Blake Fielder-Civil, ex-husband of the late Amy Winehouse, has given his first-ever long-form interview. Speaking to Paul C. Brunson for his We Need to Talk podcast, the former music video assistant discussed addiction, the impact of the 2000s tabloids, and why he hopes to “take control of [his] own narrative.”
After meeting in a Camden pub in 2005, Winehouse and Fielder-Civil began a tumultuous relationship, marred by substance abuse and intrusive press coverage. After their relationship initially broke down, Fielder-Civil returned to his ex-girlfriend, and Winehouse wrote her seminal, Grammy-winning album, Back to Black. The pair briefly reconciled before getting married in 2007 and divorced in 2009, following a turbulent two-year marriage. Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning on July 23, 2011, at the age of 27.
Throughout his conversation with Brunson, Fielder recounted his experience of addiction, how he felt the media ‘blamed’ him for Amy Winehouse's death, and the moment he found out she had died.
Here's what we learned from Blake Fielder-Civil's conversation with Paul C. Brunson
When asked by Brunson if he and Winehouse “became addicts together,” Fielder replied. “I know for a fact we did.”
Although Fielder had used drugs in the past, he claimed, his "First actual dependency, where I'm waking up and going, shit, I need to use something to feel normal was around that time, this would have been 2004/5 time.”
When asked whether he feels responsible for introducing Winehouse to “heroin, cocaine and crack,” Fielder began, “I mean, to be fair, you know, back in the day, I would say, Yes, that's me, all my fault."
But, he added, he now feels the “need to defend [himself]”.
“Amy had started trying cocaine with their ex-partner,” he went on, adding, “It was known that Amy had experimented with drugs and it was nothing to do with me.”
However, Fielder was the one to introduce heroin to the singer.
“The heroin was something as I said that I tried, let's say ten times, smoked it over a period of six months with some friends,” he said. "That's where I was at with that. But yeah, the first time she did it was with me, and it was probably my sixth time.”
The pair married in 2007 shortly after the release of Winehouse's Back to Black album, which sent her skyrocketing to new levels of fame, exacerbating their addiction issues. “It was so strange waking up and knowing that there's a hundred outside people waiting to take a photo of your sneezing or looking a bit bedraggled so they can say horrible things about you,” he said of the 2000s tabloid culture.
The pair, he alleged, often had conversations about wanting to get clean together, he said, but drug use became their way of feeling “normal” in their day-to-day lives amid Winehouse's massive fame.
They were also part of the early 2000s phone hacking scandal. “We got our phones hacked," he said. “Yeah, I got interviewed by the police years ago about having our phones tapped, which is crazy.” Shortly after Winehouse's death in 2011, reporter Charles Lavery claimed that Winehouse and Fielder's phones were often tapped and that the information was used to preempt when Winehouse would arrive at various rehab clinics, so that photographers could wait outside to get pictures of her entering or leaving treatment.
Fielder and Winehouse divorced in 2009. During and after their marriage, Fielder spent several stints in prison. In 2006, he was sentenced to 27 months for attacking a pub landlord in Hoxton, East London and attempting to bribe the victim. In June 2011, he was sentenced to 32 months for burglary and possession of an imitation firearm.
According to Fielder, he and Winehouse remained close following their divorce in 2009. Although they didn't spend lots of time together and she had a new boyfriend at the time of her death, they had, he claimed, discussed the possibility of getting back together.
“Just before I got told that Amy passed away, the last letter that I received was Amy […]said, 'Me and you, let's really, really give it a go as friends,'” he recalled. “And I said, 'Let's do it, we'll always be friends.'”
However, he said, a few weeks earlier, they had been discussing “should we get back together?”
“We tentatively talked about it,” he said. "And then she decided you know what? Yeah, cool it. So I was like, ‘Okay that’s cool.’ And then she obviously never got that letter.”
“The week Amy passed, I was in jail, unfortunately, we were still very much talking about the possibility of reconciling again,” Fielder said on the podcast.
“It's quite something to be — not only to lose a part of yourself, your best mate let's say, someone you loved and still was intentionally close to — lose that person, be blamed for it, mourning alone in jail, ostracised in the press — as in, like, it's his fault,” he recalled of the period that followed Winehouse's death.
Fielder claims he fell back into addiction issues as a result. “It took me a long time to get out of that and to give my head a real good shake — to look at myself.”
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As for his motives for coming on Brunson's podcast, he explained that he hoped to reclaim his narrative, as he still feels blamed by the media for Winehouse's death.
“I'm never, ever here to say, ‘Hey Amy was bad, you know,’ Not at all. But I know Amy wouldn't want me to still be sat here 20 years later saying, ‘It was all my fault,’" he said. "She'd be saying, ‘Get it right babe, come on, tell them the truth.’ We were just young addicts at the time. We weren't to start with and then we were and it could happen to anyone.”
He also claimed that when it comes to the question of who should shoulder the responsibility of Winehouse's death, the people who surrounded Winehouse at the time of her death should bear some of the blame. He also claimed that Winehouse had agency of her own.
He added that he believes they “would still be in each other's lives now” if she were still alive. “You know, I would’ve met her today for a drink or a coffee, whatever.”
Towards the end of the conversation, Fielder reflected on what he would say to Winehouse today. He would want her to know “that I'm doing well, that I'm happy, that I'm clean. That would mean everything to her.” He added, “I cannot live in the past.”
"I’m not going to limit myself to perfection, because what is perfect?”"
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