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Many people in the public eye sanitise and sugarcoat their words but that was never Amy Winehouse’s style. Straight-talking and sharp-witted, the musician was brutally honest. That same tenacity is immediately seen in her mother, Janis Winehouse.
The 72-year-old, whose only daughter died from alcohol poisoning 15 years ago today, has multiple sclerosis (MS) and issues with memory loss, but remains lively and incisive.
“She was a victim of her own success,” Janis tells The i Paper in a rare interview. “She didn’t want it, but it just followed her. And she’d be like, ‘Who, me?’” Discussing her daughter’s battle with drug and alcohol addiction, she argues that many people misunderstand how addiction works. “Once you’re addicted, you’re addicted,” she reflects. “The only boss is the addiction. People say, ‘Oh, no, you just stop doing such and such’.” They don’t get it. You can’t stop because your body is saying I need it.”
When I ask what she believes contributed to Amy’s well-documented addiction issues, she points to her lack of confidence. “She was actually nervous,” Janis reflects. “She didn’t have confidence. Hence the alcohol. I think it’s the same with many, many addicts with alcohol. The alcohol takes away the pain. And that is a horrible thing with addiction.”
Janis is speaking at an event celebrating the 10th anniversary of Amy’s Place – a recovery house in Hackney, east London, for women battling drug and alcohol addiction, set up in memory of Amy. Staggeringly, Amy’s Place is one of the only recovery centres in the UK solely for women. Run in conjunction with the UK’s largest housing association, Clarion Housing Group, the service is for young women aged 18-30.
Amy’s Place delivers a broad range of therapeutic and practical services to support women, including counselling, art therapy, yoga, sound healing, and piano lessons. The service houses up to 16 women at any one time, with residents able to stay for up to two years and each woman assigned a recovery support worker. There are eight single flats and four shared. Amy would be a big fan of the service if she were alive, says Janis, who is also co-founder of the Amy Winehouse Foundation.
How has Janis coped with grief in the last few years? “I’m just getting on with it because that’s what I do. I get on with life. I live it,” she says. This is a trait her daughter inherited from her, she says. “She was so like me, she just got on with it.”
Amy was not changed by fame and was never interested in money, her mother says. “I remember that interview where she said to the person interviewing her: ‘You’re standing on that lady’s foot’ because that is just how she was. She points it out. You’re doing this.”
People stand around chatting, eating smoked salmon and cream cheese rolls and red velvet cake as we talk. The garden is full of former and current residents of Amy’s Place. Inside, framed pictures of Amy hang on the walls. The place has recently been done up and has the luxury of a hotel and the warmth of a family home.
Amy would have been blown away by Amy’s Place, Jane Winehouse, Amy’s stepmother who is married to Amy’s father Mitch Winehouse, tells me. “She would love the women,” the 61-year-old adds. “It’s very true to her. Everyone here is so real. To be here, to engage properly in recovery, you have to get real. You quickly connect to people on quite a visceral level that you don’t necessarily connect with people in everyday life.”
Jane explains that the family knew little about addiction when Amy started struggling. “When Amy started having her problems, we knew nothing,” she says. “We’d had no family experience of addiction. Mitch and Janice, they barely drink. It was quite alien to us.”
Discussing the media’s relentless hounding of Amy, Jane, who knew Amy since she was two, argues that the wider situation has improved since that time. “The paparazzi were parked outside her door morning, noon and night. It was a very, very different time. Thankfully, I think, I hope certainly, that we’ve moved on from that.”
Paramedics discovered Amy in her flat in Camden, north London, on the afternoon of 23 July, 2011. She was only 27. “I think as a family, we just didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives in misery, you know,” Jane, who is the director and co-founder of the Amy Winehouse Foundation, says. “We wanted to make something really positive come out of something that was so tragic.”
When they ask women at Amy’s Place to reflect on their experiences there, they often talk about how safe they feel, Jane says. “Consistently, the first thing they say is that they felt safe – some of them for the first time ever”. The women at Amy’s Place come from a range of backgrounds. “Some of them have had a really, really traumatic past. Others have come from lovely families, but there was just something within them that made them just never feel like they never fitted in. That they had low self-esteem. Low self-esteem is a real recurring theme.”
Stella Needham has been living at Amy’s Place for around a year and a half. “I was on the verge of death,” the 21-year-old recalls of her situation before moving here. “I had been in and out of hospitals for a while. I had sepsis. My organs were failing me. I had been put on an emergency bed list for rehab.” Her physical health had massively deteriorated due to ketamine addiction. She explains she was taking 7-9g of the drug every day.
But Stella’s life has changed immeasurably since then. She celebrated two years sober around a month ago, and her physical health has completely recovered. She now has a job as a support worker at a drug and alcohol service – a role which initially began as volunteer work.
“I think addiction is an uncomfortability with self. I think that’s what it kind of narrows down to,” she says. “I know lots of people, and me, I was self-medicating from other problems. So I was just medicating because I couldn’t stand to be sober and live a normal life and think clearly.”
The support she gets from the other women at Amy’s Place has clearly been transformative. “We’re like sisters,” Stella, who grew up in Camden and is a massive Winehouse fan, says. “I could call up any of the girls at any time of night, and I know someone would be there for me.”
Rachel Finlinson, the manager at Amy’s Place, explains they don’t kick out residents who relapse and use drugs or drink alcohol, unlike most similar services. The 55-year-old argues that women in addiction are highly stigmatised. She emphasises the importance of having a woman-only service as she explains many of the residents have suffered sexual violence or domestic abuse perpetrated by men. It is incredible to see the women go from arriving feeling hopeless to blossoming and turning “into the women that they were always meant to be”.
