From its very first announcement, Sam Taylor-Johnson's Amy Winehouse biopic Back To Black has been was mired in controversy. It was too soon, some people complained, and too exploitative; others simply asked: “why?”
On the week of its release, the early reviews were just as divided. After the Evening Standard savaged the film, the news editor followed it up by tweeting: “There was genuine office debate on if we could give Back to Black MINUS ONE STAR". But The Guardian went the other way, calling it “an urgent, warm, heartfelt dramatisation… buoyed by an extraordinary lead performance.”
Viewers will now be given the chance to make up their own minds as it hits general release, but as Jack O’Connell – who plays Amy’s former husband and subject of her Back To Black album, Blake Fielder-Civil – reminded people in a recent interview: “This is a reimagination, and it is fictitious.”
With that in mind, there’s some pretty interesting interpretations of parts of Amy’s life played out in the film. So let’s separate some of the fact from the fiction.
The Blake meet-up: fact (mostly)
Amy’s ill-fated romance with Blake, according to the film, starts in the Indie Sleaze-era The Good Mixer, a pub in Camden which had been a famed Britpop scenesters' hangout during the Nineties. They struck up a conversation after Blake won on the races and bought her a drink.
This is gospel, according to him in an interview with the Daily Mail. “We met at a pub called the Good Mixer in Camden," he said. "I'd just had a good win at the bookies so I went to the pub to celebrate, opened the door and Amy was the first person I saw and that was it. And from that night onwards, we began our tortuous love affair.”
He added jokingly-but-probably-not-jokingly: “The drinks were on me for the first and last time!”
That Blake introduced her to the Shangri-Las: likely false
One of the most laughable moments in the film comes when Amy – a woman with a famously encyclopaedic knowledge of Fifties and Sixties tunes and jazz icons – says she’s never heard the Shangri-Las or their song 'Leader of the Pack', which Blake then does a little Drag Race-esque lip-sync to when he plays it in the pub.
As well as the choice of song and the lyrics (“They told me he was bad / but I knew he was sad”) being too on the nose for the situation, it’s also highly doubtful that Blake introduced her to the band, though she did reveal she listened to their song 'I Can Never Go Home' during their breakup, also calling the girl group’s track “the saddest song in the world”.
She also cited the Shangri-Las as an influence for Back to Black and occasionally integrated the hook lyrics from 'Remember (Walking in the Sand)' into the bridge of 'Back to Black' during live performances. But like his character in the rest of the movie, this musical education scene is probably giving Blake way too much credit.
Amy started using Class A drugs on her own: false
In her own lyrics in Back To Black, Amy famously sang “You love blow / and I love puff”. She insinuated that at the time, she wasn’t into harder drugs than weed. As chanted in the film, and according to her dad Mitch Winehouse’s book My Daughter Amy, she always used to say: “Class A drugs are for mugs,” which does probably ring true.
However, while she later became addicted to heroin, in the film she’s shown calling a dealer for the drug and then taking it on her own. In reality, Fielder-Civil said he took “full accountability” for introducing her to it, telling The Jeremy Kyle Show: “I was smoking it on foil and she said 'Can I try some' and I said… I might have put up a weak resistance – the fact is whatever I said she did end up having some.”
That she desperately wanted a family of her own: fact
Amy was obviously a romantic at heart, which is why she got married to Blake – eloping to Miami for a surprise wedding – aged 23, and she previously said that she wanted to have children: “While I love music, I'd really love to have a family and that's the most important thing to me.”
That her father’s intentions were always honourable: debatable
Winehouse is shown telling her former manager, Nick Shymansky, early on in her career that she didn’t need to go to rehab. That's true, as evidenced in her song 'Rehab': “If my daddy thinks I’m fine… I won’t go, go, go”, and Shymansky later explained the full situation in Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy). In Back to Black, a devoted Mitch Winehouse later drops everything to get Amy into recovery.
However, what’s missed out in the film is that while Amy was on holiday in St Lucia in 2009 after rehab, Mitch awkwardly turned up with a camera crew to make a Channel 4 documentary, My Daughter Amy, seemingly without her willing participation.
That news of Blake having a child caused Amy to fatally relapse: false
The final scene of Back To Black shows a sober Amy moving into a new house in Camden, but then is told by a paparazzo that Blake has a new girlfriend and that they had a baby; the inference being that this is the news that causes her to relapse, and then die.
“Completely and utterly baseless, sensationalist implications,” one critic noted in their review. True, and the timings were off: Amy had been dating her new partner, Reg Traviss (never mentioned in the film) for a year at this time; Blake’s baby was born in May 2011; and, unrelatedly, Amy sadly died of alcohol poisoning two months later.
