I NEVER IMAGINED LIFE WITHOUT HER
IT’S a day he’ll never forget. Ten years ago Tyler James returned to the house he shared with Amy Winehouse, his best friend and housemate of nearly a decade, to find an ambulance parked outside.
Upstairs, she was dead in her bedroom.
Two days earlier, he had walked out – again – the latest tactic he’d tried to make her stop drinking. Doctors’ letters were proof that alcohol, on top of the effects of long-term bulimia, would kill her.
“I was running out of ideas,” he remembers.
As usual, she’d called him a day after he left: “You all right, darlin’? T, please come home.”
When he put his key in the door on 23 July 2011, there was a paramedic in the hallway – not unusual because of her relapses. But then another ambulance arrived and another paramedic ran upstairs. This time, something felt seriously wrong.
Amy had been clean of heroin and crack for three years by the time she died. “But she never gets credit for that,” Tyler (39) says.
The paparazzi, permanently camped outside the house in Camden Square, London, and the flats that had preceded it, all of which she shared with Tyler, had recorded everything up to the point of her death: her skeletal frame from bulimia; her heroin highs; her wounds from self-harm; her destructive and often violent relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, the man she married and then divorced, who inspired her lyrics for the phenomenal 2006 Back to Black album; her trademark pink ballet slippers splattered with
