How Amy Winehouse’s Friends Are Reclaiming Her Legacy

When most people think of Amy Winehouse, the things that first come to mind are often negative. Alcohol, drugs, fraught relationships; essentially a mental collage of tabloid images in which she exists more as a spectacle than an artist, or even a person. In the long shadow of tragedy, the Amy who defined all convention; who became the first British woman to win five Grammys; who was generous, quick-witted, unbelievably talented, sometimes difficult and deeply loved, is often an afterthought.

This is a scale that Beyond Black – a new book celebrating Amy’s life and cultural impact – intends to tip. Curated by her stylist and close friend Naomi Parry, Beyond Black pulls together photography, writing, memorabilia and recollections from those who knew her best, including her close friend Catriona Gourlay, whose essay “Knowing Amy” is the emotional centrepiece of the book. In focusing on the positive story, counters the darker narrative that has come to dominate Amy’s legacy.

Naomi kindly asked me to write the introduction to Beyond Black, which, alongside the recent BBC documentary, Reclaiming Amy, sees many of Amy’s friends and family speaking publicly for the first time.

Here, I catch up with Naomi and Cat to discuss the reasons behind their decision to speak publicly, being the Three Queens of Camden in the 00s, and the small colony of feral kittens that, for some reason, lived with Amy.

VICE: Beyond Black and Reclaiming Amy are the first times either of you has spoken publicly about Amy. I was wondering if you could start by talking a bit about the decision to start sharing the Amy that you know? 

Naomi Parry: Right after Amy died, we agreed that we wouldn’t talk publicly about her. So many people around the time of the funeral wanted to jump in front of the camera or go on Lorraine or whatever, and we were just like, “no way, that doesn’t feel right”. So we already had this little pact between us. But I just got so fed up with the narrative and the way that she’d been portrayed. I didn’t have any intention of talking personally, ever, but because her narrative had been completely hijacked I felt I kind of had to. 

Catriona Gourlay: There was so much Amy noise, and most of it was pure bollocks or hot air from people who were trying to acquire some sort of status, or they were a signed artist – there was always something behind it. It got to the point where our silence was contributing to that, because we weren’t correcting anything.

Parry: One of the things that Cat said after we turned down [Asif Kapadia’s] Amy documentary was that we can’t be annoyed at anyone for getting the narrative wrong if we weren’t there to counter it. So that’s how all of this stuff came about: through getting really pissed off with how people were talking about Amy. The book was something I’d always wanted to do, but you can’t really tell somebody’s story from one perspective. It wouldn’t have done her justice. I wanted to do something that celebrated Amy, that was also honest and kept the focus on her.

Gourlay: I think it gives people an opportunity to see different facets of Amy’s personality, which was something Naomi and I discussed at length before filming for Reclaiming Amy. Everyone knows the top-line information, so what were those other elements of her personality and her life that people didn’t know?

Parry: There was so much more to her, and so much that she achieved in such a short space of time. When somebody dies normally you talk about all the positive things – you reminisce about how great they were, how funny they were. You don’t constantly talk about all of the negative stuff – and that’s all it’s been for ten years. You get the occasional article that celebrates her as a style icon or a music legend, but they’re few and far between. 

Gourlay: A lot of her early career in particular gets lost. She won an Ivor Novello. She was winning awards as a songwriter, and she was a very different kind of artist for that time. She did some phenomenal early performances, but when people show clips of her it’s usually from when she had a really rough tour, or was off the rails. They don’t often show really knockout vocal performances, which I think is a shame. 

Parry: There were lots of people that were really important to Amy who hadn’t really had a voice, or hadn’t wanted to speak, but really wanted to celebrate her. I thought it was important to get all of those people involved, hence why Cat is the main contributor and I got her on board first of all. It was about gathering up all of those positive things that people have ever said about Amy. Whether it was a review, a passing comment in an interview with an artist, beautiful photographs – none of the tabloid stuff, all the people that she loved right back from the early days before she was super famous, as well as the people that she inspired. I wanted to get all that into one place so this book really felt full of love and appreciation.

This project kicked off with an exhibition of Amy’s clothes at the GRAMMY Museum, also called Beyond Black. That celebration of her style also makes its way into the book, but her clothes and accessories are presented very differently. There’s a lot still life photographs surrounded by her belongings – a Leonard Cohen songbook, a vintage magazine, a collection of CDs. Could you talk a bit about the ethos behind those photoshoots? 

Parry: The clothes themselves aren’t the most exciting thing. It’s not like you’re looking at an Alexander McQueen piece where there’s a lot of beautiful intricate detail – they’re really simple dresses and really simple shapes. The most interesting ones are where maybe Amy’s hacked off the bottom and it’s frayed, or we spilled ink over something, or there’s a lipstick stain. What really made those items special was Amy. So, how do you breathe life into a piece of clothing without having somebody there? 

I didn’t want to put them on models, because that would be really distasteful, so I came up with the idea of shooting them on sets. We got as much of her actual stuff in there as possible. I wanted them to have a nod to her personality and her stylistic influences, the mixture of the contemporary and the retro, as well as some of her film influences, which we framed and put on the walls. I also wanted them to look a bit like her house at Jeffrey’s Place [in Camden], because it had a real hodgepodge of furniture. Some of it was vintage, some of it was just a bit shit, but there was this huge mixture of stuff. Loads of kitsch bits, stuff all over the walls, a bra hanging off a door handle. We wanted to make the sets feel like Amy had just walked out of the room. 

Gourlay: The first thing I said when I saw the images was “oh my god, it looks like Jeffrey’s Place!” [Naomi] hadn’t told me that that’s what it was meant to look like, but that was the first thing I thought. I guess that’s the place that we all feel the most affinity with Amy. It was the flat she brought with her first advance from Island Records, and I lived there as well. It’s where we were happiest. 

Parry: While we had a loose plan, we didn’t know exactly how these images were going to turn out  – which was kind of my approach to styling, Amy, really. I never get a moment to do a fitting with her because she was always busy, so I’d just bring a load of stuff and we’d make it work on the day. She was pretty messy and I wanted to emulate that in the shots. I can’t even imagine what the fucking house looked like when her and Cat lived together! 

Gourlay: It was chaos. We had one drawer for anything important. It had all her song lyrics and ideas she wanted to come back to on those yellow legal pad notes and torn up bits of journals. Also stuff to do with the cats’ vet bills, but they all got confiscated in the end…

Parry: There was one night where Amy turned up at my house at 11PM with two kittens that apparently she’d stolen from Pete Doherty. Me and my boyfriend had just split up and I had our Rottweiler in the house, and I was like, “you can’t bring kittens in here, seriously, the dog will eat them” and she was like “it’s fine!” and ran upstairs and put them in the bathroom. I don’t know if they were the kittens that bred, but the next thing I knew she had like 11 kittens in her house that I was looking after when she was in and out of hospital. 

Gourlay: And they kept on multiplying. I remember waking up in her house on Prowse Place [in Camden], and all I could hear was meowing. There were cats walking around the gutters, cats in the curtains… It was not what you wanted before breakfast! It was like a feral inbred cat version of The Birds. In the end a team of us swept in and had them all neutered. 

Parry: Some of those cats are still alive!

Naomi, when you first asked me to be involved we talked a lot about the tabloid treatment of Amy in terms of how it skewed her narrative and impacted her mental health. As friends who were there at the time, how bad was it? 

Parry: When I first met Amy, Frank was out but no one really knew who she was. After the Brits in 2007, it just seemed to go wild, particularly with Blake [Fielder-Civil, Winehouse’s then-boyfriend] coming back onto the scene. Where Amy was living at the time there was a metre and a half between the front door – which was next to the bedroom – to the road. There would be eight paparazzi camped outside there every single day, as well as fans. I used to park my car in that metre and a half of space and they’d sit on the bonnet so that they were right outside her door. 

Gourlay: She was very adverse to the idea of having security for a long time, but people genuinely would try to give her a slap in the street just to say that they’d done it. Things had started escalating by the time You Know Who got arrested. We both moved into a complex in Hackney Wick and there wasn’t even a local shop. It was so secluded. The idea was that she’d be behind gates and going in and out by car, but even then it got to the point where we’d have to put shaving foam around the edge of the windows because [paparazzi] could get a reflective picture off the window frame. It was nuts. Our phones were tapped, and we found out that various red tops had installed photographers and reporters in our complex. There’s one picture of Amy in a bra and they said she was wandering the streets, but she wasn’t. She was coming from her flat on the ground floor, up one flight of stairs, to mine. I mean yes, she was wearing her bra, but we used to walk around in between our two flats in all sorts of states of undress, because we were just popping from one flat to another. She’d knock on my bedroom window and I’d slither out and go downstairs. 

Parry: The amount of times that I’ve gone out drunk or put on a ridiculous outfit to go to the shop to get some milk or whatever… You don’t have to think twice about it. But Amy couldn’t even go out and get the papers without the press being there. There’s no boundaries at all when somebody becomes that famous. It’s like they become public property and people think they can do whatever they want.

Gourlay: Everyone was looking for their fast buck. Yes, Amy could be a wee bit volatile – people would know when one thing could cause her to lash out, and they’d be like, “great, there’s some money”. The photographers would say awful stuff. We’d go out to dinner and they’d be like “are you ever gonna have another album out, Amy?” I think there’s some video footage of me saying to them “when’s your next fucking Grammy-award winning album out then? Anytime soon?!” Fuck off. I’d try not to do that, obviously, but it’s like… You’re a photographer sat out in the street praying on other people’s lives and misery, don’t tell someone else that they should be writing an album that’s going to win them a handful of Grammy’s, you vulture! It’s good that I’m not still annoyed about it though [laughs]. 

Obviously there were a lot of good times as well, and there was so much going on around East London at the time. What was it like being a group of mates in Camden in the 00s?

Gourlay: That’s an era that I look back on with rose-tinted glasses, even though it was horrific. We were all feral beasts! When me and Naomi and Amy were first hanging out, it was such a wild time. Everyone had club nights on. I’d be hosting Club NME on a Friday night and Naomi and Amy would get me ready, we’d go to Frog on a Saturday, and whenever a big band was in town we’d take them to our shitty pubs in Camden and have an absolute blast.

Parry: How did we get by? We never had any money but I swear we could do more stuff then than I can now.

Gourlay: I’ll tell you how: It’s because of those £4 cocktails that had seven shots in! I feel sick even thinking about those now. We’d have one going out drink and then blag our way through the night.

Parry: It was so much fun, before it got to the point where Amy couldn’t walk down the street without people recognising her. We used to go and play pool all the time. This probably sounds really wanky, but Camden was our playground. Cat knew everybody and had access to everything. It just felt like all the people, and all the bands that were around at that time, all knew each other. There was a real sense of community.

Gourlay: Do you think it’s the same now, and we’re just old?

Parry: I’m always gonna have a love for Camden, but they’ve got a Cath Kidston on the high street with a punk hanging around outside of it, you know? It’s just really odd. It’s still fun, I’m sure, but a lot of venues closed down and a lot of people moved on.

I think there’s a void where various “scenes” once were, for sure. Most people probably still associate it with Amy and The Libertines and that whole era.  

Parry: Camden is a place that transcends trends and there’s so many little subcultures, and Amy kind of represents all the misfits in London all wrapped up into one tiny little person with a beehive popped on her head. I remember meeting up with Tina Kalivas, who did the outfit that Amy wore to the Elle Style Awards, and Tina used to hang around in Camden quite a lot. She’s like an old rocker, and she said exactly that. She was like, “finally we felt like we had somebody that represented us”. And she wasn’t just big in the UK, she went fucking through the stratosphere. I think Amy is forever going to be the Queen of Camden. 

This week many people will be sitting down with the book for the first time. How do you think they’ll come away from it feeling, or what do you hope they’ll come away feeling?

Parry: I think they’ll come away seeing how much she was loved, and understanding a little bit more about who she was, and feeling a little bit closer to her. 

Gourlay: It’s nice to have a different insight from people that played music with her, or did nights with her – someone like Bioux, who used to run a record store in Camden. We were so close to Bioux, but no one would know who he was because he’s never put himself front and centre saying he was Amy’s friend, and he’s able to talk about their relationship as well as her as a musician because he spent a lot of time playing with her. I think when you see people’s stuff – things and people they had around them, and their influences – it gives you a much better idea of the stuff they’re into. [Beyond Black] is about what she was like, and it’s very honest. It’s not saying she was the sweetest, kindest person ever. It’s very clear that she’s nuanced and amazing. 

Parry: I want people to come away and just be like, “fuck, she was great”. 

@emmaggarland

This interview has been edited and condensed for length. 

Beyond Black is out now via Thames & Hudson and available to buy here.