20 replies to this topic

[LisaliciA]

Blender magazine has the first interview conducted with Amy Winehouse in months. The series of chats, done as she traveled through Europe on tour in early October, paint a frightening picture.

In the article, her father publicly admits that she’s taking heroin and cocaine and Wino has severeal moments where she repeatedly falls asleep while being interviewed, on seperate occasions.

Click here to check out the full Blender piece.

Here are our HIGHlights:

She’s never exactly been a picture of health, but tonight she looks especially worse for wear: hunched, heavy-lidded and frail.

She sighs and plops down on the couch. She lights a cigarette and turns a drowsy gaze toward Blender; she’s ready to talk. We start by asking if she’ll be recording the follow-up to Back to Black anytime soon.

“Yeah, we’ve got a couple of more bits … I’m writing … ” she mumbles. “On the whole … ” She trails off.

Um … Back to Black was such a personal record — the songs were clearly about your relationship with Blake. Are you still writing confessionals?

“I’m still writing about the dynamics of being in a relationship … Would you like some wine?” she asks, fetching two glasses and beginning to pour. “I believe in relationships,” she continues, “whether it’s your grandmother or your dog … ”

Now her words are slurred, her eyelids drooping. Her head wobbles into a nod. She falls asleep for a second, wakes with a start, mutters and drops off again. The smoldering cigarette in her left hand falls to the floor.

“Oh, God, what is wrong with me?” she asks, coming to. “There’s something wrong with me … ”

We inquire about her brief rehab stint in August. What was it like there?

“You go in and you’re just sat down. They looked at me and said, ‘You’re an alcoholic.’”

And are you?

“No … I don’t know.”

Are you clean these days?

“I take, like, anti- … I take stuff for my depression. Prescriptive stuff. But I don’t take it.”

And you don’t do any other drugs?

“I don’t have time.”

On August 8, Winehouse was admitted to University College Hospital in London after the U.K.’s News of the World reported she had slipped into an overdose-induced coma after smoking, snorting and otherwise ingesting a combination of heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy and ketamine, topped off with vodka and whiskey quaffed on an evening pub crawl. “I don’t know how to explain what happened,” said Winehouse, who was released after having her stomach pumped. “I can’t remember what I looked like. I couldn’t recognize myself. It was terrifying.”

On August 13, at the urging of both Winehouse’s and Fielder-Civil’s parents, the couple checked into The Causeway, a $20,000-a-week detox clinic in Essex, outside of London. Less than 48 hours later, following what London papers described as “blinding” marital arguments, the couple left rehab. Winehouse’s family now squarely blames Fielder-Civil for this. “He refused to cooperate with the staff,” says one of her relatives. “They said Amy had been willing to work with them but that Blake wasn’t interested. He knows that he’s lost if they both clean up.”

The official story from Winehouse’s camp is that there is no story. Raye Cosbert, her manager, will say only that Amy “takes prescription medication, which makes her drowsy.” What medication, exactly? “That’s between Amy and her physician.” Is Blake a bad influence on his wife? “Blake and Amy love each other very deeply. And love is a good thing.”

But Mitch Winehouse, for one, is not so reticent about the state of his daughter’s health. “We know she’s on hard drugs — heroin and cocaine. That’s why we’ve been trying to get her into rehab,” he says. “Janis and I worry that she will seriously harm herself, but mercifully that hasn’t happened yet.”

Beyond that, Mitch allows himself little optimism. “I don’t know what they’ve been doing for the last month or so. We’d like to think that she and Blake have stayed clean since they went to St. Lucia,” he says. “But the thing with drug addicts is that they rarely tell you the truth.”

It's from PerezHilton.com
and the whole article should be on http://www.blender.c...x?key=9519&pg=0
but I can't get through...

[Little Legs]

thanks for posting . . . im gonna see if i can find the whole article

[sarahbol]

"Raye Cosbert, her manager, will say only that Amy “takes prescription medication, which makes her drowsy.” "
Interesting.

Is Blender something we can trust? I don't know this magazine.

[Little Legs]

i cant get the site to open :cry: will keep trying though!

[Moody's Mood]

Can't get it to open either..

[strictrat]

Nope not opening. gaaaaah

[strictrat]

ok it just did but it took about 10 minutes!!


edit: ok now im waiting another 15 minutes for the second page.

[Tinkerbell]

I like Blender...its popular here in the US. It isn't a tabloid and I don't recall them every printing anything false in the three + years I have been reading.

[strictrat]

I dont think i trust a magazine that puts a naked pussycat doll on the cover and claims to be a sincere music publication.
But maybe this is an american media thing that im just not used to.

[Lainey]

While Blender is fairly respected as a music publication, it unfortunately loses a lot of credibility due to its covers of scantily clad women most months. I believe it's published by the same folks behind Maxim - go figure.

[suestev07]

got through to page 2 of the article...don't know how long it took, was doing other stuff...so thought I'd post it...

"Chasing Amy

Over the past months, chart-topping tabloid magnet Amy Winehouse has wandered bloody through the streets of London, checked in to (and out of) rehab and slipped into a coma. Blender trails the diva through Europe to learn firsthand that “no, no, no” still means no.

Jody Rosen
Blender November 07 2007

65amyWinehouse_article.jpgAnd you don’t do any other drugs?

“I don’t have time.”

You don’t have time?

“I’m a really big drinker,” she says in response. “I used to be there before the pub opened, banging on the door.”

She nods off again. Across the room, Naomi looks stricken.

It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Over the past year, Amy Winehouse has emerged as one of the world’s biggest pop stars. Her second album, Back to Black, announced the arrival of a superlatively talented singer-songwriter with a unique retro-futurist musical blend: ’60s girl-group pop, jukebox soul and Billie Holiday–style torch balladry, filtered through the hard-boiled sensibility of a Jewish cab driver’s daughter from the North London suburbs. The music soared, and Winehouse made the big leap overseas, cracking the Billboard Top 10 with Back to Black and its smash single, “Rehab.”

But by the summer of 2007, Winehouse’s ­tabloid-magnet exploits were threatening to eclipse her ­musical success. Amy and Blake had become the latter-day Sid and Nancy: a scary-skinny couple careening around London, supplying a near-constant stream of lurid photo-ops and tales of deathwish-level partying. There were stories of rampant drug use, eating disorders, self-mutilation. There were mass-media interventions by parents and in-laws. As summer turned to autumn, Winehouse was poised for a career apotheosis, likely to garner a slew of Grammy nominations. But her friends and handlers feared that she might be too high, too drunk, too lost — or worse? — to reap the glory. So the singer was put on the shelf for the month of September, to recuperate in time for her big fall coronation. With this in mind, Blender traveled to Europe at the beginning of October to conduct the first interview with a reborn Amy Winehouse. But things aren’t quite working out as planned.

Back in the dressing room, Winehouse snaps awake with a jerk and begins apologizing.

“I’m just really drowsy at the moment,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

Maybe we should continue this later.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Naomi offers.

“I’m so sorry,” Winehouse says.

Amy Winehouse has always had music in her life. She was born on September 14, 1983, in the London suburb of Southgate, to dad Mitch and mom Janis, a pharmacist. But uncles on her mother’s side were jazz musicians and her paternal grandmother was a singer who dated the legendary British saxophonist Ronnie Scot. Mitch Winehouse was himself an amateur crooner and ardent fan of American jazz vocalists — Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington — whose records he played nonstop when Amy was a child.

Amy’s parents separated when she was 9, and she and her older brother Alex went to live with their mom. Amy’s musical taste skewed decidedly mainstream — until she fell in love with hip-hop. “I listened to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection every day until I was about 11,” she has said. “And then I discovered Salt ’n’ Pepa and TLC.” At 12, she enrolled in the Sylvia Young Theatre School, a prestigious performing-arts academy, but was expelled three years later; she enrolled in another London performing-arts school but soon dropped out to spend most of her free time indulging a favorite new hobby: smoking weed"

http://www.blender.c...x?key=9519&pg=1

Wonder why she's so tired? Is it the prescription meds for her depression, or something else???

[kevd7]

i LOVE this, from page 5..."

An hour after our last aborted interview, Winehouse is due back on the La Musicale stage. A few minutes before showtime, she appears in the greenroom, wading through a crowd of gawkers, looking more awake than she has all night. The band takes to the stage and crashes into “You Know I’m No Good.” Winehouse is transfixing: rocking on her heels, gesticulating, shimmying, swaying. Her singing is magnificent. She lingers behind the beat and unspools jazzy syncopations, purrs low, burly blue notes and rears back to deliver rolling melismas that would give Mariah Carey pause.

You cannot help but be struck by the ease of her virtuosity: For Winehouse, living is evidently exceedingly difficult, but singing is as natural as breathing."

*off to look up "rolling melismas" * lol

[kevd7]

o.k., from wikipedia....any musicians in the house???
"In music, melisma (commonly known as vocal runs or simply runs) is the technique of changing the note (pitch) of a single syllable of text while it is being sung."

[Little Legs]

I finally got it to open!!!

Winehouse arrives nearly five hours late, eats lunch from a McDonald’s bag then disappears into the bathroom. She emerges a few minutes later looking woozy and passes out while having her makeup done. Winehouse is helped to a waiting car. “Amy’s not feeling well, she’s going to head home,” her label rep announces. “It must have been the McDonald’s

O dear . . .

[LisaliciA]

"You cannot help but be struck by the ease of her virtuosity: For Winehouse, living is evidently exceedingly difficult, but singing is as natural as breathing. For the three-plus minutes of “You Know I’m No Good” it is possible to forget the spectacle of the past hours, days and months — to look past the awful toll inflicted by too little food or too much drink or McDonald’s milkshakes or “prescription medication” or whatever else Winehouse is putting into her body. When the song ends, the studio audience erupts into the biggest ovation of the evening, a burst of sheer relief, and Winehouse is whisked backstage. The throng gathered there cheers and reaches out to shake hands, but she doesn’t pause to soak up the adulation. She strides down a hallway, up a flight of stairs and straight into her dressing room, clapping the door shut behind her."

I really like the fact that they actually like her music, most of the magazines don't even bother talking about it. The article is quite nice, don't know what to think about the sleeping-parts