‘Anybody who had Amy in their lives will always be a little broken'

Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace reflects on her friendship with Amy Winehouse one decade after her death

- JOSIE COPSON

I couldn’t get my head around the fact that Amy Winehouse wanted to meet me. I’m not Madonna, I’m just a normal girl who went on Big Brother, while she had this extreme amount of talent. But she kept telling mutual friends and my PR company that she did. I think she just found me amusing from the clips she’d seen and what she’d heard about me.

One night in 2008, our mutual friend was on the phone to her and I was being my usual loud and obnoxious self in the background. I was extra confident because I was drunk, so I chatted on the phone to her and she asked me to go round to her flat.

It felt like the meeting of all meetings, and we spent all night talking about everything and anything. People love or hate me, and she chose to love me. At the end of the night when I was going home, she pulled me away and asked for my number. It was like we’d just had the cutest mate date. The girl who introduced us said, “I’ve never seen her like that with anyone before.”

Amy was kind, gentle and strong. I remember once someone was rude to a waiter, and she told them, “That’s not nice. Don’t talk to them like that.” She was unafraid to call people out, and thought all human beings should be treated with the same respect. She didn’t buy into being a star.