Fifteen years after Amy Winehouse’s devastating death at 27, the man the public vilified is finally telling his side. Blake Fielder-Civil, now 43, sat for his first long-form interview since the singer’s 2011 passing, breaking a silence that lasted nearly a decade and a half. The conversation, spanning over two hours on the “We Need to Talk” podcast, confronts the question that haunted him for years: is he responsible for the death of one of music’s most iconic voices?
Fielder-Civil acknowledges he played a role in Winehouse’s downward spiral but draws a firm line at full responsibility. “I’ve made my peace with the fact I had a part to play,” he says. “But there’s one thing aside from everyone else that also had a role to play. Amy herself had agency. That is in no way at all disrespecting her by saying that, but Amy did what she wanted to do.” He points out that her addiction worsened while he was incarcerated for a bar fight, arguing that removing him didn’t solve the problem.
The narrative that Fielder-Civil introduced Winehouse to drugs has followed him for two decades. He challenges it directly, claiming the singer experimented with cocaine before they ever met. “There are pictures of Amy at the Brits with powder up the nose,” he says. “It was known that Amy had experimented with drugs and it was nothing to do with me.” He does admit to introducing her to heroin but insists he never forced anything. “I never blamed a person that gave me drugs for the first time. Do these people think I forced Amy to do drugs? That’s just not what happened.”
Their love story began in a Camden pub around 2001, a game of pool sparking something neither could walk away from. The Back To Black album documented their first breakup, but they reunited and married in 2007. Fielder-Civil describes their connection as something separate from the chaos. “Our love had nothing to do with addiction, and addiction had nothing to do with our love. That’s where it went. It wasn’t who we were.”
At the time of Winehouse’s death from accidental alcohol poisoning, Fielder-Civil was serving time for burglary and firearm possession. He learned the news from prison officers after trying to call her twice that day. “My first thought was, this is my worst nightmare,” he recalls. “I burst into tears.” He couldn’t attend her funeral. The couple had spoken days earlier about reconciling, making the loss even more devastating.
Now sober and in a healthy relationship, Fielder-Civil believes Winehouse would want the full truth told. “I’m never here to say Amy was bad. But I know Amy wouldn’t want me to still be sat here 20 years later saying it was all my fault. She’d be saying, ‘Get it right, babe. Come on. Tell them the truth.'” The interview represents his attempt to do exactly that, control his narrative, acknowledge his failures, and finally let the public see beyond the villain they created.
