At Her Final Concert, Amy Winehouse Wept and Hugged Herself While the Audience Booed

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At Her Final Concert, Amy Winehouse Wept and Hugged Herself While the Audience Booed

A disastrous Belgrade comeback show became Amy Winehouse’s last, weeks before her death at 27.

She’d just come out of rehab and begged to perform. On stage in Belgrade she forgot where she was, handed her songs to the backing singers, and stood there holding herself as 20,000 people turned on her.

A heavily tattooed woman with disheveled dark hair hugs herself while singing into a microphone on a stage lit in pink and purple.
Belgrade, June 18, 2011: Amy Winehouse stands at the microphone, arms crossed and hugging herself, during what would prove to be her last-ever concert. Photo by Brian Rasic / Getty Images.

The June 18, 2011 show at Belgrade Fortress was meant to launch a 12-date European comeback tour, Amy Winehouse’s first real return to the stage after years of limited performances. She arrived nearly an hour late and visibly intoxicated, weeks after a stay at London’s Priory clinic for an alcohol assessment that came with strict orders not to drink.

Three-panel photo of a tattooed woman on stage: left panel shows her head bowed with arms crossed, center shows her hugging herself at a microphone, right shows her covering her face with both hands.
A triptych captures three raw moments from Winehouse’s Belgrade show: head bowed with arms folded, embracing herself before the mic, and finally covering her face with both hands as the performance unraveled. Photo by Brian Rasic / Getty Images.

Roughly 20,000 people had paid €40 to €45 a ticket, a steep price in Serbia where monthly wages ran around €300, and many had traveled from neighboring countries. She mumbled through lyrics, sang only strained fragments of songs, stumbled across the stage, took off one of her shoes, threw down her microphone, and left the stage several times while her band and backing vocalists carried the set.

Fans photograph a handmade Amy Winehouse memorial poster at a tree shrine in north London, with flowers and balloons marking the 10th anniversary of her death.
Fans gather around a tree shrine near Amy Winehouse’s former north London home on July 23, 2021, marking exactly a decade since her death, with handmade tributes, flowers, and balloons reading “10 Years On.” Photo by Tolga Akmen / AFP via Getty Images.

Then she led a “startled backing dancer” through Valerie and gave up halfway through Just Friends to introduce the band, whose names she struggled to remember. At points she thought she was in Athens or New York.

The boos grew louder as the night went on. Some fans threw paper cups; others walked out. Serbian daily Blic called it a scandal and “the worst concert in the history of Belgrade.” Even Serbia’s defence minister, Dragan Sutanovac, weighed in publicly, calling the show “a huge shame and a disappointment.” Moby, who performed after her that same night, said publicly that he hoped the people around her would step in. The rest of the tour, dates in Istanbul, Athens, Spain, Switzerland, Italy and more, was pulled within days.

Just over five weeks later, on July 23, 2011, she was found dead at her home in Camden, London, from accidental alcohol poisoning. Empty vodka bottles were in the room, and her blood alcohol level was 416 mg per 100 ml, more than five times the UK drink-drive limit. She was 27.

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