On June 18, 2011, Amy Winehouse walked onto a stage in Belgrade, Serbia, as part of a European tour that had been booked for a period when the people closest to her had serious reservations about whether she was in a condition to perform. The Belgrade concert was the third date of the tour. The first date, in Belgrade three nights earlier, had been cancelled. The second date was the Belgrade show that has been documented in footage that circulated widely afterward and that has become one of the most painful documents in the history of live music — not because of anything dramatic or violent or obviously wrong but because of the specific quality of wrongness in the footage, the specific way in which the person on stage was not fully present in the place the performance required.
Winehouse’s manager and the people around her have described the period leading up to the Belgrade show with the specific helplessness of people who understood what was happening and could not stop it — not because the logistics prevented intervention but because Winehouse’s will, in the direction she was moving, exceeded what the people who loved her could redirect. She wanted to perform. She had said she wanted to perform. The people who knew her best had learned, through years of experience, the specific futility of attempting to override her when the will was engaged.
The show began. The footage shows Winehouse at the microphone — the voice, which had been one of the most celebrated of her generation, not locating itself in the way that it had always located itself, the control that had made the recordings so extraordinary not present in the same way in the room that night. The audience response was documented in various accounts as confused — some booing, some cheering, most of the people who were there describing the specific disorientation of watching someone they had come to hear in full voice performing at something well below that level while occupying the same physical space.
She was helped offstage. A statement was released. The remaining tour dates were cancelled.
Her manager Raye Cosbert has said in subsequent interviews that he knew before the show started that something was wrong — not in the general sense of the concerns that had surrounded the tour’s booking but in the specific sense of what he saw when he looked at her in the hours before she was due to go on. He has said he did not know what the right thing to do was and that the specific weight of that uncertainty has not left him in the years since. He has said he has asked himself the question that people who were around her ask themselves with a consistency that suggests the question does not have a satisfying answer.
She died five weeks later on July 23, 2011. The cause of death was accidental alcohol poisoning. She was 27. The Belgrade footage exists. Most people who loved her music have watched it once and not watched it again. The footage of the shows that preceded it — the peak performances, the recordings that captured what her voice actually was — is the thing that her collaborators and her fans return to when they want to remember what she was. The Belgrade show is the one that shows what the cost of what she was actually looked like from the outside.