Amy Winehouse’s tombstone sits in a quiet corner of a Jewish cemetery in Edgware, close to her family home in Southgate, the north London suburb where she grew up and spent much of her short yet wildly iridescent life. The black marble headstone, engraved with bright pink lettering, is also dedicated to Amy’s beloved grandmother Cynthia Levy, who died in 2006. The pair were exceptionally close and, for all of Amy’s remarkable achievements — in her brutally truncated career she made two bestselling studio albums, was awarded six Grammys and three Ivor Novello awards — at heart she was always a gobby, jazz-loving Jewish girl from north London.
That relationship with Cynthia, herself a jazz singer and a former inamorata of the late saxophonist and club owner Ronnie Scott, is one of the central themes of a new biopic of Amy, Back to Black, released this month, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. It celebrates Amy’s extraordinary life, charting her journey from singer in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra to the louche, chaotic world of pop stardom and paparazzi intrusion. As one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our time, everyone wanted a piece of Amy.
The chaos has continued more than a decade after her death. One posthumous chapter that the film resolutely avoids is the bitter row over the ownership of some of the singer’s most valuable possessions, which has broken out between her father, Mitch Winehouse, 73, and two of her best friends, Naomi Parry, 37, and Catriona Gourlay, 41, and is now the subject of a civil case in the High Court.
Mitch is driving the case against the two women. Last year he accused them both of selling valuable property — principally clothes and other collectables that, he says, belong to the Amy Winehouse Estate, which he administers. The fight is all the more toxic for the fact that Mitch, Catriona and Naomi were once close — all committed to Amy’s welfare at a time in her life when she was especially vulnerable.
Amy was found dead at the age of 27 from alcohol poisoning at her Camden home in July 2011. Many of her closest friends had seen the worst coming — and did their best to rescue her from a drink and drug-soaked oblivion. By way of recognition from the Winehouse family, more than 20 of her friends’ names are also engraved on her headstone.
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Among those names are Catriona, who had been friends with Amy since 2002, and Naomi, who worked for the singer as a stylist and dress designer for five years. They had met at a bar in Soho in 2005, when Naomi was a student at the London College of Fashion.
At the peak of Amy’s fame in the mid-Noughties the three women were inseparable. Amy and Catriona lived together at Amy’s various flats in the Camden area as she began her career.
“Amy had so many complexities in her life,” Catriona recalls. “When Naomi and I knew her, she was a kid confused about her sexuality — and making all the worst decisions with the sort of men she chose to associate with. We were both members of a core group of women around her, who loved her and cared about her. I always said that she and I had a very fluid, nondefined relationship.”
The women spent their days working or studying and hanging out at Amy’s flats in the evenings, or going out in Camden, drinking and playing pool. Later on they would be accompanied by a posse of security guards hired either by Mitch or Amy’s manager, Raye Cosbert. They were there to protect Amy from Amy as much as anyone else.
Naomi — who had her own problems and was in the throes of an abusive relationship — was invited by Amy to move into her first house in Jeffrey’s Place in Camden, which she had bought outright with the proceeds of her first album, Frank, in 2005. Naomi designed a number of Amy’s stage clothes, including the bamboo-motif dress she wore for what would be her final concert — a shambolic gig in Belgrade, Serbia, in June 2011, that Amy was too drunk to complete. Just over a month later she was dead.
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Such was the women’s bond with Amy that they were asked by the family to dress her body for the funeral. In the end that task fell to Catriona and Amy’s friend and PA, Jevan Levy. Naomi could not face dressing the body, but she sorted out what her friend would wear: a leopard-print dress from Dolce & Gabbana.
“We were there with Amy for quite a while,” Catriona recalls. “We did her hair, we did her make-up. I was just a young girl at the time — about the same age as Amy — and I’d never seen a body before, apart from my grandmother’s. Preparing Amy for the funeral was the worst thing I have ever had to do. I knew she would have been absolutely livid if she didn’t have her eyeliner in and her hair done. She would have been fuming. But at least I got to spend time with her and talk to her and tell her I loved her, and I got to give her a last kiss.”
When I speak to Mitch over Zoom about Catriona and Naomi, he gets a tear in his eye. “We were very close to them and loved them both,” he says. “When Amy died I was amazed by what they did for her. I’ll never forget them. It just shows the love they had for Amy and the fact that at that time they wanted to be part of her final journey. And for that I’ll always be grateful to them. I always regarded them as friends.”
That friendship has since soured in a welter of recrimination. In documents submitted to the High Court in London in December, Mitch, as the personal representative of Amy Jade Winehouse (deceased), claims the pair sent “various items of personal property owned by Amy during her lifetime” to two auctions that took place in Los Angeles in 2021 and last year. “By consigning such items for sale in their own names and on their own behalf, the defendants converted the claimant’s property to their own use,” the claim states.
The 2021 auction, solely comprising items associated with Amy, generated sales of $3,230,800, less auction costs and taxes. The second auction was held in 2023 to mop up items that had not sold at the first.
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The claim issued by Mitch is for a total of £732,234. He is seeking just over £534,000 from Naomi and £198,000 from Catriona.
Mitch has always insisted that Naomi was the sole curator of the auction. However, Naomi says that she only assisted with the organisation of the auction. Mitch claims that neither Naomi nor Catriona owned any of the 156 or so items that the women put up for sale. He says he had understood they were only assigning a small number of personal items, with the proceeds to be donated to the foundation — and only found out the scale of what they were offloading after they had been sold.
Naomi, meanwhile, says she was never the curator and that Mitch was well aware of their plans and had not objected. “The estate was completely in control of their sale, inventory and contract,” she says.
Among the items sold at the first auction was the bamboo-motif dress Naomi had designed that Amy wore at that final concert in Belgrade. It sold for $243,200 (£193,000) — 16 times its original estimate, and more than any other item in the sale. A Moschino custom-made bag that Naomi says was given to her by Amy was bought by a collector for more than £150,000. “We had no idea that these items were so valuable,” Naomi says. “And we were astonished and shocked when Mitch launched the legal action. We just didn’t believe it. Amy had given us all those items and they were ours to keep. She would not have minded us selling them at all. They were culturally relevant pieces and the responsibility of looking after them properly was beyond my ability. Museo de la Moda, which bought most of my collection, store their items in temperature-controlled rooms.”
Mitch Winehouse had always loomed large in Amy’s life. A controversial figure, at the height of Amy’s tabloid-propelled fame he was often perceived as self-interested, looking to advance his own showbusiness career. With Amy’s star in the ascendant he started presenting an online television series — Showbiz Rant. When Amy went to St Lucia in 2008 after rehab, Mitch turned up with a film crew to make a reality TV documentary. Amy seemed puzzled and none too thrilled. In 2010 Mitch launched an album of his own. He is not without a rough-hewn charm, frequently given to a glimmer of self-deprecation. After the release of his album he said: “I had a singing career 40 years ago. I was so successful that I became a London taxi driver.” And when it came to the casting of the new biopic, he joked that George Clooney should play him. In the end the part went to Eddie Marsan, perhaps not quite the Hollywood hunk he had in mind.
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The film company acquired “life rights” to make Back to Black and the estate receives a fee as a result. But Mitch had very little involvement in the creative process — for instance, he was not involved in casting Marisa Abela as Amy, and says he had nothing to do with Naomi and Catriona not being featured as characters.
He now spends most of his time administering the estate. In her brief career Amy did earn a lot of money. In 2008 The Sunday Times Rich List estimated her wealth at £10 million, but much of that dwindled. At one point it was reported that she was spending £1,000 a day on drugs and that she once blew £500,000 on a hotel bill in St Lucia. Her erstwhile husband, the sometime jailbird and pork-pie hat enthusiast Blake Fielder-Civil, would regularly tap her up for “pocket money”, and she reportedly spent £1,000 a month on her kittens. She was also generous to innumerable other “friends”.
When she died her parents were left with £3 million after tax — largely the value of the house in swanky Camden Square that she bought towards the end of her life. But millions in royalties since her death have made the estate much more robust. Some of that goes to family members.
“What she did has set her whole family up,” Mitch says. “But a large proportion is used to fund the Amy Winehouse Foundation. About £4 million so far has gone to the foundation and other charities.”
The Amy Winehouse Foundation was set up after the singer’s death to help young people with addiction problems. Principally it pays for Amy’s Place, a residential home for recovering addicts in east London. The family will pay 33 per cent of its income from the new film to the foundation.
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Janis, Amy’s mother and Mitch’s former wife — they split in 1993, when Amy was nine — is also involved in running the estate but has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and leaves much of the day-to-day work to Mitch. His second wife, Jane, is managing trustee of the foundation — effectively honorary CEO. She and Mitch split up in 2023.
When Amy died in 2011 she left no will. By then she was divorced from Blake, who had introduced her to heroin — he didn’t get a penny. All her assets after tax went to Mitch and Janis. Blake, who now lives a quiet life in the north of England, popped up on daytime TV last year to say he would “always carry a burden of guilt” for Amy’s death, but wasn’t solely to blame for her addictions.
Neither Naomi nor Catriona ever received cash “gifts” from Amy, but some of her things ended up in their possession. Mitch insists it came as a surprise to him when they sold them. “After the first auction and when we got the final figure from the auctioneer, he said that Amy and Catriona’s items had sold very well. And I thought, ‘What items?’ ” Mitch says. “They had mentioned some letters from Amy and a picture, but nothing else. We were flabbergasted, to say the least.”
The women, however, say Mitch and the estate did know what they were intending to sell. In September 2021, two months before the first auction, the estate was sent an inventory of more than 240 items, many of which were earmarked for auction. This inventory had been put together for the Design Museum in London for a special exhibition — Amy: Beyond the Stage — starting on November 26, once the auction had concluded. Prospective buyers had been informed that any items they acquired at the auction would remain on loan at the Design Museum for the duration of the exhibition.
The auction catalogue did not address the provenance of the items but the museum inventory did. In it, for instance, Naomi is designated the “lender” — ie the owner —of the bamboo-motif dress and Moschino handbag; Catriona, meanwhile, is the “lender” of a red zip dress worn by Amy at a concert in 2004 and a pair of gold boots worn by the singer for the shoot for the Frank album cover.
This list was emailed to Jane Winehouse and an accountant who was a trustee of the foundation. Jane sent the list on to Mitch. At the time none of the recipients queried Naomi and Catriona’s ownership of the items. A spokesman for the estate tells me that Jane reviewed the list purely to assess whether the items were suitable for display at the exhibition. “She did not consider the ownership of the items. At no stage prior to the auction did Naomi or Catriona disclose to the estate that they were submitting over 150 lots between them for sale in their own names and for their own benefit.”
The auctions were run by Julien’s Auctions, a respected business based in Beverly Hills that specialises in music and showbusiness memorabilia. Naomi originally met Darren Julien, the founder and president, in October 2016. She says she then met Amy’s brother, Alex, and his wife, Riva, to discuss a possible auction of the property Amy had given her, although the couple are understood to deny this.
“I felt it was the right time to sell the things Amy had given me,” Naomi says. “I know she would have been quite happy with that. At that time the dresses were at my mum’s house in Wales — and that house was riddled with moths.”
She also needed the money. “Amy’s death took a heavy toll on me both personally and professionally, and I spent years trying to rebuild my career, living hand to mouth. Most of the items I sold were either my own designs, my own original possessions borrowed by Amy, or items gifted by brands through me that she had decided she didn’t want. This collection sat at my mum’s house for ten to fifteen years and I couldn’t afford to properly insure it or preserve it.”
Did she consider giving some of the proceeds of the sale to charity, or to the Amy Winehouse Foundation?
“As lovely as it would have been to be in a position to donate my proceeds to charity, I had already embarked on a project to celebrate Amy at my own personal expense — a book called Beyond Black [published by Thames & Hudson], which raised significant funds for the foundation and estate.”
A meeting was organised in London at the Century Club in March 2020 and was attended by Mitch, Naomi, Darren Julien and his business partner. Naomi says that at the meeting she told Mitch of her plans to sell the items: he had already also agreed in principle to put items into the auction on behalf of the estate. “He just wasn’t sure what he wanted to sell,” Naomi says.
Julien, too, claims that Mitch was always aware that Naomi and Catriona planned to sell the items Amy had given them. “They asked Mitch if it would be OK for them to sell some of their things,” he tells me. “Mitch was fully aware and fully approved their inventories.” When I put this to the estate, I was told Mitch did not want to comment further on this particular matter.
Julien says he is “appalled” at the litigation brought by Mitch. “I did tell him, ‘I just think it’s wrong what you’re doing.’ That’s the last communication we had. The tragedy of it all is that these are two girls who Amy absolutely loved. It’s just such a pity. I had been talking to Naomi about this stuff for years. I can see why Amy loved Naomi and Catriona. They’re both very genuine people. They truly loved Amy. And this whole thing has been an emotional process for them.”
The dispute between the women and Mitch is not the only source of bad feeling surrounding the auction. There is some confusion over the auction publicity and how much money was promised to go to the foundation. This began with a press release in 2019 that stated: “All proceeds from the auction will benefit the Amy Winehouse Foundation. Every penny received by the estate will go directly to supporting disadvantaged young people.”
Julien says this instruction came from Mitch, but before the auction took place he declared the foundation would receive only 30 per cent. The rest would go to the estate. The estate, meanwhile, blames the auction house for a press release “error”, and says it never intended all of the proceeds to go to the foundation. They say this was amended on the auction website ahead of the sale.
Julien has run his business since 2003. In 2016 he sold the most expensive dress ever auctioned: the gown Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang Happy Birthday to John F Kennedy in 1962. It went for nearly $5 million. He has dealt with a number of estate sales, which he says have all run smoothly. “This is the first time we’ve ever had something like this happen.”
Hundreds of items were cleared out of Amy’s Camden house and kept in a lock-up before being consigned to the auction. But not all the consigned items had been Amy’s property. After her death, fans had travelled to Camden to pay their respects and some had scrawled their names and slogans on street signs. A total of 14 signs were stolen by souvenir-hunters and it cost Camden council £4,000 to replace them. The council offered an amnesty to the thieves; four were returned and the council gave them to the family as keepsakes. The signs — originally funded by the Camden council taxpayer — sold for just under $40,000. Again, Mitch insists that Naomi consigned these items, as sole curator, to the auction but Julien recalls they came from Mitch.
The case may take years to unravel.
Mitch is adamant that the women should hand back the money that he believes belongs to the estate — and could be channelled into funding the foundation. He says that he would like “nothing more” than to drop the case. “But you are talking about nearly £750,000. I can’t imagine for a second that we’re going to be shaking hands on this. Of course I wish we could resolve all this amicably — but I don’t see how we can. They are not going to move. And if we did resolve matters I feel I would be betraying Amy’s legacy.”
He says he went to the police about the case, only to be told that because he had initiated proceedings in the High Court it was a civil matter. I ask Mitch if he wants to see his daughter’s friends sent to jail.
“No, that would be horrible. Crazy.”
If his court action is successful, however, both women are likely to be made bankrupt. They have been crowdfunding their defence, but an unnamed backer has now come forward to assist them financially.
In Camden Square a makeshift shrine commemorating Amy is still visited by fans. Many of them also make the pilgrimage to the cemetery, where they can locate Amy’s headstone on a digital map on a screen. A couple of weeks ago I was there as another funeral was taking place. A young mother was speaking tremulously: “Nothing ever can prepare you for the death of your child.” It was a poignant moment, all the more so because the bereaved mother was speaking just a few yards away from Amy’s headstone. Whatever the outcome of this toxic battle between the Winehouses and Amy’s best friends, it’s important to remember that at its heart lies the tragedy of a prodigiously talented woman who died too young.
