Amy Winehouse (1983-2011)
July 26, 2011
The first sign that a vigil is ongoing in Camden Square comes on nearby Murray Street. Someone has added something to the road-sign in pen: “Amy”, followed by an arrow pointing towards the house in which she lived.
Since her death sometime in the early afternoon of Saturday 23rd July, the small strip of grass opposite No. 30 Camden Square has transformed into a shrine to Amy Winehouse.
Three days after her death, the road is choked with TV vans with vast satellites on their roofs. Spanish students lounge around, hugging one another and making peace signs into iPhones. Cyclists slow down to look at the crowd. Despite the hundred or so people standing around – waiting for something, but quite what it is, no-one seems sure – it’s incredibly quiet.
The main voices to be heard are those of TV reporters – no British ones on the scene by Monday, just American and Australian entertainment stringers filing back reports to unseen studios.
It’s not funereal as such, but there are no MP3 players, no radios, and no one singing any of the songs so intimately associated with the woman whose death has brought them here. Instead, there’s a sullen, hugely respectful line of people filing by the 18ft of mementoes that have collected at the entrance to the park which Amy Winehouse’s home looks directly out on.
The singer’s face beams back from dozens of photocopied photographs taken with fans over the years; with drawings of her famous beehive and thick kohl eyelashes; with handwritten notes; and with the occasional large painting celebrating the icon she’d become some time before her untimely death.
Despite working in music radio for years, I only ever saw Amy Winehouse once – and naturally it was in Camden. Coming down from the private room at the top of the Hawley Arms much too late one Friday night a few years back, I passed her on the stairs, small, tottering on massive heels, resplendent in a clingy black and white checked dress. It wasn’t a special moment by any means – it just seemed like the natural order of things. You went out drinking in Camden every so often and, sooner or later, you’d see Amy Winehouse.
She was one of the few contemporary musical acts to be intimately associated with a specific area of London. Camden and Amy; the two were synonymous. Drugs, vintage clothing, live music, rough boys, late nights, hard drinking – it’s hard to think of another star whose attributes match so exactly the place where they lived.
She was living in Camden when she became both an international star and domestic tabloid dynamite. At the height of her notoriety in 2008, she briefly moved to Bow (leaving Camden was intended to remove her from familiar habit and temptation) but returned after a year, buying the house in Camden Square in March 2010. But as soon as she did, as the Sun put it, “the parasites…crept back in and dragged her into the gutter.”
Three days before her death, her final on-stage appearance was fittingly at the Camden Roundhouse, where she sang with her goddaughter Dionne Bromfield as part of the iTunes Festival. Camden was the melting pot where she created her internationally celebrated work Back To Black; it would also be the last place her majestic voice would ever be heard.
On Thursday, walking back into town after a meeting in Kentish Town, I wandered down Inverness Street. I was thinking of doing an entry on the Good Mixer pub, but there were spits of rain in the air, and I decided I’d postpone snapping away. As I walked back, I noticed one of the stalls in the market had a large airbrushed picture of Winehouse on the back. It read: “Nobody stands between me and my Camden.”
I pondered taking a photo, but as the rain started to pick up, I skipped past and headed for the station.
When I walked back past it today (the record shop immediately behind playing You Know I’m No Good loud enough so that it could be heard by anyone passing by), the stallholder had covered the whole thing with a black sheet. Whether it was a tribute or just to keep the tourists and their pens away from his stall, I don’t know, but it seemed apt.
Further up the road, the probable future of the Amy Winehouse brand was prominently displayed. In the window of Escapade, sandwiched between two Blues Brothers, was the Winehouse fancy dress kit. The tragic story of a phenomenally talented young woman is boiled down to a beehive and a microphone you can wear at a hen party.
The house in Camden Square will undoubtedly become the newest exhibit in the London rock tour, another pilgrimage site filed alongside the residences where Mama Cass and Jimi Hendrix expired.
The graffiti appearing on the road-signs this weekend is just the start.
As soon as the police tape is rolled up, the wall of No.30 is going to be scribbled on by people from all over the world. The residents of Camden Square will have to get used to stepping over half-melted candles and soggy hand-written notes scattered across the square. The house will become as essential a Camden destination as Stables Market and the Electric Ballroom.
Walking round the collection of letters, photos and drawings that celebrate her life in Camden Square, a man in his sixties pointed out a glass of rose to his wife. “She liked a drink, that’s true! She certainly liked a drink!” As he pointed, his voice suddenly cracked and he started to sob.
There is something undeniably moving about the piles of single cigarettes, the half-size bottles of vodka, the nicorette patches plastered onto the trees, and the half-full wine glasses standing up on the grass. It seemed to me like the communal equivalent of everyone getting together in a pub to toast the deceased after the funeral.
It’s just so terribly sad.
There’s nothing else to say.
UPDATE – August 2011
As the days went on, ten of the road signs around Amy Winehouse’s former home (the first photo in this post shows the sign two days after her death) became completely covered in graffiti from fans. The Ham and High reported that four were taken by souvenir hunters, who ignored pleas from Camden Council to return them so they could be passed on to her family.
Camden Council’s environment boss Sue Vincent told the paper: “We are appealling to the good nature and conscience of the person or persons who stole the signs and are asking for them to be returned. We are not concerned with who took them and will not be investigating this if we can get them back. The signs can be returned to any police station in Camden and no questions will be asked. They will then be given to the Winehouse family.”
Pathak’s in Drummond Street
July 5, 2011
While the property at 134 Drummond Street might not look like the place where a revolution would start, what went on inside the building during the 1950s completely changed life in Britain.
Simply put, without it, most of us would never have eaten a curry at home.
In 1956, a Gujurati-born Indian named Lazmishankar G. Pathak left Kenya for Britain. Pathak took the only job he could find – working in the sewers – while his wife Santagaury stayed at home with their six children in Queens Crescent, Kentish Town.
It was in their tiny kitchen that Santagaury started making traditional Indian sweets and snacks to sell to their newly-arrived fellow immigrants, hungry for an authentic taste of home. While the cooking started as an attempt to top up the family’s funds, it didn’t take long for the food to prove so popular that the Pathaks started to struggle to meet the demand.
After a couple of years of selling foods made in their house (their 10-year-son Kirit working as the delivery boy), they opened an Indian grocery behind Euston station in 1958, in the working-class Drummond Street.
In 1962, they changed the name of the shop from Pathak’s to Patak’s – the pronounciation was easier for English tongues. The Pathaks began expanding into pickles (which LG claimed to have invented one day to stop the fruits and vegetables he had over-ordered from being wasted) and pastes of spice and oil, enabling people to quickly produce their own authentic-tasting curries when they arrived home after a long day at work.
By 1978, their products were being stocked by the major supermarkets (where, in the grey days of the late 1970s, they would have seemed unimaginably exotic and unfamiliar to most shoppers), and by the time LG Pathak died in 1997, his firm was become a massive success and a firm favourite amongst the British public. His children eventually sold the family company to Associated British Foods in 2007 for a whopping £200 million.
Patak’s Lime Pickle. I would happily eat this with every single meal.
The London writer Geoffrey Fletcher visited and sketched the Drummond Street shop in 1968, some years before Pataks outgrew its humble origins (and sadly the more elaborate stone facade that once crowned the shop window.)
In Geoffrey Fletcher’s London, he describes a trip inside:
where, in addition to a bewildering assortment of spices, curries and sugar candy, are fresh vegetables flown in from India. Indian sweetmeats, ruinous to the figure but otherwise eminently desirable, are a speciality. These include Rose Halwa, flavoured with roses, and Almond Halwa, and there are two kinds of Barfi – the delicious green made out of pistachio nuts and the plain yellow. There is also the triangular vegetable savory, Samosa, rather like a Cornish paasty, a couple of which with a mug of tea form the Indian working-man’s dinner. Altogether the street has become an Indian suburb.
Today, Patak’s is no longer based in London – they moved out to Lancashire, where they operate the largest Indian food factory in the world – but Drummond Street is still full of the Indian restaurants which came in Patak’s wake.
Every third shopfront seems to be occupied by an Indian restaurant – the Diwana (a veteran vegetarian institution, full with locals on the night I ate there), the Ravi Shankar (opened in 1982, according to its advertising board), The Massala Hut, the Shah, Sizzling Bombay, Drummond Villa Tandoori, Chutneys…a staggering number of Indian food-sellers in such an otherwise short and easily missed street.
The firm’s recent TV ad campaign – starring LG’s son Kirit, the former delivery boy who is now the chairman – had the strapline “Patak’s: Why Britain Loves Curry.” Well, this unassuming shop front in an unlovely stretch of Euston is where that love affair started.
Despite what it looks like in these photos, the shop is still operating as a grocery today – I just happened to snap the shopfront after the owners had locked up for the night. In fact, 134 Drummond Street is still being used in much the same way as it was in 1958, when an enterprising Indian gentleman moved in and completely changed the way an entire nation ate.
Edit: Here’s a photo of the shop during the day, still looking largely the same as when Geoffrey Fletcher visited in 1968.
Darkest London 