hook up that night he came Mr Big and
(30:09):
another anonymous source seem to back up the overdose theory.
This source told The Mirror that Amy's boyfriend reg Travis,
had discovered that Amy had been talking with Blake again
from his prison cell and the night before her death,
it led to a fight, which led to Redd storming
out of the house, which led to Amy shooting a
lethal dose of heroin. It was all very reminiscent of
(30:30):
the story Amy had told the years earlier about the
self harm she didn't flicted on herself after Blake allegedly
caught her with a call girl in their hotel room
about to get high together. But Tony has her party's story,
and the story told by the source and The Mirror
both bluntly contradicted the version of events told by Andrew Morris,
the bodyguard who lived in Amy's house and listened to
(30:51):
her talk, laugh and played drums into the wee hours
of Saturday morning. That version of events didn't involve fights
with her boyfriend or drug scoring odyssees. After midnight, further
contradiction came in the form of the toxicology report, and
that was scientific contradiction. The report showed that there were
no illegal substances in Amy's system when she died. Not
(31:15):
the narrative that the tabloids had pedaled for so long
didn't come to its expected conclusion. No crack pipes, no needles.
Some were shocked when the truth came out about Amy
Winehouse's death, while others found it sadly inevitable. But one
thing was for certain. The conclusion of Amy's twenty seven
years story wasn't as simple and tidy as you may think.
(31:39):
In some ways, it's not even over. M Jake Brennan
and this is the seven o'clock and the Club is
(32:00):
hosted and produced by me Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
in partnership with My Heart Radio. Zeth Lundie is the
lead writer and co producer, and the story and copy
ding by Pat Heally. This episode was mixed by Matt Boby.
Additional music and score elements by Ryan Spraker and Henry Luneta.
Sources for this episode are available at Double Elvis dot
(32:22):
com on the twenty seven Club series page, talk to
me on Social Act, disgrace Land Pod, and hang out
with me live on my Twitch channel disgrace Land Talks.
For more news on your favorite podcast, follow at Double
Elvis on Instagram, rock rolla what up here is
Hey, what's up, everybody. Jake Brennan here. I hope you've
been enjoying these stories about Amy Winehouse in season four
of Seven Club. While you're digging into the downfall of
one of the greatest modern divas, I wanted to share
a story about another queen of the pop realm, Taylor Swift.
You can hear all about Taylor's disgraceful fans and Interstate
Stockers in the season nine premiere of disgrace Land, my
(00:22):
other music and true crime podcast. You can hear that
episode on January eighth wherever you listen to podcasts, or
you can hear it along with every single other disgrace
Land episode right now exclusively at Amazon dot Com slash
disgrace Land. The Seven Club is a production of I
(00:42):
Heart Radio and Double Elvis. Amy Winehouse died at the
age of seven, and she lived a life that was
quickly running out of time. I can give you twenty
seven reasons why that statement is true. Eleven would be
the date in July of nine teen fifty one when
one of her musical heroes was briefly jailed for being
(01:04):
in the wrong place at the wrong time. Five more
would be the number of years have passed since the
release of her career making second album, five long years
during which she never delivered a follow up. Another two
would be the number of years her ex husband, Blake
Fielder Civil would receive when he was sentenced for stealing
(01:24):
four thousand pounds worth of someone else's stuff to support
his drug habit. Seven more would be the hour of
the evening when Amy sent what would be her final tweet,
a nebulous missive that got the Internet in the world talking.
And two would be the hour of the morning on Saturday,
July eleven, when her living bodyguard unsuspectingly saw her alive
(01:49):
for the last time, all totally on this our ninth
episode of season four, the wrong place, at the wrong time,
four thousand pounds of someone else's stuff, getting the world
talking in Amy Winehouse, I'm Jake Brennan and this is
(02:10):
the twenty seven cars. Sara Van held the sheet music
(02:57):
in her hand and felt her heart sink. The song
was Ship, probably taken from the top of a whole
pile of ship songs, songs that Columbia Records owned outright
and therefore could easily parlay into easy money. Frank Sinatra
wasn't demeaned with ship songs from this throwaway pile. No
(03:19):
one at Columbia was forcing Frank to slum it with
a song like the gas Pipe She's Leaking Joe, And
just look at that stupid goddamn title, the gas Pipe
She's Leaking Joe, condescending as hell offensive. Even more offensive
was that Columbia wanted her, Sara Van, a black woman,
to sing a song that essentially lampooned black culture. And
(03:42):
don't even get her started with the cheesy whitewash Calypso arrangement.
The whole thing was a cluster. You know what would
happen if Columbia a and R man Mitch Miller told
Frank Sinatra to sing something like that, a song that
parodied Italians, the opposite of More for starters. Fork would
either tear Mitch new asshole in front of the entire orchestra,
(04:03):
or he just bounce leave Gaunsville. Baby. Sara Van didn't
now the luxuries that Frank Sinatra had. Rosemary Clooney didn't either,
but Rosemary always did what Mitch Miller told her to do.
She didn't put up a fight. Sara Van, on the
other hand, not so much. She knew that she was
(04:24):
above the material. She had a four octave range, never
got horse, never ran short of breath on stage. Hell,
she could have been an opera singer. And yet Sarah
Van was also smart enough to know that she had
to get creative when it came to putting up a fight.
If she refused to perform the material, Mitch Miller would
gladly fire her on the spot and find someone else
(04:47):
to replace her. Fine, Mitch Miller could make her sing
the song, but that didn't mean he could make her
sing the song well. So for the gas pipe, She's
leaking Joe, Sarah did one take decent at best on purpose.
She took the session about us seriously. She took the
song which was zero percent, and there was no passion
(05:09):
in the performance, no nuance, just the right notes in
the right places, and honestly, a dilettante like Mitch Miller
probably didn't even notice the difference. She claimed it as
a little victory in a larger battle. She also bristled
at those on the other end of the spectrum, the
jazz purists who expected her to sing a particular way.
(05:30):
She didn't mind it when they called her by one
of her nicknames like Sassy or the Divine One, but
don't call her a jazz singer, That just pigeonholder. She
loved jazz, no doubt. She lived it, breathe it. She
was the vocal equivalent of birds or disease horn. But
she wanted her instrument to be free, not beholden to
one genre or style or expectation. Inmates at a Detroit
(05:53):
prison and heard that trademark sound of freedom on the
evening of July eleven, when they were unexpectedly treated to
Sarah's voice ringing from cell to sell all through the night.
She had been nabbed as part of a police raid
at a private home that doubled as an after hours club.
Detroit cops smell of the potential violation of the state's
(06:14):
liquor law. Thankfully they didn't smell the reefer. They busted windows,
they broke the door down, They took Sassy's prints, and
held her for nearly twelve hours, but they didn't have
anything on Sarah Vant. Just like a grand jury in Washington,
d C. Didn't have anything on Sarah Van. The next
year in Charles, Ireland and the United States Attorney General
(06:37):
wanted to know what happened in pounds of reefer that
literally disappeared during a drug bust. That was a fun
ton of drugs up in smoke, And Sarah was one
of a handful of musicians who were suspected of having
intimate knowledge of the whereabouts of the missing marijuana, and
they asked her to testify, but she had no clue,
and even if she did, she wasn't telling. She did
(06:58):
tell her attorney about the things she was really concerned about,
and it wasn't Pettie buss By the fuzz at private
house parties. It was a thing with Columbia. Sarga tossed
all these ship songs, even though she was of the
same caliber as a label so called top artists, all
of whom happened to be White, Doris Day, Joe Stafford,
Danny Fucking Kay and Frank. And despite the fact that
(07:21):
she was artistically and commercially up on that top shelf
with her label MATS, Sarah didn't get the same top
shelf material or the same top shelf promotional schedule, and
her attorney agreed and they filed a letter of complaint
with Columbia. She was one of the record labels top artists,
and she demanded to be treated as such. Columbia's lawyers
advised the label to see the error of their ways,
(07:43):
and soon they made sure Sarah got top billing. Soon
after that her fight not just fought, but one. Sara
Van made an unexpected move. She bailed from Columbia to
go to do her thing, first at Mercury Records, and
then at Roulette Records and elsewhere. She made moves like
a star because she was a star. She knew her worth.
(08:04):
The labels didn't tell her what she was worth. She
told them. She refused to be defined by the name
of the label on her records or by the material
she was given to perform. Decades later, more than ten
years after Sara Vant's death, Amy Winehouse made her own moves.
She resisted definitions. She performed the material she wanted to perform,
(08:27):
much of it written by herself, and it didn't matter
if it was sanitized for radio. Didn't matter if the
song was titled Funck Me Pumps, or if the song
was told from the perspective of an anti hero who
resisted the call to go to rehab. Amy Winehouse modeled
herself after her musical heroes, heroes like Sarah Van, not
(08:48):
only in the way she sang, but in the way
she did things her way. Most twentysomethings Amy's age had
no clue who Sara Van was. Maybe they knew Ella
or Billy's name, but not Sarah's. Didn't matter. Sara was
always in fashion. Amy knew that in her music and
her attitude where a guide post for Amy along the way,
(09:10):
Because maybe her generation didn't know who Saravan was, but
they were definitely going to know who Amy Winos was
and they were never going to forget her. Honestly, at
this point in summer of two thousand eleven, her career
could tank and she would still remain one of the greats,
or so she hoped. But Amy's confidence was at an
(09:30):
all time low. It had been five years since Back
to Black, and although she talked a big game about
her upcoming third album, the reality was that nothing was happening.
She had already done the hard part. She had made
her Saravant Stand, that defiant stand where she decided what
material she would produce and how it would be produced.
(09:52):
The floor, as it were, was hers. But now you
couldn't even see the floor in the studio and the
lights were dimmed. The tape was blank, the songs weren't ready.
Her focus was off, her game was off, and it
was clearly time to reclaim her life in her career
before she was made immortal for all the wrong reasons.
(10:36):
Amy Winehouse was trying to decide what to wear. She
and her boyfriend, the English film director REDG Travis, We're
due to attend a wedding on Sunday, two days away.
It was leven. Amy and Redge had managed to patch
things up since pictures of Redge hand in hand with
his ex girlfriend have been splashed all over the tabloids.
(10:59):
Regge's new cry of films, Screwed, had been in theaters
for a month then. So far the reviews weren't much
better than Psychosis, the horror film he directed the year before.
But even if his films didn't achieve the kind of
critical acclaim he hoped for. As the romantic partner of
England's most notorious singer, redd received time marks. He had
his ship together, unlike Amy's x Blake Fielder civil who
(11:22):
continued to fall apart on an absurdly regular basis. Only
a month earlier, Blake was sentenced to two years and
eight months in jail, this time for a burglary he'd
committed in order to scrounge up bread for junk. He
was carrying a gun when he did it, too, and
never mind the fact that the gun wasn't loaded, it
wasn't even real. And Blake and his accomplice, Christopher Silvester,
(11:44):
broke into a house in Rotten, a suburb of Leeds,
turned the place inside out, and they carried a hammer,
some tape, ski masks, and gloves. The fake gun was
to make Blake feel about seven stone larger in case
he encountered some real fucking colums. And the duo pulled
roars from cabinets, They empty cupboards, They turned over tables
and stuck their fingers and every nook and cranny, and
(12:05):
they got away with jewelry. They hauled out a television,
Xbox DVD player. All told, the duel was busted with
four thousand pounds worth of someone else's stuff when they
were pulled over by local police. The cops also found
Blake's gun, which turned out to be fake. At least
they couldn't get him on a legal possession of a
firearm and to thank Jimmy thought I was married to
(12:28):
that one marriage. The weight of that union hungover Amy's
head as she thought about the weekend wedding that she
was attending. Her marriage to Blake had been an A
plus disaster from the start. Even though they had been
divorced for two years and Blake had a new flame
with a baby on the way, Amy couldn't shake the
notion that he had been her soul mate. She couldn't
(12:49):
explain it. How did you explain an attraction to the
person who had tragged you down so far that was
beyond opposites attracting, especially now when she was involved a
relationship that was every bit as healthy as her time
with Blake had been toxic. The fact that Blake's name
was still tattooed directly above her heart likely didn't give
(13:09):
Red Travis the warmest of fuzzy feelings. Amy was just
glad that it wasn't her own wedding she was getting
ready to attend. The only thing she had to concern
herself with this particular weekend was what to wear, and
she wanted to wear what she wanted to wear, not
what someone else wanted her to wear. She was over
being pressured by others into doing things for them, like
(13:32):
the show in Serbia. Amy heard the rumors that followed
the show, the ones that a tour manager or a
bodyguard or even someone in her family had literally pushed
her onto the stage in Serbia forcibly made her perform
when she clearly was not in the right state to
even be around that many people, let alone sing for them.
But it wasn't like that. She hadn't been strong armed
(13:54):
to sing, not physically at least, she probably wouldn't have
gone through that if it had been her to sit,
or if she hadn't been so fucked up that she
couldn't make her own decisions. To be honest, given the
option of back to back shows in front of crowds
of thousands or a simpler fate of frequenting pubs in
Camden Town, it's just another face, a face that would
(14:15):
have go out a tune on a tiny stage every
now and then. Jamie Wins would have chosen the ladder.
She didn't need all of this, all this pomp, all
this circumstance, oceans of people, nor does she need every
single action she took in every single decision she made,
picked apart by the world, as if her life was
nothing more than fodder for nine to five ors congregating
(14:35):
around water coolers. Then, of course, the show in Serbia
led to more questions. Was she well? Was she high?
Should she really continue on with her tour? Was this
all indicative of a larger problem, a problem with her
manager or perhaps even her label Island Records. Did anyone
close to Amy actually care for her? Oh? She just
being used to make a quick bucket every turn. She
(14:57):
was done with questions. She we have had some answers,
but she was just as tired of replying to the
questions as she was of the questions themselves. And she
was tired, tired, physically exhausted. She picked out a dress,
just pointed at one in the rack. Seconds after she
pointed at it, she couldn't even remember what it looked
like anymore. She took a swig from a glass, and
(15:20):
then she logged onto Twitter. She stared at the prompt
on the screen, what's happening? Good question, Twitter? What was happening?
She took another swig. Fuck it was late. She typed oinca, oinca,
oinca while you awake, and then click the tweet button.
Why was she awake? What time was it really and
(15:42):
where was redg It? Replies to her tweet started coming
in fast and furious. She knew they would, and that
trademark was a notification. Sound another and another, each whistle,
stumbling over the last and then being cut off by
the next. People wanted to know what it meant. Oint
up oink up at an inside joke? Was she speaking
in code to someone? Was she talking to herself? Was
(16:05):
she once again beyond funked up? This was online gibberish
from a fucked up mind, Jamie laughed. All she had
to do was write some stupid phrase online and they
all devoured it. Some bullshit news site. Maybe even Perez
Hilton was probably already making clickbade out of this tweet
right now. If they could only see her now at
(16:26):
home doing funk all. She wasn't endlessly fascinating like they
all thought. Being endlessly fascinating was nice and all, And
that is until you were the one they were all
endlessly fascinated with. The Next Saturday, July eleven, Amy continued
to shrink away from doing anything a superstar would do.
(16:47):
It was a wonderfully prosaic day. She met her mom,
Janice for a lunch, and they took their time, and
there were no paparazzi on site to shove camera lenses
in her face, which, of cour respect the question that
was being asked around this time. If Amy Winos did
something and the paparazzi wasn't there to document it, had
she actually done something? She returned to her home on
(17:10):
Camden Square. She hadn't hallucinated tiny mice for days. She
was no longer afraid to look into mirrors for fear
that a figure would emerge from them. She was beginning
to embrace a feeling of being quite simply normal, or
something like it. At least the semi detached Victorian she
was living in wasn't exactly normal. It's set her back
(17:31):
two point five million pounds when she bought it in
two thousand nine. She had only recently moved in, seeing
as she sank another two d thou pounds into it
to build a gym in a recording studio on site.
And the doctor who showed up that night for what
was essentially a glorified proof of life check, maybe that
wasn't so normal either. Dr Christina Romata was there at
(17:53):
the behest of Island records sent weekly to make sure
Emy's health was on the open up. Dr Roome toy
knew that Amy wasn't about to follow anyone's advice or
instructions but her own. No offense stock. But Amy did
things her way, and no, not like Frank Sinatra, but
like Tony Bennett and Saravana. Damie told Dr Romatay, she
(18:14):
was born and that's why she was drinking. She would
stop drinking for a few weeks until the boredom get
the best of her, and then she'd start again. She
wasn't sure if delibrium was helping. She took it for
alcohol withdrawal and anxiety. If only librium cured boredom. Drinking
past the time, and there was a lot of time
to pass, so much time. Time didn't feel finite. It
(18:37):
felt like it just went on forever, that it would
never end, and sun days and some nights Jesus, time
just board the ship out of you. Time used to
be more fun back when she could pass the time
with a crack rock or some junk. That ship you're
floating in time, the whole space, time continuum itself. Whatever
(18:57):
the funk that was black holes that went on wherever
you weren't a body. You didn't have a brain, you know,
the very concept of time was a non concept. But
she was clean now and there was none of that
jump to fuck with time. She kept drinking. She wanted
time to feel finite. She wanted to be able to
measure it, to look at it from one end to
(19:18):
the other, the dawn of time to the end of time,
and really hold its measurement in her hands. She looked
at her hands, no time, just skin and knuckle wrinkles
and the fingerprints on her digits. She took another drink
and her eyes went a little glassy dr romance. He
asked Amy if she was planning on not drinking at
some point that evening. Was she stopped once the doctor left.
(19:42):
Amy said she didn't know. But she didn't know. She
just wasn't answering questions anymore. We'll be right back after
this word word word. Amy Winehouse slept in late. That
(20:03):
was standard operating procedure, completely ordinary, especially when she'd been
up late the night before, which she had been. Andrew Morris,
Amy's living bodyguard, knew exactly how late. He listened to
her for hours, hold up inside her bedroom well after
dr Christina Romatay had left earlier that evening, Andrew listened
(20:24):
from elsewhere in the Camden Square house as Amy watched television, laughed,
spoke loudly to friends on the phone. Even louder was
her new drum set, which she was inspired to play
in the wee hours of the morning. Drums were something new,
scratched or creative itch, maybe even more than singing at
this moment, or maybe it depended on the moment, And
(20:47):
a few times she played the drums in front of
a crowd weren't what she expected. It was like when
you try to play a brand new song in front
of a huge festival crowd and they all wanted to
hear the same old hits. The small pub crowd didn't
want to hear Amy said, tempt to coax out a
reggae or a dub rhythm on a kid. She was
a singer, not a drummer. The audience couched their disapproval
(21:07):
and drunken requests sing Amy, Sing, Sing rehab Amy. She
was no one hit wonder, But nevertheless the truth remained.
She was that song, and that song was her. It
continued to define as she was five years after its
release A tragic caricature. Amy worried that she needed to
(21:30):
come to terms with the possibility that she would never
escape that role for as long as she lived. Now
at home in Camden Town, Andrew Morris was the one worrying.
He was concerned that Amy's late at night drumming would
disturb the neighbors reminded her to keep it down. The
last time Andrew spoke to Amy before he hit the
(21:52):
sack was around two in the morning. She had her
laptop out. She was watching clips of herself performing online
and she glanced up at and true, boy, I can sing,
she said, in a rare, unguarded moment of confidence. Damn right,
you can sing. Andrew responded, and then she made a confession.
She would gladly give it all up, every last bit
(22:12):
of it. The Grammy Awards, the brit Awards, the Avenuvello Awards,
the v M A moon Man, the duet with Tony Bennett,
her POSH Camden Address, the money, every last quid if
it meant that she could go back back seven eight
years or so even earlier, back to a time when
she could walk down the street, any street, any street
in London at all and not be mobbed. Back to
(22:33):
a time when her name wasn't easily found in any
given paper, or when unflattering and unsuspecting photos of her
werener mainstay on TMC or Cocker before she had to
get used to being demeaned with the nickname why No,
and then she was being honest with herself. That would
also be back to a time before she ever laid
eyes on Blake Field her civil but maybe even that
couldn't have been avoided. Whether her path in life had
(22:55):
led her to worldwide celebrity status or not. She wondered
if she would have met Blake regard this as if
it was fading. Just because things were meant to be
did not mean that they were meant to be perfect.
There were plenty of things in this life that were
meant to be doomed, like the jazz hip hop supergroups
she wanted to assemble, Request Love on the drums, Raphael's
(23:15):
Sadiq on Base, most deaf joining her own vocals. They
couldn't seem to get that project off the ground ship.
Maybe it wasn't even on the ground yet. Amy had
trouble remembering if she had legit talked with those guys
about it, or if it was just some fantastical notion
that lived inside her brain and some days okay, or
more like most days, her looming third album felt like
(23:37):
even more of an illusion than the supergroup Idea ever
did her long awaited follow up to Back to Black.
The pressure was at times unbearable, not just to deliver something,
but to deliver something on the level of the last record.
It had to be better than great. Maybe it would
never happen. She had written some songs, so a dozen
or so. She had to live her songs before she
(23:59):
wrote them. Everyone knew that Salam Remy knew that she
didn't write that ship overnight. She was keeping the songs
close guarded. It would be like letting people read her
diary if she started sharing them everywhere. Titles like You
Always Hurt the Ones You Love made that clear. You know,
as soon as I wanted the year ways people all
over London, We're going to say how it was all
about them. Then she remember that she had booked some
(24:20):
upcoming studio time, both with Salam and with Mark Ronson.
That gave her hope. Maybe she would figure out this
third album predicament. After all, Andrew let Amy try to
get some sleep. He had returned from vacation only a
few days earlier, but in the time following his return,
as he would later explain, he was well aware that
(24:42):
she was drinking on the regular. He could tell by
the way her words sounded when she spoke. But he
didn't see Amy over drink. She appeared to have drinks
for the pleasure of having drinks, not to maintain a
seven drunk buzz. He didn't see her binge. Nothing was
out of the ordinary, nothing seemed wrong. Still, Andrew's job
(25:03):
was to keep tabs on amy winos at all times
of the day, no matter how ordinary things appeared. So
around ten am the following morning, Saturday, July eleven, Andrew
quietly made his way to Amy's bedroom. The house was quiet.
He found Amy lying in bed, out cold, sleeping. It
(25:24):
off completely ordinary standard operating procedure. Andrew closed the door
as quietly as he had opened it, and then Amy
continued to rest. He passed the time and turned on
the news. A car bombing and then seventy seven people
killed on an island in Norway. They were saying it
was a terrorist attack. The news fucking sucked. He switched
(25:46):
the set off time didn't stretch that day. The hours
went by quickly, and before long it was the afternoon,
after three pm. Actually, Andrew still hadn't heard Amy make
any noise. Probably time to check on her again. He
went back to her bedroom and opened the door. She
was still there, how cold, sleeping it off wellly. Amy
(26:10):
was still in the exact same position that she had
been in earlier in the morning. When Andrew checked on her,
Who's eerie like he was looking at a carbon copy
image five hours later, Amy's arms and legs and the
exact same spots as they were before. Absolutely nothing had changed. Fuck.
(26:31):
Andrew ran to her side. She wasn't breathing. Fuck, no pulse.
She was out cold still. Two Voca bottles around the
floor next to the bed. They were empty. Andrew grabbed
his phone and dialed emergency services, and when he got
through the dispatch, he couldn't believe the words coming out
of his mouth. Amy Winehouse was dead. On the evening
(27:16):
of July eleven, the news traveled fast, and so did
the rumors. Rumors that Amy Winehouse had taken her own life,
Rumors that the stale rock and roll adage hope I
die before I get old was very much alive and well.
There was also a rumor that quickly became conjecture in
(27:36):
both printed and television news, and it was this Amy's
death was due to a drug overdose. That one was
bolstered by a story told by a fifty six year
old London fixer, the kind of guy you went to
when the kind of people you were looking for weren't
simply listed in the white pages. And this story had legs.
(27:58):
Tony as her party said It was around eleven thirty
in the evening on Friday July, the day before Amy
was discovered dead. That was the last time he ever
saw her. He was walking past a pulp called the Eagle.
A taxicab rolled up, the window rolled down. Amy stuck
her head out. Tony has a party, knew people, so
(28:19):
of course he knew Amy Winehouse. Amy Winehouse knew that
Tony was the guy to get you what you were
looking for when you weren't exactly sure where to look
for it. Amy asked him to get in the cab.
She was looking to score, but Tony get the hook up.
Tony was a bit surprised. He thought she was off
of it. It was all over the papers how she
had kicked the stuff, not exactly, She told him she
(28:41):
still dabbled when she felt like it, and tonight she
most definitely felt like it. Tonight she had been fielding
phone calls from Blake from prison where he was currently
doing time for the whole fake gun burglary bullshit. It
was fucking annoying, straight up harassment was what it was.
So yeah, not exactly off of it, And there were
nights to dabble in. Tonight was sure ship one of them, right.
(29:06):
Tony could call this guy no sweat, Mr Big was
what they referred to him. As they drove to a
telephone box. When Tony stepped inside, it was like he
was stepping inside of a time machine or whatever the hell.
That doctor who thing was called Tony made the phone call.
Amy awaited impatiently in the cab. Soon after a car
(29:26):
pulled up, dealer stepped out. Amy handed over a lot
of bills pounds by Tony's count, and the dealer handed
or some crack and some heroin. Afterwards, Amy had the
cab dropped Tony off in the nearby Archwaye neighborhood of
North London. She gave him a kiss on the cheek,
on his way out the door. I want Amy's family
(29:47):
to know the truth about what happened, Tony said only
days later, when his story hit the press. I want
to help them out. Tony's story seemed credible, not only
due to Amy's history of drug use and re apps,
but because by telling it to the press and the police,
he faced retaliation from the dealer who came through with
the hook up that night he came Mr Big and
(30:09):
another anonymous source seem to back up the overdose theory.
This source told The Mirror that Amy's boyfriend reg Travis,
had discovered that Amy had been talking with Blake again
from his prison cell and the night before her death,
it led to a fight, which led to Redd storming
out of the house, which led to Amy shooting a
lethal dose of heroin. It was all very reminiscent of
(30:30):
the story Amy had told the years earlier about the
self harm she didn't flicted on herself after Blake allegedly
caught her with a call girl in their hotel room
about to get high together. But Tony has her party's story,
and the story told by the source and The Mirror
both bluntly contradicted the version of events told by Andrew Morris,
the bodyguard who lived in Amy's house and listened to
(30:51):
her talk, laugh and played drums into the wee hours
of Saturday morning. That version of events didn't involve fights
with her boyfriend or drug scoring odyssees. After midnight, further
contradiction came in the form of the toxicology report, and
that was scientific contradiction. The report showed that there were
no illegal substances in Amy's system when she died. Not
(31:15):
the narrative that the tabloids had pedaled for so long
didn't come to its expected conclusion. No crack pipes, no needles.
Some were shocked when the truth came out about Amy
Winehouse's death, while others found it sadly inevitable. But one
thing was for certain. The conclusion of Amy's twenty seven
years story wasn't as simple and tidy as you may think.
(31:39):
In some ways, it's not even over. M Jake Brennan
and this is the seven o'clock and the Club is
(32:00):
hosted and produced by me Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
in partnership with My Heart Radio. Zeth Lundie is the
lead writer and co producer, and the story and copy
ding by Pat Heally. This episode was mixed by Matt Boby.
Additional music and score elements by Ryan Spraker and Henry Luneta.
Sources for this episode are available at Double Elvis dot
(32:22):
com on the twenty seven Club series page, talk to
me on Social Act, disgrace Land Pod, and hang out
with me live on my Twitch channel disgrace Land Talks.
For more news on your favorite podcast, follow at Double
Elvis on Instagram, rock rolla what up here is
Host
Jake Brennan
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