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The Club is the production of I Heart Radio and Double Elvis.

Amy Winehouse died at the age of seven, and she lived a life that was never not out of control.

I can give you twenty seven reasons why that statement is true.

Three would be the number of times she said no in quick succession when talking to producer Mark Ronson about rehab, a response that would quickly become musical legend.

Another three will be the number of weeks it would take for Amy and Mark to craft half of an album, during which time Amy would frequently disappear to the studio bathroom to indulge in old habits.

One more for the number of landmark legal cases she waged against the paparazzi after photographers invaded her privacy one too many times.

Nine would be the hour in the morning when Amy would set up tequila shots during her supposed eight month long detox.

Another three would be the number of months that elapsed between the announcement of a comeback tour and Amy once again crashing and burning, this time as the headliner of a jazz festival.

Six would be the number of songs she was able to stumble through during that show before Mother Nature literally pulled the pluck into will be the number of years she'd have left to live when that show ended, all totally on this episode indulging in the bathroom a landmark legal case Mother Nature in Amy Winehouse, I'm Jake Brennan and this is the club, m Mercer Street, New York City, March two six.

There she was.

It was hard to miss, her jet black beehive piled on top of a whispy body, just as she would look in the tabloids when she became a daily fixture.

But in New York City in two thousand and six, her debut, Frank hadn't even cracked the top fifty in the States, so nobody knew who this strange looking creature was.

He approached, she didn't recognize him.

She was expecting someone a little more seasons.

As she herself would later put in, she was expecting an older man with a beard, some hip hop geezer.

Mark Ronson was no geezer.

Mark Ronson was a thirty year old producer with a bit of good buzz following him when he landed the opportunity to work on half of the tracks for what would become Amy Winehouse's monster second album, Back to Black, but he was still fighting for producer credits, so it was no surprise she didn't recognize him.

In fact, Amy wasn't all too thrilled to even meet the guy.

Amy knew Mark was just another DJ who happened to get noticed at some exclusive club, and now he was using that cultural currency to break into record making all flash, probably just trying to ride the coattails of the nearest popeye idol he could find.

Amy wasn't out to be a popeye idol, and that was well established and well documented.

She just wanted to make good music, so excuse her if the Abercrombie looking other fucker in front of her didn't necessarily scream authenticity.

But what the hell.

He was here and she was here and might as well give him a chance.

Amy and Mark went for a walk through New York Soho shopping district.

Amy discovered that, like her, Mark was born in London, but that's where the similarities ended.

Mark was crafting pop and hip hop tracks with the likes of Nicka Costa, while Amy had been busy recording two thousand threes, jazz heavy Frank, and they were from different universes.

Mark's mission was to prove Amy wrong while also proving himself to her.

He knew he was the perfect guy for the job, so he looked for common ground.

They were both children of divorce, both of them Jewish, both led lives that were nowhere near conventional.

Mark grew up in both London and New York and had a hybrid accent to match that experience.

Also, like Amy, music had always been central to Mark's life.

He spent a lot of his childhood in the house of his stepfather, Mick Jones.

So the nineteen eighties stadium rock powerhouse Foreigner Foreigner's monster hit I Want to Know What Love Is was written by Mick Jones about Mark's mother.

Davious artists were in and out of Mark's home.

Robin Williams once tucked him into bed.

Daryl Hall played at early morning chess with Mick Jones while Mark headed off to school.

In the morning, Mark would frequently wake up to the sounds of late night jam sessions and parties that he routinely found himself wandering downstairs in the middle of the night, unnoticed by the adults, where he gravitate towards the stereo a magnet to steal and press his body up against the speaker to absorb the vibrations.

Music had been his life since as long as he could remember.

His education was by audio osmosis.

He had a deep understanding of the relationship between Jewish American songwriters and black music.

Soul, hip hop, and Amy's first love, jazz.

Amy threw a curveball.

She didn't want to make jazz anymore.

In her eyes, jazz had been hijacked by snobs.

She didn't want to make snob music.

She was now obsessed with the girl groups of the nineteen sixties, the Shangri Las, the Crystals, the Ronett's Big Beehive Music.

Mark had little experience with the sixties girl group sound, but he was intrigued.

His shy, saw spoken demeanor in non confrontational way of discussing music in life allowed Amy to open up.

She started to talk about more than just music.

She even told Mark about the on again, off again relationship she had with Blake Fielder.

Civil Mark knew that being a producer wasn't just about making music.

Sometimes you had to play therapist, as well a prester on Blake.

It had been a whirlwind romance, she said.

Blake had gone back to his ex girlfriend six months later.

Amy was with another right now, but god damned to Blake do a bloody number on her.

After they split, Amy got it bad, real bad, rock bottom bad, drinking all the time bad, and everyone was worried about her.

She laughed just thinking about it.

She explained to Mark how she had been in and out of the hospital and wound up living at her dad's house so he could keep an eye on her.

Mark took it in stride.

He wasn't in the business of judging the people he worked with.

Even if Amy was painting herself as a major league hop mess, he was there to help her pull that pain out and put it down on wax.

You know what else, say, he confessed.

Tried to make me go to Rhea.

Oh yeah, Mark was curious, what did you tell them?

I told him No, no, no, wait, Mark stopped deadness tracks, the attitude, the cynicism, the irony, it was all there herew around the words in his head.

No, no, no, that was that was it.

It was gimmicky hooky.

It was a song and the two decamped to mark stu dio.

Thirty minutes later, Amy emerged with Rehab fully formed, but it was a slow, chugging blues tune.

Mark wanted to make it more pop, make it dance.

Pop didn't sound like a dirty word when it came from Mark's mouth.

He wasn't Simon Fuller.

Mark was actually trying to understand where Amy was coming from, how she heard the tune, how she felt it, just like he had felt the vibrations of the music come out of a speaker at an after hours party when he was a kid.

Mark sat down at the drums, banged out of rhythm, and Amy started strumming in time.

Holy sh it.

She couldn't believe how quickly the song came.

It was like it was there in the room and she and Mark just reached out and grabbed it.

And the other songs came just as quickly.

When Amy returned to the studio the next day, Market built out tracks for the song that will become Back to Black.

It was exactly what she wanted the entire album to sound like.

For three weeks, the duo punched the clock at the studio, along with the punchy support of the dap Kings, Brooklyn's Keepers of the Old School, Soul, Flame, live horns, raw tunes, real music.

Amy sift rum and coke in between vocal takes.

Mark had succeeded improving Amy wrong first impressions be damned.

Mark's first impression of Amy, however, didn't include any red flags that she was struggling.

Her work ethic was much stronger than her reputation.

The two got on like a house on fire.

Songs like rehab played more like tongue in cheek, declarations of independence and desperate cries for help.

In the studio, Amy kept her darkest secrets to herself.

It wasn't just rum and cokes.

Between takes, she gorged herself with food, like she was medicating anxieties with calories.

And then she disappeared into the bathroom minutes and back to the vocal booth.

Her makeup smeared in her appearance pale.

Later, Studio Style First would comment on how Amy would redecorate bathrooms every time she disappeared into one.

In her mind, she was holding it together.

She had it all under control, and no one was the wiser.

The people would get wise and she would lose control.

She couldn't hold it all together on her own, and it would put her life in mortal danger.

Amy Winehouse sat on a beach in St.

Lucia and felt the warm salt air blow against her hair, four thousand miles away from London and its prying eyes, so many eyes in London.

London was more than big brother.

London was big sister and big cousin, and big aunt and uncle too.

It was two thousand and eight and St.

Lucia was planned as a reset of sorts.

After her no show at the Rock on Senne in Paris, her disastrous appearance at Best of All in the Isle of Wight, and that dust up at the Prince's Trust Charity ball.

Amy was in desperate need of a reset for mind, body and soul.

She was determined to get clean.

She was rebuilding herself physically and mentally.

She was seeing things clearly now.

She wanted out of this dog and pony act, and she knew exactly what to do about it.

She hit the paparazzi where it hurt, hit them horror fuckers from see it coming as it stood right now, She could see them coming a mile away, all the way in St.

Lucia, she could still see them, and they were right where she left them back in London.

They were always where she left them.

She went to bed, and when she woke up, and there was that time when she was just trying to pick up a prescription like a normal human being, and they didn't care.

As soon as the taxi pulled up to the curve, they were on her flashes painted the back seat of the cab.

She stumbled out the door and towards her apartment, flanked by a bodyguard, and one of the paparazzi noticed the prescription slipping in his hand.

The temptation was too strong.

It was right there, the extra strength medications Old Wino was taking.

He could not take the shot private medical information.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Amy stormed after the scum, halfway between distress and disorientation, nearly falling down in the process.

Her bodyguard pulled her back towards the door of her apartment.

And they had no common sense, none of them, As if common sense would make any difference, as if after years of hounding her, her assails would finally give up the chase.

And they didn't be on slot of clicks, the onslot of flashes.

They continued point blank, merciless, and they haptured everything.

The disheveled hair, the cracked lips, dry skin, vacant eyes, the mass scare that streaked down her face after an emotional afternoon, her Rah reaction when blake Field, her civil was released from prison and wanted to be sent straight to rehab.

The man she loved and then the man who broke her heart, and also the man who introduced her to Class A drugs, the very same man who inspired the album that ensured she'd never have another private moment in her life, the man she reconciled with and then married, only losing to prison six months later.

Amy was really just a few short years ago.

She was making the best music she'd ever made with Mark ronson I'm Back to Black.

The music they made together liberated her from the heartache that had run her down like a freight train.

Now she couldn't even show her face in public.

She needed bodyguards everywhere she went.

She was a global superstar, and every time she left her home to go to fucking McDonald's there were thousands of pictures to document it.

A little ship Back to Black wasn't just a blessing it was a curse.

She felt the strong hand of her bodyguard grabb her by the shoulder and guide her to the door.

She fumbled with her key.

The endless stream of flashes and clicks continued, and the cameras snapped and snapped, and then Amy snapped.

She rushed the closest creeting with a camera she could find and grabbed his lens.

He pulled it away inside stepped Amy.

She staggered into the street, and then the taunts started.

The paparazzi, Why oh, why no, why no.

They continued to mock her, trying to provoke another explosion, another priceless photo, another story to sell to the Daily Mail.

Amy turned around and surveyed the crowd of cameramen separating her from the front door of her apartment, and he was hopeless.

Her bodyguard ushered her into the nearest calve that he could, and they sped off.

They didn't even have the decency to let her enter her own guy damn home without mobbing her, and that home was now ground zero for the press.

Each morning and each evening, there would be a platoon of paparazzi waiting outside her door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the beehive ballistic missile.

Eventually, people could tell if Amy was in town or not simply by the presence outside her apartment.

Months later, when Amy headed to St.

Lucia and the paparazzi were forced to trail smaller games celebrities, thieves would break into her house and steal a number of personal possessions and guitars, recording equipment, thousands of pounds, all because they knew there was no way Amy was in town if the front of her home wasn't flooded at all hours.

Fuck the one century, you were always in the wrong place and it was always the wrong time.

The dawn of the digital age, the golden age of reality TV celebrity in two thousand and eight was not your father's celebrity.

Jimmy Hendricks and Janice Joplin didn't have to deal with this ship.

The lines between reality and public perception were blurred.

People didn't want to see celebrities living her life that was so high it was out of reach.

They wanted the glamorous stripped away.

They wanted real people, flaws and all, but especially flaws, and in the case of Amy, Wino's people got to see it all.

If she had a bad concert, if she was drunk during the night out on the town, if she showed up with Blake on the street in front of her apartment, bloody and bruised, if she chased down paparazzi, wild eyed and half conscious, is she puffed from a crack pipe.

People couldn't get enough.

They were printing money off of this bullshit, and nearly everyone around heim Me cashed in.

Many in her circle included ensuring the paparazzi would only become more of a nuisance.

It would never really go away.

She just wanted to make music.

All this other ship had him in part of the deal.

It wasn't her vision.

She felt unsafe going about her daily life, so she decided that it was long past time to reclaim her safety, her comfort, her life.

She wasn't going to take it anymore, so she left.

She stayed in St.

Lucia for eight months, and on May one, two thousand nine, she relaxed under a hot sun on a beach while a High court back in London ruled in her favor to grant an anti harassment injunction against Big Pictures.

The leading paparazzi agency in the country.

It was a landmark victory.

The paparazzi were no longer allowed within a hundreds of Amy winehouse.

They weren't allowed to take photos of her in front of her home, and they weren't allowed to photograph her friends and family members without consent for Amy.

It wasn't just a victory, but it was a little fuck you to the industry that had taken advantage of her for years.

She was in control now, and not just over who could and couldn't take her picture.

She was in control of her health, her career, her love life.

She was over blazed.

She was making plans to move out of Campden to the more serene hadley Wood area of Enfield, north of the city.

Her new house, her new life, would be waiting for her when she returned home.

But there was something else waiting for her to and if she looked hard enough, she could see it coming.

We'll be right back after this word word word.

On the first day of the two thousand nine St.

Lucia Jazz Festival, the rain was relentless.

A tropical storm ripped through the island.

The eye of the storm aimed directly at the sight of the concert, hard driving rain, not just tropical, biblical, and the weather was so intense that the first day of the music festival was canceled and by the second day the rain had finally let up that there was another hurricane preparing to bear down on the main stage.

This hurricane wasn't a tropical weather system, but rather the headliner of the festival, the main draw.

The crowd waited eagerly under a bright, eerie full moon, and the hurricane picked up speed backstage.

It was Amy Winehouse's first show since the the Bocle at the festival eight months prior.

The show where she showed up late and left early, the same one where she ordered two cases of Jack Daniels and did her best to consume every last drop of it and under an hour the show book ended a tumultuous two thousand and eight.

That year started off well enough five Grammy wins, but it was all downhill from there or uphill, depending on your point of view.

Amy's beloved Blake was sentenced twenty seven months in prison.

Two bleak videos of Amy and the Libertines Pete Daherty were posted online, and they were high as hell and playing with baby mice like a couple of dirty fingered little kids, though their fingers were dirty with presumably from a crack pipe.

This behavior just added fuel to her ongoing public relations fire.

Amy was arrested three times.

She had lost complete control.

It was now careening towards the predicted oblivion, unfurling in a wild fit.

She was quickly becoming the next tragic chapter in the history of young talent who burned out before their time.

Time to put two thousand and eight in the rear view.

It was two thousand nine, and things were going to be different.

Amy was healthy, She gained weight and was no longer looking dangerously thin.

She had started a yoga regiment, was riding horses, and was bonding with the locals in St.

Lucia.

She had physically moved herself far away from her old haunts, in her old habits.

But old habits, you know what they say, They die hard.

Her demons lingered in the air in her head, and they followed her like a dog follows its master.

She was off jump it.

She was frequently photographed sipping red wine and smoking what one Guardian article described as a strange cigarette.

Come on.

Amy was writing a fine line of control one moment, having it in the next moment not so much.

Her father, Mitch, brought a camera crew to St.

Lucia, claiming that he was making a documentary about his life.

Everyone knew the score.

Though if he needed money, he could provide it.

She just didn't want the constant clicking and flashing of cameras back in her life.

And then she received news that Blake, her Blake, had fathered a child while in rehab.

Fuck, and that one hurt more than she thought it would.

For all the good the island had done her, it seemed Amy couldn't escape her previous life.

She stood backstage at the St.

Lucia Festival, her trademark b I've Hair to Back in all its glory, hovering elegantly over her tattooed arms.

A few stiff drinks took the edge off on what of it.

She thought she'd been drinking regularly again, but she figured out how to keep it under control.

She'd been hospitalized in February for dehydration, but she convinced herself that that had been an adverse reaction to her medication and had nothing to do with the amount of alcohol she was drinking.

Right.

St.

Lucia was in England.

Knew Amy Winehouse wasn't Old Amy Winehouse.

She wouldn't let the same old story be told, not again.

Right.

Her mind and body were healthier, and she was fixing to make sure her career was healthy too.

And that's what she told herself as she knocked back another vodka and coke.

Then she heard the announcer come over the p a, Ladies and gentlemen.

St.

Lucia Jazz Festival introduces Hurricane.

Amy jumped the gun.

She blew onto the stage and blew her Q in the process.

It wouldn't be the only cue she missed that evening.

The drums thutted out a backbeat.

The backup dancers started to groove.

Amy followed their lead, but found herself woefully off beat.

As she turned her back to the crowd and steady herself with a deep breath, she faced them, but no words came out.

She moved the mic stand to the left and then to the right, and she called for the bass players to step forward, and then she shrugged her shoulders and she was completely fucking lost.

Amy swayed back and forth and what the hell was happening?

She had this.

She had it under control, right.

A few nonsensical words scattered to the wind, her mind raced the island, her dad, her blake, rehab rests, the alcohol, and music funk.

That's right.

She was supposed to be performing music, and for a full two minutes she wandered around as the music played, caught halfway between awkward dancing and nearly falling over on stage.

With each step she leaned against the microphone stand.

Her knuckles went white as she gripped the mic and summoned every ounce of energy she had, and finally she found her voice.

Right here we go.

She barely made it through the first song, you know you now, slurring some words and right for getting smothers sarcastic cheers from the crowd, and maybe she wasn't in control after all.

She spied againness on the floor.

She steadied herself for long enough to pick it up, and then steadied herself for a few seconds more and knocked it back.

Hurricane Amy was picking up steam, and so was the weather outside.

A steady rain began to pummel the audience and the stage.

Amy stumbled through two more songs, and the energy and the crowd began to shift.

This wasn't the new Amy wine House they had heard about, the one who got her shipped together, the one staging a massive comeback.

And now they weren't just seeing a rerun of the rundown old Amy Winehouse.

They were getting fucking soaked.

Amy lifted yet another cup to her lips, this time a Voga and coke.

Her mind wandered, she could have been anywhere.

Her head was heavy.

She leaned against the drum riser.

She just needed a moment to rest.

A backup singer pulled Amy off the riser, and she played it off, jokingly flirting with him as she made her way back to the mic and the bewildered crowd.

And then immediately after the next song, the lights went out.

Literally the rain had turned from steady to straight up, the downpour so heavy that it shorted the rigging on stage, and the torrential rain matched Amy's manic, drunken energy.

By the time the lights came back on, Amy had finished her vodka and coke and meandered through an uninspired rendition of tears dry on their own.

It would be a minute before anything at the St.

Lucia Jazz Festival was dry and the entire scene was soaked Hurricane Amy made a downturn.

She walked off the stage in the middle of the next song.

Valerie staggered backstage and retraced her tracks, and there was no real escape from what her life had become, not even on St.

Lucia.

As she sat on a couch backstage, absolutely wasted, she started to understand the unsettling truth.

If she ever wanted to take back control role, she'd have to dry out first.

Amy Winehouse sat with a friend at the bar of St.

Lucia's Cotton Bay Village resort.

Her massive gold hooped earrings peeked out from her dark, luscious curls, day old mask, garraw smeared around her eyes, her clothes hanging from her wiry frame.

She was perched barefoot like some rare bird, the kind the honeymooners and families on vacation and never seen before.

Amy was once again starting to look like things weren't going her way.

One week removed from her complete meltdown at the St.

Lucia Jazz Festival, she wasn't even supposed to be here.

She was supposed to be home in England performing at the Star studded Island Records fiftie anniversary party alongside Bono and the Boys and you too.

But just because she was supposed to be there didn't mean she wanted to be there.

Far from it.

Fucking Bono, she thought, She chuckled to herself as she recalled the Q Awards back in two thousand six.

You two up on stage receiving some bloody award or another, Bono rambling on with another pair of his fucking designer sunglasses.

She sat in the audience and suffered.

He just went on and on, droning like the spoiled prick that he was.

She was beyond fed up, and she let Bonno know it.

She didn't hold back in the whole place hurt her.

Shut up.

I don't give a funk.

She wasn't on some trip to change the world, and she wasn't about to rub shoulders at some namous record label birthday party.

If she wasn't getting ready Forget Island Records.

She was going to keep doing her thing on an actual old island.

She ordered a shot at tequila and trained it.

If she was going to make a comeback, it would be on her terms.

She didn't need to be on stage again, sucking hell.

The Beetles stopped performing live and they turned out all right.

Amy could still hear the booze from the crowd echoing through her mind.

She thought of the years that had passed since she put a record out.

Universal kept rejecting her demos.

They said the songs didn't sound like they would sell eleven million records, like her previous songs dead.

What do they even know about it?

It was the same people who enjoyed listening to Bono rambo on like he was fucking Gandhi.

Amy downed another shot at tequila.

The bartender looked at her anxiously.

It was anyone's guests if she'd walk out of the bar casually or end up on all fours and making a scene, and the bartender placed a cup of hot water in a few tea bags in front of Amy and her friend.

Amy would have been insulted if it wasn't so funny.

She was doing quite well, thank you.

Normally she would have had six shots by now.

Today she'd only had two.

It was nine in the morning.

Like almost everything the past few years, Amy's time in St.

Lucia didn't go according to plan.

She meant for St.

Lucia to be her escape, her detox, her rehab on her own terms.

Most importantly, it was a time to reconnect with herself, to get back to the music in a way from the tabloids and paparazzi.

But they followed her everywhere, and now she was slipping the colt, the pills, the junk that was all out of the picture.

She kicked those habits with the booze that never really went away.

And as Amy tried to sober herself up hours before noon, a wave of anxiety crashed through her mind.

She couldn't trust her fans, she couldn't trust her friends, she couldn't trust her family, her father, her blake, her sweets was gone.

But there was only one thing that truly let her get a away from it all.

Amy reached over the bar grabbed the bottle of tequila.

She knew she wasn't supposed to.

She took a massive gulp and felt the liquor rocket through her body.

Life was beautiful, and it was fucked up, and at times it seemed predestined.

Maybe that was something people just told themselves when they couldn't get the ship under control, Because control, as it would turn out was one thing Amy Winehouse would never regain.

I'm Jake Brennan and this is the twenty seven Club.

Club is hosted and produced by me Jake Brennan for Double Elvis in partnership with I Heart Radio.

Zeth Lundie is the lead writer and co producer.

This episode was mixed by Matt Bowden.

Additional music and score elements by and Spraker and Henry Lumena.

This episode was written by Ted Omo, story and copy ending by Pat Healy.

Sources for this episode are available at Double Elvis dot com on the twenty seven Club series page, talk to me on Social Act, Disgrace Sland pod, and hang out with me live on my Twitch channel Disgrace land Talks.

For more news on your favorite podcast, fallow at Double Elvis on Instagram, Rock rolla, What's up here is