‘I can’t grieve because she’s kind of still here’
Tonight, a BBC documentary marks the 10th anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death. Guy Kelly meets a close friend of the singer
As hangovers go, it was at least a memorable one. It was 2002; Chantelle Dusette was 22 and she’d ended up crashing at the home of a friend-of-afriend she met on a night out. “In the morning she said, ‘I’m a singer, do you want to hear me sing?’” Dusette remembers. Feeling a bit worse for wear, she didn’t really get a chance to answer before her “larger-than-life” host set off on an Ella Fitzgerald cover.
“As soon as she started to sing, I just looked at her and was like, ‘I know that I’m hungover, but you are really, really good.’ She just went, ‘Hmm...’” Dusette laughs, before going quiet. “It was a long time ago.”
Her new friend was indeed really, really good at singing. At the time, Amy Winehouse was an anonymous yet freakishly charismatic and gifted 19-year-old from north London, but a few weeks later she would record Frank, her triple-platinum-selling debut album, and quickly become one of the most recognisable and expressive singers this country has ever produced.
Dusette has never spoken publicly about the Amy she knew, but tonight, 10 years on from Winehouse’s death from alcohol poisoning at her home in Camden, she features in a documentary, Reclaiming Amy, in which she, other friends and Winehouse’s parents, Mitch and Janis, attempt to do just that: show us the real Amy – away from the headlines, away from the drugs, away from a reputation so often traduced.
It was Janis, the voice of the documentary, who asked Dusette to break her silence. Now 66, Janis suffers from multiple sclerosis, and has said she is worried that the condition “threatens to strip her of her memories of Amy”.
“I understood it was really a way to piece some things together for her,” Dusette says. “[The friends] had agreed not to say anything until the time felt right, and I don’t know if there ever is a right time, but the ask came from Janis and I felt it would help her.”
When Dusette, 41, a theatre writer, met Amy, she was “very lovely, very funny, very animated, and anti-drugs at that point. She took cannabis, but in her words ‘you were a mug’ if you did [anything stronger].” Instead, the music came first. “She had to sing. She had something to say, something to express. Music was how she did it.”
Frank launched Amy as an extraordinary talent, and an extraordinary character – gobby, but eminently witty and wise; always glam in her own tattooed, beehived way; and somehow both an old soul and brimming with youth.
That period, when the success came but the pressure hadn’t started, was when everything was good. “Everyone would say that, yes, it was the quieter period,” Dusette says.
But the quiet wouldn’t last. When Amy’s follow-up album, Back to Black, made her an international star, winning her five Grammys, a Brit award and becoming the UK’S second biggest-selling album of the century, the glare of celebrity was unrelenting.
Dusette says: “She found fame incredibly difficult. Imagine if you just had no privacy at all, every time you stepped out of the house you had to consider the way that you looked because you were going to be in every newspaper,” she says. “There is nothing you can do in that situation apart from run. And then hide. Who wants to live like that? She did not.”
Family and friends use Reclaiming Amy to point out factors overlooked in other documentaries about Winehouse, including Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning Amy. That she had been confused about her sexuality, for instance. And that the death in 2006 of her grandmother, Cynthia Levy (a jazz singer depicted in Amy’s iconic “pin-up” upper-arm tattoo), rocked her at a point when she was already fragile.
Those things, added to the effects of bulimia, from which she had suffered since her teens and which was made worse by criticisms of her body shape, meant she became selfdestructive.
The move to heavier drinking and harder drugs was gradual,
Dusette says. Understandably, she doesn’t want to focus on drugs, and only confirms that she was not friends with
Winehouse’s husband for two years, Blake Fielder-civil, who has since admitted introducing Amy to heroin. But she does wish that society could have been as sympathetic to mental health problems 12 years ago as it is now.
“The education just wasn’t there. Not like it is now. We are really good at having those conversations now and we weren’t.”
Ten years ago yesterday, Dusette spoke to Amy on the phone. She had been “really, really positive”. The next day she got another call from her Camden house, this time raising the alarm. Dusette rushed there and arrived before even Janis and Mitch. She sat outside, stunned. “I just went into shock for some time, it didn’t make any sense to me. It was like a light switch, it was that quick.” Some friends helped prepare Amy’s body for the funeral. Dusette couldn’t face it. She attended the service and joined the family in sitting shiva (the Jewish mourning period), but every time she walked into a shop or bar and heard Rehab or Back to Black or any of Amy’s other hits, she’d have to walk out.
“How do you grieve someone who kind of isn’t dead? I don’t know how to answer that.”
And so she watched, as others in the media “had complete control of the framing of Amy”. She understands why there is such a yearning to find answers for why her friend died. “People always try to connect with her, because she was so relatable. As much as she was wildly famous, it also felt like she was just your mate. And because she was so complex, there are a billion ways you could tell that story.” She thinks about what her friend’s life would have been like. “I would have loved her to have been a mother. That was a very important thing for her, and she would have been an incredible mother.” Every year on July 23, Amy’s close friends and family visit the cemetery where Amy’s ashes are scattered. This year they will stay together into the evening to watch the documentary they worked on.
“I hope people get to see a human: someone’s daughter, someone’s friend. We know she had this enormous gift, and so for someone who hasn’t heard of Amy Winehouse, go and listen to her music,” Dusette says. “Amy speaks best for herself.
Reclaiming Amy is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm