Remembering Amy Winehouse: Stars Reminisce About Their Sweet, Lost Friend

Amy and her mother, Janis Winehouse (Getty)Amy Winehouse may have flirted with destruction in both her brief life and her unforgettable lyrics, but in the wake of her death at the age of 27, her friends remember a woman full of warmth, kindness, and heartbreaking fragility. Others have recalled the brilliance of her voice, and the power it held before becoming overshadowed by the weight of her addictions and the cartoonish tabloid life that ensued.



PEREZ HILTON: In the early days of Perez Hilton's website, it was clear that an up-and-coming artist named Amy Winehouse was something of a musicial obsession to him and later, a friend. Reminiscing Satuday, Hilton wrote, "She was clearly troubled, but there was not an ounce of evil in her body. She was not a bad person. She just surrounded herself with bad people."

He continued, "We remember all the times we spent with Amy and the thing she wanted more than anything else in this life was not fame and fortune but somebody to love her. That's a deep desire we had in common and would talk about a lot."

Hilton went on to describe Winehouse's love of music, and the time he ended up having to buy her 10 soul CDs because she'd randomly selected them and her credit card didn't work.

Perez concluded: "And, what we hope for more than anything is… even if people didn't get to know the real Amy Winehouse, like we did, and fall in love with her and her childlike innocence… we hope that what people remember the most is her catalogue of timeless songs."RUSSELL BRAND:  In a post to his website, comedian Brand described his first impressions of a "some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma."

But Brand went on to describe Winehouse as "a f**king genius," describing his first experience with her music passionately and honestly: "I arrived late and as I made my way to the audience through the plastic smiles and plastic cups I heard the rolling, wondrous resonance of a female vocal. Entering the space I saw Amy on stage with Weller and his band; and then the awe. The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie [Holiday] and Ella [Fitzgerald], from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine. My ears, my mouth, my heart and mind all instantly opened. Winehouse. Winehouse? Winehouse!"


MARK RONSON
On July 23, hours after Amy's passing, her frequent collaborator Mark Ronson tweeted,"she was my musical soulmate & like a sister to me. this is one of the saddest days of my life." He has not commented further, but before Amy's death he spoke openly about what it was like to co-produce Back to Black, the album that made Winehouse an international star.

Ronson inadvertently started a row with the British singer when he told Jools Holland, "Working with someone like Amy Winehouse, she would come to me with just a song on an acoustic guitar and then you'd kind of dream up the rhythm arrangements and the track around it, all sorts of things. It's really different, artist to artist."

Winehouse was somewhat bizarrely incensed, and took to her Twitter to announce, "ronson you're dead to me; one album i write an you take half the credit – make a career out of it? don't think so BRUV."

Despite the online anger, Mark always defended Amy, never failing to credit her in his own successes and telling Complex magazine, "[We're] very close now and we're really good friends to each other. Sometimes you hang out with your friends and sometimes you're all about music and business and it can definitely get in the way of friendships, but I imagine when she is ready to make [her third] record, she'll hopefully call me. And if not, we'll still be friends."