Winehouse started making headlines for all the wrong reasons. She just decided, ‘Well, if that’s the thing that’s stopping me from being with him then I’m gonna do it.’ She never saw it as a big deal.” “She made the decision to take it herself,” James writes in My Amy. Post continues below.įielder-Civil introduced Winehouse to heroin. Listen to Mamamia's daily entertainment podcast, The Spill.
"I had never felt the way I feel about him about anyone in my life," Winehouse told Rolling Stone. She fell madly in love, tattooing his name on her chest. He was a music video assistant and drug addict. In 2005, Winehouse met Blake Fielder-Civil at a bar. What I saw was basically anorexia, the OXO cube/Haribo diet.”
“The media called her ‘curvy’,” he writes. Her childhood friend Tyler James says in his book My Amy that she struggled with some of the stories about her. She had just turned 20 when her debut album Frank was released. Winehouse scored a record deal when she was still in her teens, and moved into her own flat. “I obviously did not think that deeply of it. I eat what I want and then I just bring it all up,’” her mum says in the documentary Amy. “When she was probably 15, she one day said, ‘I’ve got this really great diet, Mum. Her mum remembers the time she told her about it. Self-conscious about her appearance, she became bulimic. What does it feel like? ‘Ow, that f*****g hurts.’”Īt the age of 14, she started on antidepressants, and around the same time, bought a guitar and started writing songs. “It’s a funny thing, a morbid curiosity,” she told Q magazine. Her talent shone through at an early age, but so did her mental health issues.
Growing up in London, her taxi driver dad Mitch split from her mum Janis when she was nine, after a long-running affair with a co-worker. At the time of her death, the outrageously talented singer hadn’t touched drugs in three years. She was my best friend.But the truth was sadder and more complicated. James, who described himself as “the only friend had left by then,” went on to note that he still has not recovered from the grief that came with her death. The “Rehab” singer (seen here in 2007) died in 2010 from alcohol poisoning. “It was like a film premiere out there,” the “ My Amy: The Life We Shared” author recalled to London’s Times on Friday of the media circus outside his and Winehouse’s home after the news of her death broke. She was only 27 years old, and the cause of death was determined to be alcohol poisoning. Winehouse had been found dead in her bed.
Once James returned to their home, he saw an ambulance parked outside and a paramedic in the hallway. James met Winehouse (seen here in 2008) when he was 13. “I had a massive argument with her because there were letters from the doctor saying if she drank any more, she’d die,” he said, noting that the “Rehab” singer “didn’t touch drugs,” only alcohol, during the “last three years” of her life. Amy Winehouse’s best friend, Tyler James, looked back on the final days of the singer’s life.
When James left one day in July 2010, however, he had no idea that he would never see Winehouse alive again. So I’d leave, and within two or three days, she would say, ‘Tyler, come home,’ and I would come back,” he said on the UK’s “This Morning” on Wednesday. “Whenever she relapsed, I’d leave because I was worried she would think I was supporting that. Tyler James, who met Winehouse when he was 13, said in a new interview that he would get so fed up with the Grammy winner’s drinking that he would regularly storm out of the London home they shared in the final years of her life. Amy Winehouse’s best friend recalled having a “massive argument” with the talented but troubled singer just days before her untimely death nearly 10 years ago.