Free Saving Amy by Daphne Barak Page B

performed ‘Me and Mr Jones’ and ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’, an appearance for which she was subsequently panned in the press.
    Although Amy was reported to be on a downward cycle, she was still winning awards for her talent. On 8 October 2007, she won the Best Album award at the Q Awards. Mark Ronson picked it up on her behalf, but during thepartying afterwards ended up misplacing it. The slightly bemused general manager of Bar Soho, a Central London bar, subsequently discovered it in the venue’s toilets.
    In October, Ronson released a cover, with Amy on vocals, of the Zutons’ song ‘Valerie’ from his album Version. The single shot to No. 2 in the UK single charts. Otherwise, however, Amy wasn’t doing so well. On a tour of Europe, Amy played Germany and Denmark, before performing in Norway, where she and Blake were arrested in Bergen on 18 October. According to reports, they were released the next day, after being fined for possession of marijuana, after which Amy continued her tour.
    After Amy won the MTV Artists’ Choice award in November, one of the most coveted music awards, Island released a deluxe version of Back To Black and a DVD called ‘I Told You I Was Trouble: Live in London’, which included interviews with Amy, Island’s Darcus Beese and Mitch Winehouse, driving around in his taxicab. It also showed a live performance at Shepherd’s Bush earlier in the year.
    But while Amy was winning awards, on a personal front things were about to get much worse. Her relationship with Blake was still up and down and Blake had an assault charge hanging over his head from an alleged encounter with a barman in Hoxton, East London, in June 2006.

    Mitch says of that time, ‘Amy and Blake’s relationship was very much up and down … and we knew … [that] he [Blake] had a serious criminal case pending …
    ‘He [had] assaulted somebody or allegedly assaulted somebody and he knew he had this hanging over his head and he knew they would have this court case [going] on for sometime. This is all we knew. We didn’t know anything about anything else, and Amy and I were talking about [it]. He felt that he might go to prison for a considerable amount of time and I would sit and talk to them about what we would do … you know, how we could resolve the problems and everything else. But basically there was not an awful lot we could do. Because we knew at some point he would have to face the consequences of his actions. And he had a date to appear in court and it was cancelled and he had another date and it was cancelled and … while all this [was] going on, there [were] problems occurring of varying degrees – Amy giving performances that weren’t great … Amy doing great performances but … you know it was inconsistent.’

    On 9 November 2007, Amy’s ‘Baby’, Blake, was arrested. Photographs of a tearful Amy kissing a handcuffed Blake appeared on the front pages of many newspapers. Blake, it seemed, was being charged with perverting the course of justice by attempting to fix the outcome of a trial.
    After receiving a tip-off and secretly filming some meetings at which Blake was reported to be present, the Daily Mirror alerted the police that Blake and his friend Michael Brown, both accused of assaulting a barman, were allegedly trying to pay the victim £200,000 to drop the charges and were planning to whisk him out of the countryso that their case would be dropped. Police subsequently raided Amy and Blake’s home in Camden, using a battering ram to knock down the door, but the couple weren’t there. Blake’s arrest took place later at a flat in Bow, East London.
    A distraught Amy later tried to visit her husband, only to be turned away, as Blake’s mother had already been to see her son and prisoners were only allowed one visitor a week.
    Friends and family worried about how Amy would react without Blake at her side with all the media attention she was receiving, but Amy, perhaps surprisingly, decided