GARGANTUAN LOSS –
May 29, 2021 – That was how I found myself invited to dinner with the neighbours. People were asking about Amy. I tried to hold everything in but I got upset. It was Jagger who comforted me. ‘Don’t worry, man, she’ll be all right. People in that world go through this sort of thing.’ I’d never met any of these people before. All I knew was Mick was a rock star who’d been through everything, who knew all about drugs and fame. He was saying to me: calm down, this is normal, Amy’s a rock star, too, and this is part of the process.
He spelled it out: when all of a sudden you’re the most famous rock star in the world, everyone goes through what Amy’s going through. Of course she’s on heroin, of course she’s all these things – but she’ll come out the other side and there’s nothing to worry about.
Mick had seen it all, I thought, and now here we were in the Caribbean, eating steak in a millionaire’s beachside mansion. So that’s where Amy will be one day, too, sitting on an island looking back and saying: ‘I remember when…’
I held on to that. It felt like a very long time since anything had been normal, but it actually wasn’t much more than three years.
In the summer of 2004, when Amy had been touring her first album, Frank – she was not a star yet, just a talented girl with a record deal – it had felt like the time of our lives.
We had been friends since our early teens, and we were now in our early 20s and embarking on our music careers. There has been no other time in my life that was as carefree as those days. It was epic. It was funny. Most of all, there were no problems.
