‘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.
The Salt Path author Raynor Winn’s fourth book has been delayed by her publisher.
It comes amid claims that the author lied about her story in her hit first book. Winn previously described the claims as “highly misleading” and called suggestions that her husband had Moth made up his illness “utterly vile”.
In a statement, Penguin Michael Joseph, said it had delayed the publication of Winn’s latest book On Winter Hill – which had been set for release 23 October.
The publisher said the decision had been made in light of “recent events, in particular intrusive conjecture around Moth’s health”, which it said had caused “considerable distress” to the author and her family.
“It is our priority to support the author at this time,” the publisher said.
“With this in mind, Penguin Michael Joseph, together with the author, has made the decision to delay the publication of On Winter Hill from this October.”
A new release date will be announced in due course, the publisher added.
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Winn’s first book, released in 2018, detailed the journey she and husband took along the South West Coast Path – familiarly known as The Salt Path – after they lost their family farm and Moth received a terminal health diagnosis of Corticobasal Degeneration (CBD).
But a report in The Observer disputed key aspects of the 2018 “true” story – which was recently turned into a film starring Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson.
Raynor and husband Moth (centre) with actors Jason Isaacs (L) and Gillian Anderson (R). Pic: Steve Tanner/Black Bear
Experts ‘sceptical of health claims’
As part of the article, published last weekend, The Observer claimed to have spoken to experts who were “sceptical” about elements of Moth’s terminal diagnosis, such as a “lack of acute symptoms and his apparent ability to reverse them”.
In the ensuing controversy, PSPA, a charity that supports people with CBD, cut ties with the couple.
The Observer article also claimed the portrayal of a failed investment in a friend’s business wasn’t true, but said the couple – whose names are Sally and Tim Walker – lost their home after Raynor Winn embezzled money from her employer and had to borrow to pay it back and avoid police action.
Anderson played Winn in a movie about the couple’s journey. Pic: Steve Tanner/Black Bear
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It also said that, rather than being homeless, the couple had owned a house in France since 2007.
Winn’s statement said the dispute with her employer wasn’t the reason the couple lost their home – but admitted she may have made “mistakes” while in the job.
“For me it was a pressured time,” she wrote. “It was also a time when mistakes were being made in the business. Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry.”
She admitted being questioned by police but said she wasn’t charged.
The author also said accusations that Moth lied about having CBD/CBS were false and had “emotionally devastated” him.
“I have charted Moth’s condition with such a level of honesty, that this is the most unbearable of the allegations,” Winn wrote on her website.
The first fan started queuing before 8am.
Heaton Park, just north of Manchester City centre, is tonight hosting 80,000 fans who’ve come to see the Gallaghers’ homecoming.
“I would honestly say it’s a real cultural moment of the 21st century,” says Sam, who’s from Manchester and has come here with a group of friends – including one who has travelled from Australia for the gig.
Oasis fans wear band T-shirts with the almost obligatory bucket hats. Pic: Reuters
This will be the fourth time Sam has seen Oasis play, although obviously not for many years, and he says he can’t wait for the moment the band comes on to the stage.
“The reaction from the fans, that’s going to be really special,” he says. “This band means so much to the North West.”
Like many people attending tonight’s concert, Sam is wearing a bucket hat.
Liam Gallagher’s iconic headgear has become a part of the band’s cultural legacy and they are certainly on display here, with street vendors popping up all around the park’s perimeter.
Another fan, Dean, tells me he feels incredibly lucky to have got a ticket at all.
“I had seven devices out when the tickets were released and I didn’t get one,” he says. “And then about three days ago, a friend of mine messaged to say she couldn’t make it.
“So I made it. £120 with coach travel there and back – perfect.”
Dom has flown from half a world away to be in Manchester tonight
Dom is another fan who has come from Australia for the gig.
“We’re frothing to be here, like so stoked,” he says, “The atmosphere is going to be electric.”
Read more:
Review – Oasis reunite for first gig in 16 years
A timeline of Britpop’s most successful band
One young couple are here on their honeymoon. From Italy, they met at a Liam Gallagher concert several years ago.
“It’s where we fell in love,” Claudia says. “And we got married last month so we wanted to be here to celebrate.”
Amanda, from Manchester, is also here with a loved one – well, sort of.
Amanda has found a way to make sure her son, who lives in Australia, is there in spirit
She’s wearing a paper cut-out mask of her 30-year-old son Harry’s face.
“He’s in Melbourne and got a ticket but then couldn’t come,” Amanda explains.
“And so Harry doesn’t feel left out,” she says pulling the mask down over her face, “we’ve brought him with us!”
Entertainment
Chris Brown: R&B singer denies further charges following alleged bottle attack in London club
R&B singer Chris Brown has denied further charges following an alleged bottle attack in a London nightclub.
The 36-year-old pleaded not guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm (ABH) to music producer Abraham Diaw, during a hearing at Southwark Crown Court on Friday.
Brown also denied one count of having an offensive weapon – a bottle – in a public place.
Chris Brown arriving at Southwark Crown Court on Friday. Pic: PA
The Grammy-winning US musician last month pleaded not guilty to a more serious charge of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm (GBH) with intent to Mr Diaw.
The attack allegedly happened at the Tape venue, a private members’ club in Hanover Square, Mayfair, on 19 February 2023.
The plea hearing is part of preparations for his five to seven-day trial, which is due to take place from 26 October 2026.
Brown’s co-defendant, US national Omololu Akinlolu, 39, on Friday pleaded not guilty to a charge of assaulting Mr Diaw occasioning him actual bodily harm.
Akinlolu, a rapper who goes by the name Hoody Baby, has previously pleaded not guilty to attempting to cause grievous bodily harm.
Brown’s co-defendant Omololu Akinlolu arrives at court. Pic: Reuters
The defendants sat side-by-side in the dock, looking straight ahead during the hearing in London.
Around 20 fans sat in the public gallery behind the dock for Friday’s hearing, with several gasping as Brown walked into the courtroom.
The Go Crazy singer was able to continue with his scheduled international tour after he was freed on conditional bail in May.
He had to pay a £5m security fee to the court as part of the bail agreement, which is a financial guarantee to ensure a defendant returns to court and may be forfeited if they breach bail conditions.
Read more:
Chris Brown posts message after being released on bail
Mr Diaw was standing at the bar of the Tape nightclub when he was struck several times with a bottle, and then pursued to a separate area of the venue where he was punched and kicked repeatedly, Manchester Magistrates’ Court previously heard.
Brown was arrested at Manchester’s Lowry Hotel at 2am on 15 May by detectives from the Metropolitan Police.
He is said to have flown into Manchester Airport on a private jet in preparation for the UK tour dates.
Brown was released from HMP Forest Bank in Salford, Greater Manchester, on 21 May.
The singer, who rose to stardom as a teenager in 2005, won his first Grammy award for best R&B album in 2011 for F.A.M.E..
He earned his second in the same category for 11:11 (Deluxe) earlier this year.
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