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reionne Bromfield leans over the screen as we speak on Zoom, recounting the moment 10 years ago she received the news that would change her life forever. On a sunny July day, the 15-year-old singer was waiting to take the stage. She supported boy band The Wanted on tour in Wales, the backstage atmosphere sparkling with energy before each concert. However, on this day, something was wrong. People were unusually quiet and no one would meet his gaze. Finally, she was told something was wrong: “It’s Amy.”
Amy Winehouse, whose remarkable and all-too-brief career ended with her death ten years ago this month, had been the teenager’s godmother, friend and mentor. Winehouse had nurtured Bromfield’s nascent vocal skills and helped her break into a notoriously competitive industry. For years after her death, Bromfield couldn’t listen to Amy’s music, let alone think of her. After two albums and a stint presenting the CBBC Friday Download show, the singer who had been labeled by many as one to watch and performed live on TV with Winehouse, moved away from music.
“You don’t know if you really want to go back,” Bromfield, 25, says of the time around Winehouse’s death. “Talking about it has seemed almost impossible to me over the past nine and a half years. I felt like I didn’t want people to see me as weak ”. However, she recently changed her mind. After years of keeping it all together, Bromfield made a TV documentary on Winehouse to address her grief (it’s one of two on the singer this month; a BBC film looks at her life through the eyes of his mother, Janis).
Amy Winehouse and Me is a sweet, moving take on the fairytale situation Bromfield found himself in when Winehouse took her under his wing and her belated efforts to mourn. He also sees Bromfield aiming to return to the Roundhouse in Camden, north London, the historic location where Winehouse made his last public appearance alongside him. It was the last time Bromfield saw her alive. “Everything felt really, really good,” she recalls. “I told her that night, ‘I’m so grateful for everything you’ve done for me.’ I had never, never said this to her before – I thought she knew it. But that night, precisely, I felt the need to say it. And I’m so glad I did. Three days later, Winehouse was found dead. 27 years old.
The effects have spilled over into Bromfield’s life ever since. She didn’t sing for several years and got into a difficult relationship. Although she says she was not depressed, she had “very weak times”. Friends felt like she was holding back from them. Making a documentary might seem like a publicity take, but, listening to Bromfield, it seems like she needed something like that to force her to address the very public, but unspoken trauma she experienced.
Bromfield was six when the two met. Winehouse had befriended Julie Din, Bromfield’s mother, through the North London Jewish community. “My mom was older than her, but I think Amy liked the fact that she was a strong woman,” she says. “She tried to keep a lot of women like that around her.” As a brash 22-year-old, Winehouse was already larger than life (although it took a while for her to be truly famous) and fell in love with Dionne. She loved being the subject of Amy’s laser focus: “If Amy really loved you, she would invest in you.”
For Winehouse, Dionne’s childish honesty was an escape from the yes men with whom she worked; as a pre-teen, Dionne didn’t care much about Winehouse becoming a celebrity. “It would be like, oh, Amy is on TV, whatever,” she said. “I was only really interested in the Amy I saw in the house – the normal Amy, the Amy who would count down and try to do the numbers.” The couple would go for a walk, hang out in the garden, and cook together, with varying degrees of success. “She loved to cook. If you could get her to finish what she was cooking – because keeping her in one place was pretty hard – then oh, my God, everything would taste amazing. Then she would add two more seasonings, and you’d be like, oh, okay, that’s not very good… ”
As odd as the idea of Amy Winehouse watching television during the day may be to those of us whose memories of her are inextricably linked to clichés of distraught paparazzi and well-documented drug use, Bromfield says she brought out the singer’s maternal instincts. She remembers a rare disagreement over a £ 9 ankle bracelet Bromfield bought. “She said to me, ‘You can’t wear that, you’re too young,’ because of some old tale or something, I don’t know. She was just like, ‘You don’t wear it. ! ‘ Bromfield relented, but asked Winehouse to give her the £ 9.
When Bromfield first became interested in music, Winehouse took on the role of mentor and eventually signed the teenager with his young record company, Lioness. “She would give me assignments – she would tell me, ‘Listen to this song. And the next time I see you, I want you to tell me three things that you learned while listening to it ”, be it the lyrics, the melody or something about the artists. Winehouse continued to guide her through the pitfalls of the industry, ones she herself had not always avoided. By signing Bromfield, she was able to protect her from the worst and offer advice Winehouse perhaps wished she had. She also protected Bromfield from the worst of his addictions. “I’ve never seen her drunk,” said Bromfield. “Never.”
Somehow, on that July night, Bromfield took the stage. “I don’t think I really processed what I was just told. I remember thinking, Amy wouldn’t want me to be on the brink, I’m here now, so let’s do it. I just stayed there – I’m even surprised to remember the lyrics to my songs. It was a long way from three days earlier when Winehouse and Bromfield had danced and laughed together in front of the Roundhouse crowd in Camden. Over the next few months, Bromfield says she “just existed”, keeping her true feelings hidden. In the documentary, she visits her former manager, Sylvia Young, who tells her that she hasn’t been as successful as she thought. “She told me that that year [I had become] very serious, ”she said. “That I had lost a little of my carefree side for me. It was weird to hear that because I thought everything was under control. I thought no one could see.
Bromfield isn’t sure why she was so determined not to talk about Winehouse “to the point that even someone told me her name, I would just shut up”, but thinks that was in part because she was questioning them. people’s intentions and feared were looking for juicy details rather than caring about her or Winehouse. For a while, she felt very angry when people tried to tell her how much of a fan they had been. “It’s not like a normal death where it’s private. It’s a public thing, ”she said. “I think it was that everyone wanted to know, which made me try to keep as much as possible to myself.”
She talks to various people in the film: a bereavement counselor, a support group for people who have lost loved ones to alcohol and drug addiction, and Amy’s personal assistant, Jevan Levy, who was with Bromfield in Wales when the news broke. You can almost feel the weight on Bromfield’s shoulders as she realizes that they’ve been going through similar feelings for 10 years. She tells Levy that she wishes they had spoken sooner.
“It’s crazy to me that the easiest thing to do to overcome this is just to talk,” she said. “All of this could have been avoided by talking. “ At the start of the film, Bromfield says her world fell apart when she heard the news from Winehouse. Finally, it seems, she can begin to remember the good times.
Amy Winehouse and Me: Dionne’s Story will air on MTV UK, Monday July 26 at 10 p.m.
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