‘She was full of life’: The night Amy Winehouse appeared on stage for the last time
Three days before Amy Winehouse’s death from alcohol poisoning in July 2011, her goddaughter Dionne Bromfield, a 15-year-old singer, finished school for the summer and rushed to the Camden Roundhouse to perform.
It was her biggest gig yet, her friends were coming to watch and she was full of excitement. For a young singer dreaming of a career in music, just like her “Aunty Amy”, it was a big day.
Amy Winehouse turned up unexpectedly to support her, their moments together onstage captured by someone in the crowd, filming on a mobile phone.
This would be the superstar’s last public performance.
As I watched the grainy mobile phone footage later, for me this was the stand-out moment of all the news coverage around Winehouse’s death – she’s so evidently falling apart but trying so desperately to be there for her goddaughter.
Dionne Bromfield has shared her story from that night in On Stage With Amy Winehouse, the latest episode of StoryCast ’21 – a Sky News podcast series telling 21 stories from the year 2000 to 2021.
Listen below.
Subscribe to Storycast 21 now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Spreaker
It was 10 years ago, 23 July 2011, when I got the call from a music PR.
It was a sunny day but I was sitting in a windowless newsroom, working a 12-hour shift, and the world was also reacting to the tragedy of the horrific terror attack in Norway the previous day. It was a call I won’t forget.
Winehouse had been found in bed at home by a bodyguard with two empty vodka bottles by her side, bringing to a tragic end her very public struggle with drug and alcohol addiction. She was just 27.
Breaking the news and witnessing the outpouring of grief that followed felt unprecedented at the time, I remember a little girl with beehive hair laying flowers outside her house in Camden Square, alongside crowds in tears, Winehouse’s dad Mitch, and tributes from Mark Ronson and Kelly Osbourne; visibly stunned.
Bromfield performs with Winehouse during the tragic singer’s last public appearance
Covering celebrity deaths is part of the job as an entertainment journalist, but this was no ordinary pop star; when Winehouse died, everyone had an opinion.
People were devastated, her fragility so profound, and tears turned to anger and blame; tragedies such as this can often turn toxic as grief mixed with the spotlight takes its toll.
We wanted to find out about the real Amy Winehouse.
We spoke to people who knew her, Joe Mott, Kim Dawson, Piers Hernu, her teacher Sylvia Young, former record label bosses, her biographer Chas Newkey-Burden, and countless critics such as Paul Gambaccini.
But I didn’t call the one young woman who knew the singer like no one else. The Amy behind the icon. Behind the headlines. Behind the instantly recognisable beehive, eyeliner and tattoos. The “Aunty Amy”.
Bromfield has offered a fresh perspective of Winehouse 10 years after her death
Dionne Bromfield, now 25, was Amy’s goddaughter and musical protégé. The one who “Amy always put her best self forward to”.
“I kind of looked at her as a mother and a big sister… Aunty Amy, I mean, she loved it when I called her that.”
When Winehouse set up her own record label Lioness, Bromfield was her first signing. She helped her launch her first album, even joining her on Strictly Come Dancing as a backing singer to support her launch.
“She just had a really, really close bond with me from a young age. My mum noticed that, and Amy really wanted to kind of take me under her wing musically and just on a personal level,” she tells me during Onstage With Amy Winehouse.
“Amy was, like, made to be an amazing mum and an amazing wife. That was like her thing and her purpose for life… She loved to cook. She cooked meatballs all the time,” Dionne laughs. “They weren’t the best…
“She was a really simple girl. And it’s just everything around her was amplified and massive and big. So, yeah, the Amy I know is a loving, caring, funny and an extremely talented person. All the other stuff is just noise.”
At the time of Winehouse’s death, it didn’t feel right to approach a 15-year-old to pay tribute. But it seems a decade on, Bromfield is ready to talk about her Aunty Amy. I meet her at the Jazz After Dark club in Soho, a favourite bolthole of Winehouse and now something of a shrine to her, the walls covered in her portraits.
Bromfield notices one painting of the icon, in which she is wearing a pair of earrings she lent her during a shopping trip.
“She was like ‘oh, I don’t have any earrings and I really like your earrings. Can I wear yours… please?’ I never saw them again. God knows where they are now.”
Walking into the dark club from the bright sunshine, Bromfield is incandescent. Like many young women in the music industry now, she seems switched on but refreshingly transparent. In many ways the antithesis of the Amy Winehouse as painted by the paparazzi, but simultaneously somehow strikingly similar.
Winehouse was like a mother, sister and friend to Bromfield
Cast your mind back to the Amy Winehouse who burst on to the scene in 2003, the one I remember first seeing in her music video for Stronger Than Me: fantastically unpolished, sassy and mischievous. The similarities with her goddaughter are obvious.
Bromfield says she remembers the last time she saw her godmother, the time they shared together on stage, “so vividly”.
“She came out for Mama Said, which was one of her favourite songs of mine, and she had a little dance, a little bit of backing vocals and then walked off.”
Bromfield would call the iconic singer ‘Aunty Amy’
Bromfield says it has taken a long time to process Winehouse’s death. She was performing at a festival in Wales a few days later when the news broke.
“I remember going, okay, and carried on doing what I was doing, it didn’t really make sense in my head. It didn’t register. And I just kept on getting dressed to go and do my gig. It was more like, I literally saw her three days earlier and she was so positive she was glowing and everything. How are we going from this, to this?”
Winehouse had released her first album, Frank, in 2003. In 2005, she met Blake Fielder-Civil, whom she married in 2007. It was a marriage, she would later admit, based on taking drugs.
Amy Winehouse passed away on 23 July 2011
Yet in 2006 she released her critically acclaimed second album Back To Black, which would go on to become one of the UK’s biggest selling albums ever. It was the heartbreak of the record, many of the songs about Fielder-Civil, which resonated.
Her multiple Grammy award wins broke records and brought huge international success.
The contrast between her sultry and striking talent as a singing sensation and the depths of her darkness is perhaps what has come to define her legacy.
Bromfield joined fans who had laid tributes for Winehouse in July 2011
Tributes were laid near Amy Winehouse’s home after her death
At the time I remember people described a sense of inevitability about the death of Winehouse. In interviews, her father Mitch had said he had feared the worst might happen.
But Bromfield says there was nothing inevitable about it.
“To me, it didn’t feel like something that was on the cards,” she says. “She was really full of life that night. So, yeah, it was not a person who had given up on life.”
The fact she hadn’t given up, and still had so much more to give, is perhaps why Amy Winehouse will continue to be remembered.
And for Bromfield, her godmother, her musical mentor and “Aunty Amy”, will always be a part of her future, as well as her past.
You can listen to On Stage With Amy Winehouse and the rest of StoryCast ’21 by clicking here.
Manchester Pride has been put into voluntary liquidation – and the future of the event is now in doubt.
Artists and suppliers are owed money following this year’s event, according to an Instagram statement issued by Pride’s board of trustees.
Pride’s organisers cited rising costs, declining ticket sales and an unsuccessful bid to host Euro Pride as factors behind the decision.
The organisation is a charity and limited company that campaigns for LGBTQ+ equality and offers training, research, policy analysis, advocacy and outreach activities, as well as putting on the annual parade and live event.
The statement said: “It is with enormous sadness that we announce that Manchester Pride has started the legal process of voluntary liquidation.
“A combination of rising costs, which are affecting the entire events and hospitality industries, declining ticket sales and an ambitious refresh of the format aimed to challenge these issues, along with an unsuccessful bid to host Euro Pride, has led to the organisation no longer being financially viable.
“We regret the delays in communicating the current situation; however, we were keen not to jeopardise financial opportunities while our discussions were ongoing.
“We were proactive and determined to identify solutions to the financial issues. We’ve been actively working with several partners, including legal and financial advisors, to do everything we could to find a positive solution.
“We had hoped to be able to find a way to continue, and, most importantly, to support our artists, contractors and partners.
A scene from Manchester Pride 2024. The future of the event is in doubt. Pic: AP
“Despite our best efforts, sadly, this has not proved to be possible. We are sincerely sorry for those who will now lose out financially from the current situation.
“The volunteer board of trustees are devastated at this situation and sad to share that our staff team will be made redundant.
“We, along with the team, have put our hearts and souls into the celebration and community activities over two decades and are very distressed at the position in which we find ourselves.”
“The Manchester Pride team have now handed over the details of suppliers and artists who are owed money to the liquidators who will be handling the affairs of the charity and contacting everyone.”
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Manchester Pride’s financial difficulties were first reported by The Mill last week.
Last year, industry experts warned that without urgent intervention the UK looks set to see “the end of a clubbing era that has defined generations”.
Research found that in the last four years the UK had lost 37% of its clubs, which works out at about 10 clubs closing each month.
Sky News has previously reported how small, independent music venues have been closing at the rate of one per week and pubs have been shutting at a rate of one per day.
A White House official has said there is “zero truth” to a report that Donald Trump is considering commuting Sean “Diddy” Combs’s prison sentence as early as this week.
On Monday, US entertainment site TMZ reported the US president was “vacillating” on whether or not to reduce the music mogul’s sentence, citing a “high-ranking White House official”.
Combs was sentenced to 50 months in prison and given a $500,000 fine at a hearing on 3 October, after being found guilty of prostitution charges relating to his former girlfriends and male sex workers at the end of his high-profile trial in the summer.
Earlier this week, the 55-year-old’s legal team filed a legal document officially signalling their intention to appeal.
Combs was in tears during his sentencing hearing. Pic: AP/ Elizabeth Williams
Now, a White House official has pushed back on TMZ’s report about a possible commutation.
There is “zero truth to the TMZ report, which we would’ve gladly explained had they reached out before running their fake news”, the official told NBC, Sky News’ US partner.
Mr Trump, “not anonymous sources, is the final decider on pardons and commutations”, the official added.
Casey Carver, a spokesperson for TMZ, said in a brief statement: “We stand by our story.”
In an update to the story on the outlet’s website, the news site said: “The White House Communications Office is saying our story is not true. We stand by our story. Our story is accurate.”
Lawyers for Combs did not immediately return a request for comment about the disparity between the White House statement and TMZ’s reporting. However, they previously told NBC News they had been pursuing a pardon.
What has Donald Trump said?
In August, before Combs’s sentencing, Mr Trump said in an interview that he had been approached about a possible pardon but implied he would not be granting one.
“You know, I was very friendly with him. I got along with him great and he seemed like a nice guy. I didn’t know him well,” the president said. “But when I ran for office, he was very hostile.”
When asked if he was suggesting he would not pardon Combs, he replied: “I would say so.”
“When you knew someone and you were fine, and then you run for office, and he made some terrible statements. So, I don’t know, it’s more difficult,” Mr Trump said. “Makes it more – I’m being honest, it makes it more difficult to do.”
The president has issued several pardons and commutations in his second term – including to around 1,500 criminal defendants in connection with the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.
Last week, he commuted the sentence of disgraced former Republican congressman George Santos.
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Combs was found guilty of two counts of transportation for prostitution in July, but was cleared of more serious charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking, which carried potential life sentences.
Ahead of his sentencing, he told the court he admitted his past behaviour was “disgusting, shameful and sick”, and apologised personally to Cassie Ventura and “Jane”, another former girlfriend who testified anonymously during the trial.
He told the court he got “lost in my excess and lost in my ego”, but since his time in prison he has been “humbled and broken to my core”, adding: “I hate myself right now… I am truly sorry for it all.”
The rapper is serving his sentence at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, where his team has said conditions are “inhumane”.
He has asked to be moved to a low-security federal prison in New Jersey, but the Bureau of Prisons has yet to approve the request.
Entertainment
Police should focus on ‘tackling real crime’, No 10 says, after Met Police halts non-crime hate probes
Officers should focus on “tackling real crime and policing the streets”, Downing Street has said – after the Metropolitan Police announced it is no longer investigating non-crime hate incidents.
The announcement by Britain’s biggest force on Monday came after it emerged Father Ted creator Graham Linehan will face no further action after he was arrested at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of inciting violence over three posts he made on X about transgender issues.
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Sir Keir Starmer’s spokesman said police forces will “get the clarity they need to keep our streets safe” when a review of non-crime hate incidents by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing is published in December.
“The police should focus on tackling real crime and policing the streets,” he said.
“The home secretary has asked that this review be completed at pace, working with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing.
“We look forward to receiving its findings as soon as possible, so that the other forces get the clarity they need to keep our streets safe.”
He said the government will “always work with police chiefs to make sure criminal law and guidance reflects the common-sense approach we all want to see in policing”.
After Linehan’s September arrest, Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said officers were in “an impossible position” when dealing with statements made online.
File pic: iStock
On Monday, a Met spokesperson said the commissioner had been “clear he doesn’t believe officers should be policing toxic culture war debates, with current laws and rules on inciting violence online leaving them in an impossible position”.
The force said the decision to no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents would now “provide clearer direction for officers, reduce ambiguity and enable them to focus on matters that meet the threshold for criminal investigations”.
Justice minister Sarah Sackman said it is “welcome news” the Met will now be focusing on crimes such as phone snatching, mugging, antisocial behaviour and violent crime.
Asked if other forces should follow the Met’s decision, she said: “I think that other forces need to make the decisions that are right for their communities.
“But I’m sure that communities up and down the country would want that renewed focus on violent crime, on antisocial behaviour, and on actual hate crime.”
The Met said it will still record non-crime hate incidents to use as “valuable pieces of intelligence to establish potential patterns of behaviour or criminality”.
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