Amy and Me
Published: 25 October 2015
As the documentary about Amy Winehouse’s turbulent life is released on DVD, her best friend, Juliette Ashby, talks candidly about the girl she grew up with
When Juliette Ashby talks about her best friend, Amy Winehouse, she often lapses into the present tense. Four years after Winehouse’s death, on July 23, 2011, the pain is still too fresh for “was” and “used to”. We are sitting in Ashby’s womb-like recording studio in Barnet, to talk about Asif Kapadia’s documentary, Amy. The film has been huge — the most successful British documentary ever — and its DVD release next month will doubtless spark more Winehouse nostalgia.
Initially, Ashby, 31, a successful songwriter in her own right, wanted no part in the film. “When we first heard it was happening, we were, like, ‘This isn’t right. This shouldn’t be happening.’” But Nick Shymansky, Winehouse’s trusted first manager, persuaded Ashby, and Winehouse’s other great friend, Lauren Gilbert, to speak to Kapadia and give him reams of material. Their contributions are by far the most touching and revelatory of the film, which opens with a wobbly home video of the three of them at a teenage house party, a young Winehouse belting out Happy Birthday. Through their memories, we meet a different Winehouse to the tabloid caricature — funny, fiercely intelligent, unexpectedly domestic, affectionate, a brilliant mimic. And we glimpse the kind of passionate friendship that teenage girls excel in, where you go round to each other’s houses after school, phone each other the minute you’re apart and spend all weekend doing nothing together.
Amy Winehouse and Juliette Ashby in a restaurant in Camden in 2003Amy Winehouse and Juliette Ashby in a restaurant in Camden in 2003
Ashby grew up in Southgate, north London, where she still lives. Her elder sister, Jessica, was a fourth member of the clan and can lay claim to introducing Winehouse to flicky eyeliner. Their father, the journalist Jonathan Ashby, founded World Entertainment News Network with their mother, Jackie (Winehouse’s first job was at WENN, a leg-up from her best friend’s dad). Ashby remembers a happy, secure childhood. “I grew up in a musical family — my dad played loads of instruments, and our house was always full of music and people.”
One of those visitors was the young Winehouse, who Ashby first met, aged four, at primary school. “We were drawn to each other, two excitable little kids,” she says. Music quickly became a shared obsession. “By year six, we had a band called Sweet’n’Sour, and were able to go into a recording studio to lay down our first songs together. We were like Salt-N-Pepa, but the nine-year-old Jewish version. We’d just laugh a lot. That was what we did, laugh and sing.”
The north London twang in her voice is the only superficial giveaway that she and Winehouse were once like peas in a pod. “When we were at secondary school, Amy went gothic and I was a rude girl, so we were different in our style, but still best friends. Every Saturday, me, Amy and Lauren would go for a Chinese or to PizzaExpress in Whetstone, and then we’d all sit in her room, or my room, listen to music, talk, cry, laugh. What young girls do.”
Ashby and Winehouse singing together in 1998 when they were 15 — they formed a band called Sweet’n’SourAshby and Winehouse singing together in 1998 when they were 15 — they formed a band called Sweet’n’Sour
It sounds sweetly ordinary, but Winehouse was already remarkable. “She was always advanced,” says Ashby. “Even as kids. We’d be reading Puddle Lane, she’d be reading Schindler’s List. But she had the attention span of a fish. She couldn’t stick at one thing.”
The film implies that Winehouse’s problems started in her teens. This isn’t Ashby’s memory. She refers again to Winehouse’s precociousness and skittish concentration, but adds: “I didn’t have any awareness of that in particular. I was her best friend. We confided in each other, we had a really happy childhood.”
Sixth form at secondary school led to playing house in a first flat-share, in East Finchley. “People who used to come to 215A would say it was magical. It was the hub, the place everyone showed up. Amy was writing her first album, Frank, and it was just a special, lovely time. We both have amazing memories of that flat — normal girls in their first place together. We had a big bathroom and we’d be in there for hours together, doing our nails, waxing our legs. People say the kitchen is the heart of the home, ours was the bathroom.”
Were they going out a lot, too? “Most of the time, we were home. All we did was play music, laugh, cook. Her thing was Jewish chicken soup, and I’d do the meatballs with the matzo meal. And we liked changing round the furniture, ’cos we were always indoors.” Surely Winehouse wasn’t a neat freak? “She was messy, but we would clean together. We’d be, like, ‘You do the skirting boards, I’ll do the coving.’ And then we’d go to the florist — she was obsessed with fresh flowers.”
Winehouse and Ashby in their flat in East Finchley, aged 18Winehouse and Ashby in their flat in East Finchley, aged 18
What kind of friend was Winehouse? “We were, are, sisters. Me, Amy, Lauren. Just three young, north London Jewish girls growing up together. It’s an unconditional bond. We’d only need to look at each other and we’d know what the other was thinking. And she was hysterically funny. I’ve never known anyone who had every accent down. If I had my way, the whole film would just be her being hilarious. It’s not how I’d like her to be seen, that’s just who she is.”
Who was the ringleader? “We both mothered each other. Amy and I lived like husband and wife, and Lauren was... not our child, but we were protective of her. She was, like, ‘our little Lauren’.” Ashby composes herself. She looks as if she can barely contain how acutely she misses Winehouse. “I don’t know why that gets me, but it’s just something Amy always says, ‘our little Lauren’. Except those roles all reversed, obviously. Then it became me and Lauren looking out for Amy.”
Winehouse unexpectedly becoming the vulnerable one, as fame and addiction took hold, is a recurring theme. “I don’t want to talk about situations that didn’t directly involve me,” says Ashby of the final years, referring to Winehouse’s toxic relationship with her then-husband Blake Fielder-Civil and the negative portrayal of her father, Mitch Winehouse, in the film. “But I will say, she never asked to be famous. Her goal wasn’t the applause or the big audiences. She is a writer and musician. That’s different to a performer. Fame is scary, horrible. It’s definitely not for everyone.”
The girls together at secondary school, aged 12The girls together at secondary school, aged 12
When Winehouse bought her first flat in Camden with the proceeds from her 2004 album, Frank, “the nightmare started”. For Ashby, Camden seems to represent everything that stole Winehouse from her. She talks about “getting Amy back”, briefly, with a second shared flat in leafy Muswell Hill, but then losing her again. The tussle between Winehouse’s suburban roots and her new identity on Camden’s music scene and in its pubs underpins the film. We long for the suburbs to grab Winehouse back and keep her safe, but it doesn’t happen. She moves permanently, and, in Ashby’s words: “That was when all her neighbours had my number, and I slept with my phone on loud every night, under my pillow. I still do. Trauma does that to you.”
The night before Winehouse died, she rang Ashby. They hadn’t spoken for a while. “Me and Lauren refused to be around the circus while the nightmare was happening. Amy knew we wouldn’t tolerate her behaviour, but we were there to get her out of it. She always had somewhere to call if she was scared, needed normality and someone to tell her to ‘behave yourself and pull it together’. And that last call was my best friend, my Amy, back. Most people in that situation aren’t aware of what’s going on, but Amy was so intelligent, and she never lost that awareness. She had total clarity. She kept saying she was sorry, she was having realisations. It was hard to hear that. I kept reassuring her it was OK.”
Although Ashby has seen the film, listening to Winehouse’s music now is impossible. “I can’t hear her voice. I want to more than anything, but when it comes on somewhere, my whole body freezes and I end up having a panic attack.” All the time she is talking, Ashby’s eyes are glossy with tears. She doesn’t fall apart because she has learnt to “put on blinkers, so I can just get to the end of a sentence about Amy”.
She is determined that we should know the Winehouse she knew, and understand that the image the tabloids peddled “wasn’t my friend”. But the shock of her death, and the depth of her absence, still leaves Ashby reeling. Gilbert has been her rock, and she says the two of them are as close as ever. “Can I be honest?” she says, as I’m leaving. “I feel sometimes like I’m going to get a phone call, like it was all not real. Me and Lauren both always say that. I think I’ll always sleep with the phone on loud.”
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