How to define the relationship Catriona Gourlay had with the singer Amy Winehouse? Best friend doesn’t quite cut it somehow. Companion doesn’t convey the trust and love they shared. Or the bed, for that matter. Catriona uses the word ‘multifaceted’, perhaps because it is least likely to offend Winehouse’s fans.
Yet, it’s clear that the relationship between these two women – which began even before Amy was famous – was intense, intimate and it lasted until the end, even beyond.
It speaks volumes that it was Catriona, numb with grief, who helped lay out Amy’s body for burial after she was found dead in her London bedroom in 2011, at the age of just 27. Catriona, now 43, tells us she had shared that bed with Amy just a few days earlier, perhaps the last person to do so. She is in tears as she remembers liaising with Amy’s hairdresser that final time, as they all prepared her for her coffin.
‘I was so conscious that I didn’t want anyone else touching her,’ she says. ‘Also, if her hair wasn’t massive, we would have been haunted for the rest of our days.’ In the months that followed the funeral, Catriona came to see Amy’s dad, retired taxi driver Mitch, 75, as a ‘father figure’ while he described her as being like a ‘daughter’, one he ‘loved’.
She and another of Amy’s great friends, stylist Naomi Parry, who picked out the leopard-print Dolce & Gabbana dress Amy wore in that coffin, would regularly have dinner with Mitch on his birthday and to mark the anniversary of his daughter’s death. Their role in Amy’s life was never in doubt. Their names are among those inscribed on her headstone.
Imagine Catriona’s devastation, then, when Mitch turned on them, launching an extraordinary High Court action after they sold some items that Amy had given them. Claiming they had ‘deliberately concealed’ the sales, and that the proceeds should be given back to Amy’s estate, he sued. They countered.
The legal fight has gone on for over four years, and has left Catriona – who sold the items to raise money for IVF – in bits. To be so publicly accused of betraying her friend, and to lose a ‘father’ has been devastating.
She should be feeling vindicated today. Two weeks ago, Mitch Winehouse lost the case, with Deputy High Court judge Sarah Clarke describing him as someone who ‘likes to dominate people and situations’. She called him an ‘unreliable witness’, concluding that there was no evidence that Catriona and Naomi were anything but loyal friends of Amy’s.
Amy Winehouse and Catriona Gourlay leaving a London restaurant on a night out in 2010
A candid snap of Catriona and Amy at home – Catriona called their relationship ‘multifaceted’
This is Catriona’s first interview about the debacle, but there is no sign of triumphalism. This is a woman almost destroyed. She tells us she has lost her university job in Brighton because of the stress of the court case, has been unable to proceed with her IVF dream, and is facing bankruptcy.
‘I suffer from anxiety and this was my worst nightmare. The whole point of doing the auction was so I could have IVF. I never would have parted with anything so precious to me [the dresses Amy gave her] otherwise.’
She explains that a health scare in 2020 had raised doubts over her fertility, so despite dating at the time, she decided to ‘go it alone’ to become a mum. She had already started on the IVF journey in Brighton, but withdrew because of the mounting stress of the legal action, which was launched in 2021. Now, she feels it is too late.
‘I will never be a mum,’ she says. ‘There is nothing in the world that can compensate me for that.’ It’s not as if the sums involved had made her rich, either, as she points out, when we meet at a pub in Margate near her home. Although it was widely reported that the contested auctions in the US had made £2.4 million, Catriona denies pocketing anything like that.
‘I made £153,000 from the auction before tax. A lot of my items sold for underneath the threshold, just a few hundred dollars.’ Then there is the emotional damage. She addresses what it felt like when her ‘father figure’ Mitch told the High Court he loved her and saw her as a daughter.
‘That was one of the worst moments. How can you say that to someone across a courtroom knowing what you’d done to them? He also winked at Naomi, which was wild.’
Now she wishes she’d never sold Amy’s dresses – but points out that back in 2021, the items were in storage and needed ‘looking after’.
‘I didn’t want to sell my collection, but these were things Amy handed to me that were being stored in a trunk on my mother’s landing in Wiltshire. They needed looking after and they needed insuring. I wish I hadn’t done it now. It’s ruined my life.’
Catriona’s account of her relationship with Amy – told in full for the first time today – is illuminating. For while the singer achieved worldwide fame for songs lamenting her toxic relationships with men, most famously her drug-addicted husband Blake Fielder-Civil, it was her relationships with women, Catriona front and foremost, that underpinned her life.
Catriona tells us she last spoke to Amy on a Skype call the night before she died, laughing about Catriona having taken her dog to work with her, making plans to go to the cinema the following week to see the final Harry Potter movie.
Amy and Mitch out shopping in central London – Catriona described how Mitch also felt like a ‘father figure’ for her
Catriona said after her meltdown in Belgrade, ‘Amy was talking about trying to get better and she hadn’t done drugs in ages’
She’d actually spent much of the previous day with Amy, having taken leave from her management consultancy job. They did the ‘ordinary things’ that Amy, away from the cameras, loved to do. Modest things like enjoying a KFC meal, and watching TV.
‘I took a day off work because I wanted to spend a day with her. We just stayed in bed all day and had chicken nuggets, which the security [guard] went to get for us.
‘We watched some films in bed and it was really nice.’
Catriona recalls feeling positive about the future. While the famously troubled Amy had been devastated by her public meltdown on stage in Belgrade the previous month – slurring her way through her songs – on that day, she seemed to be in good spirits.
‘That’s the really sad thing,’ Catriona says ‘because I thought she was finally coming out the other side. She was so mortified about what happened in Belgrade and she was starting to look a bit healthier. Amy was talking about trying to get better and she hadn’t done drugs in ages. I had cut out all the partying and drinking and Amy kept saying, “I’m so proud of who you are now.” ’
That was a theme of their relationship, Catriona insists: women supporting women. It wasn’t just her. Amy had a strong, supportive female friendship group.
‘We were all making a concerted effort for her and that’s what really hurts when you see people writing stuff like, “Where were her friends?” You have no idea how much went on behind the scenes, how a core group of women were always there for her, arguably to the detriment of ourselves.’ Fans know all too well what happened next.
Shortly after 3pm on July 23, Amy’s bodyguard found her unresponsive in the bedroom of her Camden Square home, three empty vodka bottles nearby. The coroner later recorded a verdict of death by misadventure.
‘It was the worst day of my life,’ Catriona recalls.
Theirs was a long friendship. Catriona, a privately educated aspiring actress, was working in a vintage store on Brick Lane in East London in 2002, when she was introduced to Amy through a mutual friend.
Just a year apart in age, they quickly became inseparable, hanging out together, even – three months after meeting – moving into a flat in Camden together.
‘We developed a very intense, obsessive friendship from the start. We both wore our hearts on our sleeves. She would say, “They don’t make girls like you any more.”
‘Living together was nuts, our flat was chaotic. Clothes absolutely everywhere and me and Amy were two whirling dervishes. She’d sing around the flat – it sounded better than anything ever recorded.
‘She was a very loyal friend and would go completely bobcat at anyone that just looked at me in the wrong way. We would fight. It wouldn’t happen often, but we would have a proper barney and then it would all be over.’
The Amy she knew was not the same as her media image. ‘Obviously there were some late nights, but she was also an incredibly homely person. She didn’t want all that [fame] anyway. She wanted to be a mum.’
As did Catriona. ‘We were like blood we were so close. We lived in each other’s pockets 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s my fondest point in my life. Until Blake came along.’
Were they having a sexual relationship, though? The suggestion has been there since Catriona appeared on the BBC’s 2021 Reclaiming Amy documentary, opening up about what she called their ‘fluid’ relationship.
Catriona is careful here. Back then her comments angered fans who claimed she had ‘outed’ Amy by relating how the star once told an interviewer: ‘I’m not a lesbian until I’ve had three sambucas.’
Yet even Mitch seemed fine with the idea of Catriona and his daughter having a sexual relationship. ‘If they had that kind of relationship, I have no objections,’ he said.
Today Catriona will only say that it was a ‘multifaceted’ relationship and that she doesn’t want it to be portrayed as ‘sordid’. ‘It’s hard to describe. The reason I spoke [in the documentary] was because I wanted to say that the men in her life had put themselves front and centre of her story.
Mitch Winehouse launched a High Court action after friends of Amy sold some items that she had given them
‘And while she wasn’t treated very well by men, there was a core group of women that loved her in every way and thought she was amazing, gorgeous and super-hot.
‘It was quite obvious Amy wasn’t straight. She’d alluded to it a fair amount. In the film, I said we had an undefined relationship. I never mentioned anything physical.’
What did Amy’s parents believe about their relationship.
‘I think Mitch knew,’ Catriona said, adding that after Amy died, her mum Janis asked a friend: ‘Is it true Amy and Cat were involved?’
What is clearer is that when Fielder-Civil walked into Amy’s life, it was devastating for Catriona. There is no love lost there. She watched, horrified, as Amy fell for Blake, having his name tattooed on her chest. They married in 2007 and divorced two years later, their toxic relationship inspiring her album Back To Black.
‘I was against the relationship from day dot. The problem with Amy was, you’d tell her not to do something and she would go the other way. One day she turned up at my work and said, “Cat, you’re right, I’m not going to get the tattoo.”
‘I said, “Thank f*** for that.”
‘She then said, “Joking” and lifted up her top.’
Blake is frequently blamed for getting Amy hooked on crack cocaine and heroin. He has always denied being responsible, saying they started using together. Whatever the truth, she beat her drug addictions before her death.
Catriona says a greater burden on Amy, towards the end, was feeling forced to perform songs that trapped her in that despair.
‘Back To Black started to feel like a millstone around her neck. Had Amy written more songs – which she was doing – it would have reinvigorated her.’ Catriona insists Amy would have been ‘absolutely devastated’ by her dad taking his legal action.
She recalled: ‘Mitch and I became closer after she died. I felt sorry for him. In hindsight, I realise who he is and what he has done, but I was always trying to be empathetic and say he is a cab driver whose daughter has become the most hounded woman in the world.
‘He wasn’t equipped to understand what was going on. That’s the angle I came at it from.
‘I know that if Amy had been alive the legal action wouldn’t have happened.’
If she had lived, things would be very different all round. She reveals Amy wanted to go travelling, raising the prospect she could have quit showbiz altogether. And that other dream they shared?
‘I’m convinced we would both be mums by now,’ she says.