Amy, My Daughter

Amy, My Daughter Mitch Winehouse As an artist, she had few peers. Her lyrical prowess and timeless contralto vocals made her an instant revelation when her debut album Frank was released in 2003. And as her star continued to rise it became evident that this seemingly delicate girl from north London was much more than just a precocious talent.Genius, inspiration, icon; there are many ways to describe Amy Winehouse, but it was her wit, charm and lust for life that cemented her place in the hearts of her fans.Here, using exclusive extracts from his own personal diaries, Amy’s father and confidant Mitch celebrates what influenced his daughter. Documenting her early years from Sylvia Young to the Brit School, and the darker side of her life as she struggled to cope with her addictions under the glare of the media spotlight, he gives new insights.With never before seen photos, notes and drawings, this book brings together the many layers of Amy’s life – the personal, the private and the public – to create an honest and intensely moving account of the life of the most talented recording artist of her generation. AMY MY DAUGHTER MITCH WINEHOUSE All author proceeds from this book will be donated to the Amy Winehouse Foundation. The Amy Winehouse Foundation has been set up in Amy’s memory to support charitable activities in both the UK and abroad that provide help, support or care for young people, especially those who are in need by reason of ill health, disability, financial disadvantage or addiction. www.amywinehousefoundation.org (http://www.amywinehousefoundation.org) Dedication (#uf17f966f-0d90-50ab-b238-fb1dc464ab5e) This book is dedicated to my father Alec, my mother Cynthia and my daughter Amy. They showed me that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Love transcends even death. They will live in my heart forever. Contents Title Page (#ua61cf549-c923-58bf-983b-a48ad0f65690) Dedication BEFORE WE START THANKS, AND A NOTE PROLOGUE 1 - ALONG CAME AMY 2 - TAKING TO THE STAGE 3 - ‘WENN’ SHE FELL IN LOVE 4 - FRANK – GIVING A DAMN 5 - A PAIN IN SPAIN 6 - FADE TO BLACK 7 - ‘RONNIE SPECTOR MEETS THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN’ 8 - ATTACK AND THE ‘PAPS’ 9 - HOOKED 10 - A BROKEN RECORD 11 - BIRMINGHAM 2007 12 - ‘AGAIN, SHE’S FINE, THANKS FOR ASKING’ 13 - PRESS, LIES, AND A VIDEOTAPE 14 - DRUGS – THE ROCKY ROAD TO RECOVERY 15 - CLASS-A MUG STILL TAKING DRUGS 16 - ‘IT AIN’T BLOODY FUNNY’ 17 - BEACHED 18 - ‘I’LL CRY IF I WANT TO’ 19 - ‘BODY AND SOUL’ 20 - ‘GIVE ME A CUDDLE, DAD’ 21 - FAREWELL, CAMDEN TOWN EPILOGUE A NOTE ON THE AMY WINEHOUSE FOUNDATION Photographic Insert About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher BEFORE WE START (#uf17f966f-0d90-50ab-b238-fb1dc464ab5e) You’ll understand if I tell you this is not the book I wanted to write. I had been working on one about my family’s history with my friend Paul Sassienie and his writing partner Howard Ricklow. It was due to be published this year. I needed to write this book instead. I needed to tell you the real story of Amy’s life. I’m a plain-talking guy and I’ll be telling it like it was. Amy’s too-short life was a roller-coaster ride; I’m going to tell you about all of it. Apart from being her father, I was also her friend, confidant and adviser – not that she always took my advice, but she always heard me out. For Amy, I was the port in the storm; for me, she – along with her brother Alex – was the light of my life. I hope, through reading this book, that you will gain a better understanding of and a new perspective on my darling daughter Amy. THANKS, AND A NOTE (#uf17f966f-0d90-50ab-b238-fb1dc464ab5e) A huge thank-you to my wife Jane, for being my rock during the most difficult time of my life and for her continuing dedication and support; Alex, my son, for his love and understanding; Janis, for being a fantastic mother to our children; my sister Melody and all my wonderful family and friends, for always being there; my manager Trenton; my PA Megan; Raye and everyone at Metropolis; my agents Maggie Hanbury and Robin Straus, and the lovely people at HarperCollins on both sides of the Atlantic. And special thanks to Paul Sassienie, Howard Ricklow and Humphrey Price for helping me write this book. I am donating all of my proceeds as author from this book to the Amy Winehouse Foundation, which we, Amy’s family, established to help children and young adults facing difficulty and adversity in their lives. I intend to spend the rest of my life raising money for the Foundation. I believe that through her music, the Foundation’s work and this book, Amy will be with us for ever. PROLOGUE (#uf17f966f-0d90-50ab-b238-fb1dc464ab5e) I’d like to say that the first time I cuddled my new-born baby daughter, on 14 September 1983, was a moment that will live with me always, but it wasn’t nearly as straightforward as that. Some days time drags, and others the hours just fly. That day was one of those, when everything seemed to happen at once. Unlike our son Alex, who’d been born four years earlier, our daughter came into the world quickly, popping out in something of a rush, like a cork from a bottle. She arrived in typical Amy fashion – kicking and screaming. I swear she had the loudest cry of any baby I’ve ever heard. I’d like to tell you that it was tuneful but it wasn’t – just loud. Amy was four days late, and nothing ever changed: for the whole of her life she was always late. Amy was born at the Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield, north London, not far from where we lived in Southgate. And because the moment itself was quickly over, her family – grandparents, great-aunts, uncles and cousins – soon crowded in, much as they did for almost every event in our family, good or bad, filling the spaces around Janis’s bed to greet the new arrival. I’m a very emotional guy, especially when it comes to my family, and, holding Amy in my arms, I thought, I’m the luckiest man in the world. I was so pleased to have a daughter: after Alex was born, we’d hoped our next child might be a girl, so he could have a sister. Janis and I had already decided what to call her. Following a Jewish tradition, we gave our children names that began with the same initial as a deceased relative, so Alex was named after my father, Alec, who’d died when I was sixteen. I’d thought that if we had another boy he’d be called Ames. A jazzy kind of name. ‘Amy,’ I said, thinking that didn’t sound quite as jazzy. How wrong I was. So Amy Jade Winehouse – Jade after my stepfather Larry’s father Jack – she became. Amy was beautiful, and the spitting image of her older brother. Looking at pictures of the two of them at that age, I find it difficult to tell them apart. The day after she was born I took Alex to see his new little sister, and we took some lovely pictures of the two of them, Alex cuddling Amy. I hadn’t seen those photographs for almost twenty-eight years, until one day in July 2011, the day before I was due to go to New York, I got a call from Amy. I could tell right away that she was very excited. ‘Dad, Dad, you’ve got to come round,’ she said. ‘I can’t, darling,’ I told her. ‘You know I’ve got a gig tonight and I’m flying off early in the morning.’ She was insistent. ‘Dad, I’ve found the photographs. You’ve got to come round.’ Suddenly I knew why she was so excited. At some point during Amy’s numerous moves, a box of family photographs had been lost, and she had clearly come across it that morning. ‘You’ve got to come over.’ In the end I drove over in my taxi to Camden Square and parked outside her house. ‘I’m just popping in,’ I said, knowing full well how hard it was to say no to her. ‘You know I’m busy today.’ ‘Oh, you’re always going too quick,’ she responded. ‘Dad, stay.’ I followed her in, and she had the photographs she’d found spread out on a table. I looked down at them. I had better ones but these obviously meant a lot to her. There was Alex holding new-born Amy, and there was Amy as a teenager – but all the rest were of family and friends. She picked up a photo of my mum. ‘Wasn’t Nan beautiful?’ she said. Then she held up the picture of Alex and herself. ‘Oh, look at him,’ she added, a mixture of pride and sibling rivalry in her voice. She went through the collection, picking up one after another, talking to me about each one, and I thought, This girl, famous all over the world, someone who’s brought joy to millions of people – she’s just a normal girl who loves her family. I’m really proud of her. She’s a great kid, my daughter. It was easy to be with her that day: she was a lot of fun. Eventually, after an hour or so, it was time for me to go, and we hugged. As I held her I could feel that she was her old self: she was becoming strong again – she’d been working with weights in the gym she’d put into her house. ‘When you’re back, we’ll go into the studio to do that duet,’ she said, as we walked to the door. We had two favourite songs, ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ and ‘Autumn Leaves’, and Amy wanted us to record one or other of them together. ‘We’re going to rehearse properly,’ she added. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ I said, laughing. We’d had this conversation many times over the years. It was nice to hear her talking like that again. I waved goodbye out of the cab. I never saw my darling daughter alive again. * * * I arrived in New York on the Friday, and had a quiet evening alone. The following day I went to see my cousin Michael and his wife Alison at their apartment on 59th Street – Michael had immigrated to the US a few years earlier when he’d married Alison. They now had three-month-old twins, Henry and Lucy, and I was dying to meet them. The kids were great and I had Henry sitting on my lap when Michael got a call from his father, my uncle Percy, who lives in London. Michael passed the phone to me. There was the usual stuff: ‘Hello, Mitch, how are you? How’s Amy?’ I told him I’d seen Amy just before I’d flown out and she was fine. My mobile rang. The caller ID said, ‘Andrew – Security’. Amy often rang me using the phone of her security guard Andrew so I told my uncle, ‘I think that’s Amy now,’ and passed the house phone back to Michael. I still had Henry on my lap as I answered my phone. ‘Hello, darling,’ I said. But it wasn’t Amy, it was Andrew. I could barely make out what he was saying. All I could decipher was: ‘You gotta come home, you gotta come home.’ ‘What? What are you talking about?’ ‘You’ve got to come home,’ he repeated. My world drained away from me. ‘Is she dead?’ I asked. And he said, ‘Yes.’ 1 ALONG CAME AMY (#uf17f966f-0d90-50ab-b238-fb1dc464ab5e) From the start I was besotted with my new daughter, and not much else mattered to me. In the days before Amy was born, I’d been fired from my job, supposedly because I’d asked to take four days off for my daughter’s birth. But with Amy in the world those concerns seemed to disappear. Even though I had no job, I went out and bought a JVC video camera, which cost nearly a grand. Janis wasn’t best pleased, but I didn’t care. I took hours of video of Amy and Alex, which I’ve still got. Alex sat guard by her cot for hours at a time. I went into her bedroom late one night and found Amy wide awake and Alex fast asleep on the floor. Great guard he made. I was a nervous dad, and I’d often peer into her cot to check she was okay. When she was a very young baby I’d find her panting, and shout, ‘She’s not breathing properly!’ Janis had to explain that all babies made noises like that. I still wasn’t happy, though, so I’d pick Amy up – and then we couldn’t get her back to sleep. She was an easy baby, though, and it wasn’t long before she was sleeping through the night, so soundly sometimes that Janis had to wake her up to feed her. Amy learned to walk on her first birthday, and from then on she was a bit of a handful. She was very inquisitive, and if you didn’t watch her all the time, she’d be off exploring. At least we had some help: my mother and stepfather, along with most of the rest of my family, seemed to be there every day. Sometimes I’d come home late from work and Janis would tell me they’d eaten my dinner. Janis was a wonderful mother, and still is. Alex and Amy could both read and write before they went to school, thanks to her. When I came home I’d hear them upstairs, walk up quietly and stand outside their bedroom door to watch them. The kids would be tucked in either side of Janis as she read to them, their eyes wide, wondering what was coming next. This was their time together and I wished I was part of it. On the nights that I didn’t get home until ten or eleven o’clock, I’d sometimes wake them up to say goodnight. I’d go into their room, kick the cot or bed, say, ‘Oh, they’re awake,’ and pick them up for a cuddle. Janis used to go mad and quite right too. I was a hands-on father but more for rough-and-tumble than reading stories. Alex and I would play football and cricket in the garden, and Amy would want to join in – ‘Dad! Dad! Give me the ball.’ I’d prod it towards her, then she’d pick it up and throw it over the fence. Amy loved dancing and, as most dads did with their young daughters, I’d hold her hands and balance her feet on mine. We’d sway like that around the room, but Amy liked it best when I twirled her round and round, enjoying the feeling of disorientation it gave her. She became fearless physically, climbing higher than I liked, or rolling over the bars of a climbing frame in the park. She also liked playing at home: she loved her Cabbage Patch dolls, and we had to send off the ‘adoption certificates’ the dolls came with to keep her happy. If Alex wanted to torment her, he’d tie the dolls up. When I did come home early I read to the children, always Enid Blyton’s Noddy books. Amy and Alex were Noddy experts. Amy loved the ‘Noddy quiz’. She would say, ‘Daddy, what was Noddy wearing the day he met Big Ears?’ I’d pretend to think for a minute. ‘Was he wearing his red shirt?’ Amy would say, ‘No.’ I’d tell her that was a very hard question and I needed to think. ‘Was he wearing his blue hat with the bell on the end?’ Another no. Then I’d click my fingers. ‘I know! He was wearing his blue shorts and his yellow scarf with red spots.’ ‘No, Daddy, he wasn’t.’ At that point I’d give in and ask Amy to tell me what he was wearing. Before she could get the words out, she was already giggling. ‘He wasn’t wearing anything, he was … naked!’ And then she’d put her hand over her mouth to stifle her hysterical laughing. No matter how many times we played that game it never varied. We weren’t one of those families that had the TV on for the sake of it. There was always music playing and I sang around the house. We used to get the kids to put on little shows for us. I’d introduce them and Janis would clap and they’d start singing – well, I say singing … Alex couldn’t sing but would give it a go, and Amy’s only goal was to sing louder than her brother. Clearly she liked the limelight. If Alex got bored and went off to do something else, Amy would carry on singing – even after we’d told her to stop. She loved a little game I used to play with her – we did it a lot in the car. I’d start a song or nursery rhyme and she’d sing the last word. ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on the …’ ‘… WALL …’ ‘… Humpty Dumpty had a great …’ ‘… FALL.’ It kept us amused for ages. One year Amy was given a little turntable that played nursery rhymes. It was all you heard from her room. Then she had a xylophone and taught herself – slowly and painfully – to play ‘Home On The Range’. The noise would carry through the house, plink, plink, plink, and I’d will her to hit the right notes on time – it was agonizing to have to listen to it. Despite her charm, ‘Be quiet, Amy!’ was probably the most-heard sentence in our house during her early years. She just didn’t know when to stop. Once she started singing that was it. And if she wasn’t the centre of attention, she’d find a way of becoming it – occasionally at Alex’s expense. At his sixth birthday party Amy, aged two, put on an impromptu show of singing and dancing. Naturally, Alex wasn’t best pleased and, before we could stop him, he poured a drink over her. Amy burst into tears and ran out of the room crying. I shouted at Alex so loudly that he ran out crying too. After the party, Amy sat on the kitchen floor sulking, and Alex wouldn’t come out of his room. Despite such scenes, Alex and Amy were extremely close and remained so, even when they got older and made their own circles of friends. Amy would do anything for attention. She was mischievous, bold and daring. Not long after Alex’s birthday party, Janis took Amy to Broomfield Park, near our home, and lost her. A panic-stricken Janis phoned me at work to tell me that Amy was missing and I raced to the park, beside myself with anxiety. By the time I arrived, the police were there and I was preparing myself for the worst: in my mind, she wasn’t lost, she’d been abducted. My mum and my auntie Lorna were also there – everybody was looking for Amy. Clearly, Amy was no longer in the park and the police told us to go home, which we did. Five hours later, Janis and I were crying our eyes out when the phone rang. It was Ros, one of my sister Melody’s friends. Amy was with her. Thank God. What had happened was just typical of Amy. Ros had been in the park with her kids when Amy had seen her and run over to her. Naturally, Ros had asked where her mummy was, and mischievous Amy had told her that her mummy had gone home. So Ros took Amy home with her, but instead of phoning us, she phoned Melody, who was a teacher. She didn’t speak to her but left a message at the school that Amy was with her. When Melody heard that Ros was looking after Amy, she didn’t think too much about it because she had no idea that Amy was missing. When she got home and heard what had happened, she put two and two together. Fifteen minutes later, Melody walked in with Amy and I burst into tears. ‘Don’t cry, Daddy, I’m home now,’ I remember her saying. Unfortunately, Amy didn’t seem to learn from that experience. Several months later I took the kids to the Brent Cross shopping centre in north-west London. We were in the John Lewis department store and suddenly Amy was gone. One second she was there and the next she’d disappeared. Alex and I searched the immediate area – how far could she have got? – but there was no sign of her. Here we go again, I thought. And this time she’d definitely been kidnapped. We widened the search. Just as we were walking past a rack of long coats, out she popped. ‘Boo!’ I was furious, but the more I told her off, the more she laughed. A few weeks later she tried it again. This time I headed straight for the long coats. She wasn’t there. I searched all of the racks. No Amy. I was really beginning to worry when a voice said over the Tannoy, ‘We’ve got a little girl called Amy here. If you’ve lost her, please come to Customer Services.’ She’d hidden somewhere else, got really lost and someone had taken her to a member of staff. I told her there was to be no more hiding or running away when we’re out. She promised she wouldn’t do it again and she didn’t, but the next series of practical jokes was played out to a bigger audience. When I was a little boy I had choked on a bit of apple and my father had panicked. So, when Alex choked on his dinner, I panicked too, forcing my fingers down his throat to remove whatever was obstructing him. It didn’t take Amy long to start the choking game. One Saturday afternoon we were shopping in Selfridges, in London’s Oxford Street. The store was packed. Suddenly Amy threw herself on to the floor, coughing and holding her throat. I knew she wasn’t really choking but she was creating such a scene that I threw her over my shoulder and we left in a hurry. After that she was ‘choking’ everywhere, friends’ houses, on the bus, in the cinema. Eventually, we just ignored it and it stopped. * * * Although I was born in north London, I’ve always considered myself to be an East Ender: I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents, Ben and Fanny Winehouse, at their flat above Ben the Barber, his business, in Commercial Street, or with my other grandmother, Celie Gordon, at her house in Albert Gardens, both in the heart of the East End. I even went to school in the East End. My father was a barber and my mother was a ladies’ hairdresser, both working in my grandfather’s shop, and, on their way there, they’d drop me off at Deal Street School. Amy and Alex were fascinated by the East End so I took them there often. They loved me to tell them stories about our family, and seeing where they had lived brought the stories to life. Amy liked hearing about my weekends in the East End when I was a little boy. Every Friday I went with my mum and dad to Albert Gardens where we’d stay until Sunday night. The house was packed to the rafters. There was Grandma Celie, Great-grandma Sarah, Great-uncle Alec, Uncle Wally, Uncle Nat, and my mum’s twin, Auntie Lorna. If that wasn’t enough, a Holocaust survivor named Izzi Hammer lived on the top floor; he passed away in January 2012. The weekends at Albert Gardens started with the traditional Jewish Friday night dinner: chicken soup, then roast chicken, roast potatoes, peas and carrots. Dessert was lokshen pudding, made with baked noodles and raisins. Where all those people slept I really can’t remember, but we all had a magical time, with singing, dancing, card games, and loads of food and drink. And the occasional loud argument mixed in with the laughter and joy of a big happy Jewish family. We continued the Friday-night tradition for most of Amy’s life. It was always a special time for us, and in later years, an interesting test of Amy’s friendships – who was close enough to her to be invited on a Friday night. I spent a lot of time with the kids at weekends. In February 1982, when Alex was nearly three, I started taking him to watch football – in those days you could take young kids and sit them on your lap: Spurs v. West Bromwich Albion. It was freezing cold, so cold that I didn’t want to go, but Janis dressed Alex in his one-piece padded snowsuit, which made him look twice his size – he could hardly move. When we got there I asked him if he was okay. He said he was. About five minutes after kick-off he wanted to go to the Gents. Getting him out of that padded suit was quite an operation, and then it took another ten minutes to get him into it again. When we got back to the seat, he needed to go again so we had an action replay. At half-time, he said, ‘Daddy I want to go home – I’m home-sick.’ When Amy was about seven, I took her to a match. When we got home Janis asked her if she’d enjoyed it. Amy said she’d hated it. When Janis asked why she hadn’t asked me to bring her home, she said, ‘Daddy was enjoying it and I didn’t want to upset him.’ That was typical of the young Amy, always thinking of other people. At five Amy started at Osidge Primary School, where Alex was already a pupil. There she met Juliette Ashby, who quickly became her best friend. Those two were inseparable and remained close for most of Amy’s life. Her other great friend at Osidge was Lauren Gilbert: Amy already knew her because Uncle Harold, my dad’s brother, was Lauren’s step-grandfather. Amy had to wear a light-blue shirt and a tie, with a sweater and a grey skirt. She was happy to join her big brother at school, but she was soon in trouble. Every day she was there could easily have been her last. She didn’t do anything terrible but she was disruptive and attention-seeking, which led to regular complaints about her behaviour. She wouldn’t be quiet in lessons, she doodled in her books and she played practical jokes. Once she hid under the teacher’s desk. When he asked the class where Amy was, she was laughing so much that she bumped her head on his desk and had to be brought home. Amy left a lasting impression on her Year Two teacher, Miss Cutter (now Jane Worthington), who wrote to me shortly after Amy passed away: Amy was a vivacious child who grew into a beautiful and gifted woman. My lasting memories of Amy are of a child who wore her heart on her sleeve. When she was happy the world knew about it, when upset or unhappy you’d know that too. It was clear that Amy came from a loving and supportive family. Amy was a clever girl, and if she’d been interested she would have done well at school. Somehow, though, she was never that interested. She was good at things like maths, but not in the sense that she did well at school. Janis was really good at maths and used to teach the kids. Amy loved doing calculus and quadratic equations when she was still at primary school. No wonder she found maths lessons boring. She was always interested, though, in music. I always had it playing at home and in the car, and Amy sang along with everything. Although she loved big-band and jazz songs, she also liked R&B and hip-hop, especially the US R&B/hip-hop bands TLC and Salt-n-Pepa. She and Juliette used to dress up like Wham!’s backing singers, Pepsi & Shirlie, and sing their songs. When Amy was about ten she and Juliette formed a short-lived rap act, Sweet ’n’ Sour – Juliette was Sweet and Amy was Sour. There were a lot of rehearsals but, sadly, no public performances. I was devoted to my family, but as Amy and Alex got older, I was changing. In 1993, Janis and I split up. A few years earlier, a close friend of mine, who was married, confided in me that he was seeing someone else. I couldn’t understand how he could do it. I remember telling him that he had a lovely wife and a fantastic son: why on earth would he want to jeopardize everything for a fling? He said, ‘It’s not a fling. When you find that special someone you just know it’s right. If it ever happens to you, you’ll understand.’ Unbelievably I found myself in a similar situation. Back in 1984 I had appointed a new marketing manager, Jane, and we had hit it off from the start. There was nothing romantic: Jane had a boyfriend and I was happily married. But there was definitely a spark between us. Nothing happened for ages and then eventually it did. Jane had been coming to my house since Amy was eighteen months old and had met Janis and the kids loads of times. She was adamant that she didn’t want to come between me and my family. I was in love with Jane but still married to Janis. That’s a situation which just can’t work indefinitely. It was a terrible dilemma. I wanted to be with Janis and the kids but I also wanted to be with Jane. I was never unhappy with Janis and we had a good marriage. Some men who stray hate their wives but I loved mine. You couldn’t have an argument with her if you tried: she’s such a sweet, good-natured person. I didn’t know what to do. I really didn’t want to hurt anybody. In the end I just wanted to be with Jane more. Finally, in 1992, I made up my mind to leave Janis. I would wait until after Alex had had his Bar Mitzvah the following year, and leave shortly afterwards. Telling Alex and Amy was the hardest thing; I explained that we both loved them and that what was happening was nothing to do with anything they’d done or not done. Alex took it very badly – who can blame him? – but Amy seemed to accept it. I felt awful as I drove away to live with Melody in Barnet. I stayed with her for six months before I moved in with Jane. Looking back now, I was a coward for allowing the situation to go on for so long, but I wanted to keep everybody happy. Strangely, after I left I started seeing more of the kids than I had before. My friends thought that Amy didn’t seem much affected by the divorce, and when I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, she said, ‘You’re still my dad and Mum’s still my mum. What’s to talk about?’ Probably through guilt, I over-indulged them. I’d buy them presents for no reason, take them to expensive places and give them money. Sometimes, when I was starting a new business and things were tight, we’d go and eat at the Chelsea Kitchen in the King’s Road where I could buy meals for no more than two pounds. Years later, the kids told me they’d liked going there better than the more expensive places, mostly because they knew it wasn’t costing me a lot. Two things never changed: my love for them and theirs for me. Amy in a contemplative mood. My birthday card in 1992. 2 TAKING TO THE STAGE (#uf17f966f-0d90-50ab-b238-fb1dc464ab5e) Wherever I was living, Amy and Alex always had a bedroom there. Amy would often stay for the weekend and I’d try to make it special for her. She loved ghost stories: when I lived in Hatfield Heath, Essex, the house was a bit remote and quite close to a graveyard. If we were driving home on a dark winter’s night I used to park near the graveyard, turn the car lights off and frighten the life out of her with a couple of grisly stories. It wasn’t long before she started making up ghost stories of her own, and I had to pretend to be scared. On one occasion Amy had to write an essay about the life of someone who was important to her. She decided to write about me and asked me to help her. It had to be exciting, I decided, so I made up some stories about myself but Amy believed them all. I told her I’d been the youngest person to climb Mount Everest, and that when I was ten I’d played for Spurs and scored the winning goal in the 1961 Cup Final against Leicester City. I also told her I’d performed the world’s first heart transplant with my assistant Dr Christiaan Barnard. I might also have told her I’d been a racing driver and a jockey. Amy took notes, wrote the essay and handed it in. I was expecting some nice remarks about her imagination and sense of humour, but instead the teacher sent me a note, saying, ‘Your daughter is deluded and needs help.’ Not long before Amy passed away, she reminded me about that homework and the trouble it had caused – and she remembered another of my little stories, which I’d forgotten: I’d told her and Alex that when I was seven I’d been playing near Tower Bridge, fallen into the Thames and nearly drowned. I even drove them to the spot to show them where it had supposedly happened and told them there used to be a plaque there commemorating the event but they had taken it down to clean it. During school holidays we had to find things for Amy to do. If I was in a meeting, Jane would take her out for lunch and Amy would always order the same thing: a prawn salad. The first time Jane took her out, when Amy was still small, she asked, ‘Would you like some chocolate for pudding?’ ‘No, I have a dairy intolerance,’ said Amy, proudly. She’d then wolfed down bag after bag of boiled sweets and chews – she always had a sweet tooth. Jane used to work as a volunteer on the radio at Whipps Cross Hospital, and had her own show. Amy would go in with her to help. She was too young to go round the wards when Jane was interviewing the patients, so instead she would choose the records that were going to be played. Once Jane interviewed Amy, and I’ve still got the tapes of that conversation somewhere. Jane edited out her questions so that Amy was speaking directly to the listeners – her first broadcast. One link I never lost with Amy when I left home was music. She learned to love the music I had been taught to love by my mother when I was younger. My mum had always adored jazz, and before she met my father she had dated the great jazz musician Ronnie Scott. At a gig in 1943, Ronnie introduced her to the legendary band leader Glenn Miller, who tried to nick her off Ronnie. And while my mum fell in love with Glenn Miller’s music, Ronnie fell in love with her. He was devastated when she ended the relationship. He begged her not to and even proposed to her. She said no, but they remained close friends right up until he died in 1996. He wrote about my mum in his autobiography. When she was a little girl, Amy loved hearing my mother recount her stories about Ronnie, the jazz scene and all the things they’d got up to. As she grew up she started to get into jazz in a big way; Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan were her early favourites. Amy loved one particular story I told her about Sarah Vaughan and Ronnie Scott. Whenever Ronnie had a big name on at his club, he would always invite my mum, my auntie Lorna, my sister, me and whoever else we wanted to bring. We saw some fantastic acts there – Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and a whole host of others – but for me, the most memorable was Sarah Vaughan. She was just wonderful. We went backstage afterwards and there was a line of about six people waiting to be introduced to her. When it was Mum’s turn, Ronnie said, ‘Sarah, this is Cynthia. She was my childhood sweetheart and we’re still very close.’ Then it was my turn. Ronnie said, ‘This is Mitch, Cynthia’s son.’ And Sarah said, ‘What do you do?’ I told her about my job in a casino and we carried on chatting for a couple of minutes about one thing and another. Then Ronnie said, ‘Sarah, this is Matt Monro.’ And Sarah said, ‘What do you do, Matt?’ She really had no idea who he was. American singers are often very insular. A lot of them don’t know what’s happening outside New York or LA, let alone what’s going on in the UK. I felt a bit sorry for Matt because he was, in my opinion, the greatest British male singer of all time – and he wasn’t best pleased either. He walked out of the club and never spoke to Ronnie Scott again. Amy also started watching musicals on TV – Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly films. She preferred Astaire, whom she thought more artistic than the athletic Kelly; she enjoyed Broadway Melody of 1940, when Astaire danced with Eleanor Powell. ‘Look at this, Dad,’ she said. ‘How do they do it?’ That sequence gave her a love of tap-dancing. Amy would regularly sing to my mum, and my mum’s face would light up when she did. As Amy’s number-one adoring fan, who always thought Amy was going to be a star, my mum came up with the idea of sending nine-year-old Amy to the Susi Earnshaw Theatre School, in Barnet, north London, not far from where we lived. It offered part-time classes in the performing arts for five- to sixteen-year-olds. Amy used to go on Saturdays and this was where she first learned to sing and tap-dance. Amy looked forward to those lessons and, unlike at Osidge, we never received a complaint about her behaviour from Susi Earnshaw’s. Susi told us how hard Amy always worked. Amy was taught how to develop her voice, which she wanted to do as she learned more and more about the singers she listened to at home and with my mum. Amy was fascinated by the way Sarah Vaughan used her voice like an instrument and wanted to know how she could do it too. As soon as she started at Susi Earnshaw’s, Amy was going for auditions. When she was ten she went to one for the musical Annie; Susi sent quite a few girls for that. She told me that Amy wouldn’t get the part, but it would be good for her to gain experience in auditioning – and get used to rejection. I explained all of that to Amy but she was still happy to go along and give it a go. The big mistake I made was in telling my mum about it. For whatever reason, neither Janis nor I could take Amy to the audition and my mum was only too pleased to step in. As Amy’s biggest fan, she thought this was it, that the audition was a formality – that her granddaughter was going to be the new Annie. I think she even bought a new frock for the opening night, that was how sure she was. When I saw Amy that night, the first thing she said to me was, ‘Dad, never send Nan with me for an audition ever again.’ It had started on the train, my mum piling on the pressure: how to sing her song, how to talk to the director, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that, look the director in the eye …’ Amy had been taught all of this at Susi Earnshaw’s but, of course, my mum knew better. They finally got to the theatre where, according to Amy, there were a thousand or so mums, dads and grandmothers, each of whom, like my mum, thought that their little prodigy was going to be the new Annie. Finally it was Amy’s turn to do her bit and she gave the audition pianist her music. He wouldn’t play it: it was in the wrong key for the show. Amy struggled through the song in a key that was far too high for her. After just a few bars she was told to stop. The director was very nice and thanked her but told her that her voice wasn’t suitable for the part. My mum lost it. She marched up to the director, screaming at him that he didn’t know what he was talking about. There was a terrible row. On the train going home my mum had a go at Amy, all the usual stuff: ‘You don’t listen to me. You think you know better …’ Amy couldn’t have cared less about not getting the part, but my mum was so aggravated that she put herself to bed for the rest of the day. When Amy told me the story, I thought it was absolutely hysterical. My mum and Amy were like two peas in a pod, probably shouting at each other all the way home on the train. It would have been a great scene to see. Amy and my mum had a lively relationship but they did love each other, and my mum would sometimes let the kids get away with murder. When we visited her, Amy would often blow-wave my mum’s hair while Alex sat at her feet and gave her a pedicure. Later my mum, hair all over the place, would show us what Amy had done and we’d have a good laugh. * * * In the spring of 1994, when Amy was ten, I went with her to an interview for her next school, Ashmole in Southgate. I had gone there some twenty-five years earlier and Alex was there so it was a natural choice for Amy. Incredibly, my old form master Mr Edwards was still going strong and was to be Amy’s house master. He interviewed Amy and me when I took her to look round the school. We walked into his office and he recognized me immediately. In his beautiful Welsh accent, he said, ‘Oh, my God, not another Winehouse! I bet this one doesn’t play football.’ I had made a bit of a name for myself playing for the school, and Alex was following in my footsteps. Amy started at Ashmole in September 1994. From the start she was disruptive. Her friend Juliette had also transferred there. They were bad enough alone, but together they were ten times worse, so it wasn’t long before they were split up and put into different classes. Alex had a guitar he’d taught himself to play, and when Amy decided to try it out he taught her too. He was very patient with her, even though they argued a lot. They could both read music, which surprised me. ‘When did you learn to do this?’ I asked. They stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language. Amy soon started writing her own songs, some good, some awful. One of the good ones was called ‘I Need More Time’. She played it for me just a few months before she passed away. Believe me, it’s good enough to go on one of her albums, and it’s a great pity that she never recorded it. I often collected the kids from school. In those days I had a convertible, and Amy would insist I put the top down. As we drove along, Alex in the front alongside me, she’d sing at the top of her voice. When we stopped at traffic lights she would stand up and perform. ‘Sit down, Amy!’ we’d say, but people on the street laughed with her as she sang. Once she was in a car with a friend of mine named Phil and sang ‘The Deadwood Stage’ from the Doris Day film Calamity Jane. ‘You know,’ Phil said to me, when they got back, his ears probably still ringing, ‘your daughter has a really powerful voice.’ Amy’s wild streak went far beyond car rides. At some point, she took to riding Alex’s bike, which terrified me: she was reckless whenever she was on it. She had no road sense and she raced along as fast as she could. She loved speed and came off a couple of times. It was the same story when I took her skating – didn’t matter if it was ice-skating or roller-skating, she loved both. She was really fast on the rink, and the passion for it never left her. After her first album came out she told me that her ambition was to open a chain of hamburger joints with roller-skating waitresses. She was wild, but I indulged her; I couldn’t help myself. I know I over-compensated my children for the divorce, but they were growing up and needed things. I took Amy shopping to buy her some clothes, now that she was nearly a teenager and going to a new school. ‘Look, Dad,’ she said excitedly, as she came out of the changing room in a pair of leopard-print jeans. ‘These are fantastic! D’you think they look nice on me?’ * * * Whenever she was staying with Jane and me, Amy always kept a notebook with her to scribble down lines for songs. Halfway through a conversation, she’d suddenly say, ‘Oh, just a sec,’ and disappear to note something that had just come to her. The lines looked like something from a poem and later she would use those lines in a song, alongside ones written on totally different occasions. Amy continued to be good at maths because of the lessons she’d done with her mother. Janis would set Amy some pretty complicated problems, which she really enjoyed doing. Amy would do mathematical problems for hours on end just for fun. She was brilliant at the most complex Sudoku puzzles and could finish one in a flash. The pity was that she wouldn’t do it at school. We received notes complaining regularly about her behaviour or lack of interest. Clearly Amy was bored – she just didn’t take to formal schooling. (I had been the same. I was always playing hooky but, unlike my friends, who would be out on the streets, I’d be in the local library, reading.) Amy had a terrific thirst for knowledge but hated school. She didn’t want to go so she wouldn’t get up in the mornings. Or, if she did go, she’d come home at lunchtime and not go back. Though Amy had been a terrific sleeper as a baby and young child, when she got to about eleven she wouldn’t go to bed: she’d be up all night reading, doing puzzles, watching television, listening to music, anything not to go to sleep. So, naturally, it was a battle every morning to get her up. Janis got fed up with it and would ring me: ‘Your daughter won’t get out of bed.’ I had to drive all the way from Chingford, where I was living with Jane, and drag her out. Over time Amy got worse in the classroom. Janis and I were called to the school for meetings about her behaviour on numerous occasions. I hope the head of year didn’t see me trying not to laugh as he told us, ‘Mr and Mrs Winehouse, Amy has already been sent to see me once today and, as always, I knew it was her before she got to my office …’ I knew if I looked at Janis I’d crack up. ‘How did I know?’ the head of year continued. ‘She was singing “Fly Me To The Moon” loudly enough for the whole school to hear.’ I knew I shouldn’t laugh, but it was so typically Amy. She told me later that she’d sung it to calm herself down whenever she knew she was in trouble. Just about the only thing she seemed to enjoy about school was performance. However, one year when Amy sang in a show she wasn’t very good. I don’t know what went wrong – perhaps it was the wrong key for her again – but I was disappointed. The following year things were different. ‘Dad, will you both come to see me at Ashmole?’ she asked. ‘I’m singing again.’ To be honest, my heart sank a bit, with the memory of the previous year’s performance, but of course we went. She sang the Alanis Morissette song ‘Ironic’, and she was as terrific as I knew she could be. What I wasn’t expecting was everyone else’s reaction: the whole room sat up. Wow, where did this come from? By now Amy was twelve and she wanted to go to a drama school full time. Janis and I were against it but Amy applied to the Sylvia Young Theatre School in central London without telling us. How she even knew about it we never figured out as Sylvia Young only advertised in The Stage. Amy eventually broke the news to us when she was invited to audition. She decided to sing ‘The Sunny Side Of The Street’, which I coached her through, helping with her breath control, and won a half-scholarship for her singing, acting and dancing. Her success was reported in The Stage, with a photograph of her above the column. As part of her application, Amy had been asked to write something about herself. Here’s what she wrote: All my life I have been loud, to the point of being told to shut up. The only reason I have had to be this loud is because you have to scream to be heard in my family. My family? Yes, you read it right. My mum’s side is perfectly fine, my dad’s family are the singing, dancing, all-nutty musical extravaganza. I’ve been told I was gifted with a lovely voice and I guess my dad’s to blame for that. Although unlike my dad, and his background and ancestors, I want to do something with the talents I’ve been ‘blessed’ with. My dad is content to sing loudly in his office and sell windows. My mother, however, is a chemist. She is quiet, reserved. I would say that my school life and school reports are filled with ‘could do betters’ and ‘does not work to her full potential’. I want to go somewhere where I am stretched right to my limits and perhaps even beyond. To sing in lessons without being told to shut up (provided they are singing lessons). But mostly I have this dream to be very famous. To work on stage. It’s a lifelong ambition. I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes. I want to be remembered for being an actress, a singer, for sell-out concerts and sell-out West End and Broadway shows. I think it was to the school’s relief when Amy left Ashmole. She started at the Sylvia Young Theatre School when she was about twelve and a half and stayed there for three years – but what a three years it was. It was still school, which meant she was always being told off, but I think they put up with her because they recognized that she had a special talent. Sylvia Young herself said that Amy had a ‘wild spirit and was amazingly clever’. But there were regular ‘incidents’ – for example, Amy’s nose-ring. Jewellery wasn’t allowed, a rule Amy disregarded. She would be told to take the nose-ring out, which she would do, and ten minutes later it was back in. The school accepted that Amy was her own person and gave her a degree of leeway. Occasionally they turned a blind eye when she broke the rules. But there were times when she took it too far, especially with the jewellery. She was sent home one day when she’d turned up wearing earrings, her nose-ring, bracelets and a belly-button piercing. To me, though, Amy wasn’t being rebellious, which she certainly could be; this was her expressing herself. And punctuality was a problem. Amy was late most days. She would get the bus to school, fall asleep, go three miles past her stop, then have to catch another back. So, although this was where Amy wanted to be, it wasn’t a bed of roses for anyone. Amy’s main problem at Sylvia Young’s was that, as well being taught stagecraft, which included ballet, tap, other dance, acting and singing, she had to put up with the academic side or, as Amy referred to it, ‘all the boring stuff’. About half of the time was allocated to ‘normal’ subjects and she just wasn’t interested. She would fall asleep in lessons, doodle, talk and generally make a nuisance of herself. Amy really got into tap-dancing. She was pretty good at it when she started at the school but now she was learning more advanced techniques. When we were at my mother’s flat for dinner on Friday nights, Amy loved to tap-dance on the kitchen floor because it gave a really good clicking sound. The clicks it gave were great. I told her she was as good a dancer as Ginger Rogers, but my mother wouldn’t have that: she said Amy was better. Amy would put her tap shoes on and say, ‘Nan, can I tap-dance?’ ‘Go downstairs and ask Mrs Cohen if it’s all right,’ my mum would reply, ‘because you know what she’s like. She’ll only complain to me about the noise.’ So Amy would go and ask Mrs Cohen if it was all right and Mrs Cohen would say, ‘Of course it’s all right, darling. You go and dance as much as you like.’ And then the next day Mrs Cohen would complain to my mum about the noise. After dinner on a Friday night, we’d play games. Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary were two of our favourites. Amy and I played together, my mum and Melody made up the second team, with Jane and Alex as the third. They were the ‘quiet’ ones, thoughtful and studious, my mum and Melody were the ‘loud’ pair, with a lot of screaming and shouting, while Amy and I were the ‘cheats’. We’d try to win no matter what. Another lovely birthday card from Amy, aged twelve. This came just after yet another meeting with Amy’s teacher about her behaviour. When she wasn’t playing games or tap-dancing, Amy would borrow my mum’s scarves and tops. She had a way of making them seem not like her nan’s things but stylish, tying shirts across her middle and that sort of thing. She also started wearing a bit of makeup – never too much, always understated. She had a beautiful complexion so she didn’t use foundation, but I’d spot she was wearing eyeliner and lipstick – ‘Yeah, Dad, but don’t tell Mum.’ But while my mum indulged Amy’s experiments with makeup and clothes, she hated Amy’s piercings. Later on when Amy began getting tattoos, she’d have a go at her about all of it. Amy’s ‘Cynthia’ tattoo came after my mum had passed away – she would have loathed it. * * * Along with other pupils from Sylvia Young’s, Amy started getting paid work around the time she became a teenager. She appeared in a sketch on BBC2’s series The Fast Show; she stood precariously on a ladder for half an hour in Don Quixote at the Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane (she was paid eleven pounds per performance, which I’d look after for her as she always wanted to spend it on sweets); and in a really boring play about Mormons at Hampstead Theatre where her contribution was a ten-minute monologue at the end. Amy loved doing the little bits of work the school found for her, but she couldn’t accept that she was still a schoolgirl and needed to study. Eventually Janis and I were called in to see the head teacher of the school’s academic side, who told us he was very disappointed with Amy’s attitude to her work. He said that he constantly had to pressure her to buckle down and get some work done. He accepted that she was bored and they even tried moving her up a year to challenge her more, but she became more distracted than ever. The real blow came when the academic head teacher phoned Janis, behind Sylvia Young’s back, and told her that if Amy stayed at the school she was likely to fail her GCSEs. When Sylvia heard about this she was very upset and the head teacher left shortly afterwards. Contrary to what some people have said, including Amy, Amy was not expelled from Sylvia Young’s. In fact, Janis and I decided to remove her as we believed that she had a better chance with her exams at a ‘normal’ school. If you’re told that your daughter is going to fail her GCSEs, then you have to send her somewhere else. Amy didn’t want to leave Sylvia Young’s and cried when we told her that we were taking her away. Sylvia was also upset and tried to persuade us to change our minds, but we believed we were doing the right thing. She stayed in touch with Amy after she’d left, which surprised Amy, given all the rows they’d had over school rules. (Our relationship with Sylvia and her school continues to this day. From September 2012, Amy’s Foundation will be awarding the Amy Winehouse Scholarship, whereby one student will be sponsored for their entire five years at the school.) Amy had to finish studying for her GCSEs somewhere, though, and the next school to get the Amy treatment was the all-girls Mount School in Mill Hill, north-west London. The Mount was a very nice, ‘proper’ school where the students were decked out in beautiful brown school uniforms – a huge change from leg warmers and nose-rings. Music was strong there and, in Amy’s words, kept her going. The music teacher took a particular interest in her talent and helped her settle in. I use that term loosely. She was still wearing her jewellery, still turning up late and constantly rowing with teachers about her piercings, which she delighted in showing to everybody. When I remember where some of those piercings were, I’m not surprised the teachers got upset. But, one way or another, Amy got five GCSEs before she left the Mount and yet another set of breathless teachers behind her. There was no question of her staying on for A levels. She had had enough of formal education and begged us to send her to another performing-arts school. Once Amy had made up her mind, that was it: there was no chance of persuading her otherwise. When Amy was sixteen she went to the BRIT School in Croydon, south London, to study musical theatre. It was an awful journey to get there – from the north of London right down to the south, which took her at least three hours every day – but she stuck at it. She made lots of friends and impressed the teachers with her talent and personality. She also did better academically: one teacher told her she was ‘a naturally expressive writer’. At the BRIT School Amy was allowed to express herself. She was there for less than a year but her time was well spent and the school made a big impact on her, as did she on it and its students. In 2008, despite the personal problems she was having, she went back to do a concert for the school by way of a thank-you. 3 ‘WENN’ SHE FELL IN LOVE (#ulink_82b210c9-8b24-543d-94c2-dc9b147d9269) As it turned out, it was a good thing that Sylvia Young stayed in touch with Amy after she left the school, because it was Sylvia who inadvertently sent Amy’s career in a whole new direction. Towards the end of 1999, when Amy was sixteen, Sylvia called Bill Ashton, the founder, MD and life president of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO), to try to arrange an audition for Amy. Bill told Sylvia that they didn’t audition. ‘Just send her along,’ he said. ‘She can join in if she wants to.’ So Amy went along, and after a few weeks, she was asked to sing with the orchestra. One Sunday morning a month or so later, they asked Amy to sing four songs with the orchestra that night because one of their singers couldn’t make it. She didn’t know the songs very well but that didn’t faze her – water off a duck’s back for Amy. One quick rehearsal and she’d nailed them all. Amy sang with the NYJO for a while, and did one of her first real recordings with them. They put together a CD and Amy sang on it. When Jane and I heard it, I nearly fainted – I couldn’t believe how fantastic she sounded. My favourite song on that CD has always been ‘The Nearness Of You’. I’ve heard Sinatra sing it, I’ve heard Ella Fitzgerald sing it, I’ve heard Sarah Vaughan sing it, I’ve heard Billie Holiday sing it, I’ve heard Dinah Washington sing it and I’ve heard Tony Bennett sing it. But I have never heard it sung the way Amy sang it. It was and remains beautiful. There was no doubt that the NYJO and Amy’s other performances pushed her voice further, but it was a friend of Amy’s, Tyler James, who really set the ball rolling for her. Amy and Tyler had met at Sylvia Young’s and they remained best friends to the end of Amy’s life. At Sylvia Young’s, Amy was in the academic year below Tyler, so when they were doing academic work they were in different classes. But on the singing and dancing days they were in the same class, as Amy had been promoted a year, so they rehearsed and did auditions together. They met when their singing teacher, Ray Lamb, asked four students to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ on a tape he was making for his grandma’s birthday. Tyler was knocked out when he heard this little girl singing ‘like some jazz queen’. His voice hadn’t broken and he was singing like a young Michael Jackson. Tyler says he recognized the type of person Amy was as soon as he spotted her nose-ring and heard that she’d pierced it herself, using a piece of ice to numb the pain. They grew closer after Amy had left Sylvia Young, when Tyler would meet up regularly with her, Juliette and their other girlfriends. Tyler and Amy talked a lot about the downs that most teenagers have. Every Friday night they would speak on the phone and every conversation ended with Amy singing to him or him to her. They were incredibly close, but Tyler and Amy weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, more like brother and sister; he was one of the few boys Amy ever brought along to my mum’s Friday-night dinners. After leaving Sylvia Young’s, Tyler had become a soul singer, and while Amy was singing with the NYJO, Tyler was singing in pubs, clubs and bars. He’d started working with a guy named Nick Shymansky, who was with a PR agency called Brilliant!. Tyler was Nick’s first artist, and he was soon hounding Amy for a tape of her singing that he could give to Nick. Eventually Amy gave him a tape of jazz standards she had sung with the NYJO. Tyler was blown away by it, and encouraged her to record a few more tracks before he sent the tape to Nick. Now Tyler had been talking about Amy to Nick for months, but Nick, who was only a couple of years older than Tyler and used to hearing exaggerated talk about singers, wasn’t expecting anything life-changing. But that, of course, was what he got. Amy sent her tape to him in a bag covered in stickers of hearts and stars. Initially Nick thought that Amy had just taped someone else’s old record because the voice didn’t sound like that of a sixteen-year-old. But as the production was so poor he soon realized that she couldn’t have done any such thing. (She had in fact recorded it with her music teacher at Sylvia Young’s.) Nick got Amy’s number from Tyler but when he called she wasn’t the slightest bit impressed. He kept calling her, and finally she agreed to meet him when she was due to rehearse in a pub just off Hanger Lane, in west London. It was nine o’clock on a Sunday morning – Amy could get up early when she really wanted to (at this time she was working at weekends, selling fetish wear at a stall in Camden market, north London). As Nick approached the pub he could hear the sound of a ‘big band’ – not what you expect to hear floating out of a pub at that hour on a Sunday morning. He walked in and was stunned by what he saw: a band of sixty-to-seventy-year-old men and a kid of sixteen or seventeen, with an extraordinary voice. Straight away Nick struck up a rapport with Amy. She was smoking Marlboro Reds, when most kids of her age smoked Lights, which he says told him Amy always had to go one step further than anyone else. As Nick was talking to her in the pub car park, a car reversed and Amy screamed that it had driven over her foot. Nick was concerned and sympathetic, checking that she was all right. In fact, the car hadn’t driven over Amy’s foot and she had staged the whole thing to find out how he would react. It was the choking game all over again – she never outgrew that sort of thing. I’ve no idea what in Amy’s mind the test was intended to achieve, but after that Amy and Nick really hit it off and he remained a close friend for the rest of her life. Nick introduced Amy to his boss at Brilliant!, Nick Godwyn, who told her they wanted her to sign a contract. He invited Janis, Amy and me out for dinner, Amy wearing a bobble hat and cargos, with her hair in pigtails. She seemed to take it in her stride, but I could barely sit still. Nick told us how talented he thought Amy was as a writer, as well as a singer. I knew how good she was as a singer, but it was great hearing an industry professional say it. I’d known she was writing songs, but I’d had no idea if she was any good because I’d never heard any of them. Afterwards, on the way back to Janis’s to drop her and Amy off, I tried to be realistic about the deal – a lot of the time these things come to nothing – and said to Amy, ‘I’d like to hear some of your songs, darling.’ I wasn’t sure she was even listening to me. ‘Okay, Dad.’ I didn’t get to hear any of them though – at least, not yet. As Amy was only seventeen she was unable to sign a legal contract, so Janis and I agreed to. With Amy, we formed a company to represent her. Amy owned 100 per cent of it, but it was second nature to her to ask us to be involved in her career. As a family, we’d always stuck together. When I’d run my double-glazing business, my stepfather had worked for me, driving round London collecting the customer satisfaction forms we needed to see every day in head office. When he died my mum took over. By now Amy had a day job. She was learning to write showbiz stories at WENN (World Entertainment News Network), an online media news agency. Juliette had got her the job – her father, Jonathan Ashby, was the company’s founder and one of its owners. It was at WENN that Amy met Chris Taylor, a journalist working there. They started going out and quickly became inseparable. I noticed a change in her as soon as they got together: she had a bounce in her step and was clearly very happy. But it was obvious who was the boss in the relationship – Amy. That’s probably why it didn’t work out. Amy liked strong men and Chris, while a lovely guy, didn’t fall into that category. The relationship lasted about nine months, it was her first serious relationship, and when it finished, Amy was miserable – but painful though the break-up was, her relationship with Chris had motivated her creatively, and ultimately formed the basis of the lyrics for her first album, Frank. * * * Excited as Amy was about her management contract, music-business reality soon intruded: only a few months later Brilliant! closed down. While usually this is a bad sign for an artist, Amy wasn’t lost in the shuffle. Simon Fuller, founder of 19 Management, who managed the Spice Girls among others, bought part of Brilliant!, including Nick Shymansky and Nick Godwyn. Every year Amy’s birthday cards made me laugh. As before, with Amy still under eighteen, Janis and I signed the management contract with 19 on Amy’s behalf. To my surprise, 19 were going to pay Amy ?250 a week. Naturally this was recoupable against future earnings but it gave her the opportunity to concentrate on her music without having to worry about money. It was a pretty standard management contract, by which 19 would take 20 per cent of Amy’s earnings. Well, I thought, it looks like she’s going to be bringing out an album – which was great. But, I wondered, who the hell’s going to buy it? I still didn’t know what her own music sounded like. I’d nagged, but she still hadn’t played me anything she’d written. I was beginning to understand that she was reluctant to let me hear anything until it was finished, so I let it go. Amy seemed to be enjoying what she was doing and that was good enough for me. Along with the management contract, Amy became a regular singer at the Cobden Club in west London, singing jazz standards. Word soon spread about her voice, and before long industry people were dropping in to see her. It was always boiling hot in the Cobden Club, and on one hotter than usual night in August 2002 I’d decided I couldn’t stand it any longer and was about to leave when I saw Annie Lennox walk in to listen to Amy. We started talking and she said, ‘Your daughter’s going to be great, a big star.’ It was thrilling to hear those words from someone as talented as Annie Lennox, and when Amy came down from the stage I waved her over and introduced them to each other. Amy got on very well with Annie and I saw for the first time how natural she was around a big star. It’s as if she’s already fitting in, I thought. It wasn’t just the crowds at the Cobden Club who were impressed with Amy. After she had signed with 19, Nick Godwyn told Janis and me that there had been a lot of interest in her from publishers, who wanted to handle her song writing, and from record companies, who wanted to handle her singing career. This was standard industry practice, and Nick recommended the deals be made with separate music companies so neither had a monopoly on Amy. Amy signed the music-publishing deal with EMI, where a very senior A&R, Guy Moot, took responsibility for her. He set her up to work with the producers Commissioner Gordon and Salaam Remi. On the day that Amy signed her publishing deal, a meeting was arranged with Guy Moot and everyone at EMI. Amy had already missed one meeting – probably because she’d overslept again – so they’d rescheduled. Nick Shymansky called Amy and told her that she must be at the meeting, but she was in a foul mood. He went to pick her up and was furious because, as usual, she wasn’t ready, which meant they’d be late. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he told her, and they ended up having a screaming row. Eventually he got her into the car and drove her into London’s West End. He parked and they got out. They were walking down Charing Cross Road, towards EMI’s offices, when Amy stopped and said, ‘I’m not going to the fucking meeting.’ Nick replied, ‘You’ve already missed one and there’s too much at stake to miss another.’ ‘I don’t care about being in a room full of men in suits,’ Amy snapped. The business side of things never interested her. ‘I’m putting you in that dumpster until you say you’re going to the meeting,’ he told her. Amy started to laugh because she thought Nick wouldn’t do it, but he picked her up, put her in the dumpster and closed the lid. ‘I’m not letting you out until you say you’re coming to the meeting.’ She was banging on the side of the dumpster and shouting her head off. But it was only after she’d agreed to go to the meeting that Nick let her out. She immediately screamed, ‘KIDNAP! RAPE!’ They were still arguing as they walked into the meeting. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ Nick said. Then Amy jumped in: ‘Yeah, that’s cos Nick just tried to rape me.’ 4 FRANK – GIVING A DAMN (#ulink_39efea69-4596-5a9f-bcf1-5e9bbaa24061) In the autumn of 2002, EMI flew Amy out to Miami Beach to start working with the producer Salaam Remi. By coincidence, or maybe it was intentional, Tyler James was also in Miami, working on another project; Nick Shymansky made up the trio. They were put up at the fantastic art-deco Raleigh Hotel, where they had a ball for about six weeks. The Raleigh featured in the film The Birdcage, starring Robin Williams, which Amy loved. Although she and Tyler were in the studio all day, they also spent a lot of time sitting on the beach, Amy doing crosswords, and danced the night away at hip-hop clubs. Because she had gone to the US to record the album, I wasn’t all that involved in Amy’s rehearsals and studio work, but I know she adored Salaam Remi, who co-produced Frank with the equally brilliant Commissioner Gordon. Salaam was already big, having produced a number of tracks for the Fugees, and Amy loved his stuff. His hip-hop and reggae influences can be clearly heard on the album. They soon became good friends and wrote a number of songs together. In Miami Amy met Ryan Toby, who had starred in Sister Act 2 when he was still a kid and was now in the R&B/hip-hop trio City High. He’d heard of Amy and Tyler through a friend at EMI in Miami and wanted to work with them. He had a beautiful house in the city where Amy and Tyler became regular guests. As well as working on her own songs, Amy was collaborating with Tyler. One night in Ryan’s garden, they wrote the fabulous ‘Best For Me’. The track appears on Tyler’s first album, The Unlikely Lad, where you can hear him and Amy together on vocals. Amy also wrote ‘Long Day’ and ‘Procrastination’ for him and allowed him to change them for his recording. Amy sent me this Valentine’s Day card from Miami, while recording tracks for Frank in 2003. By the time Amy had returned from Miami Frank was almost in the can but, oddly, though she’d signed with EMI for publishing nearly a year earlier, she still hadn’t signed with a record label. I kept asking anyone who’d listen to let me hear Amy’s songs, and eventually 19 gave me a sampler of six tracks from Frank. I put the CD on, not knowing what to expect. Was it going to be jazz? Rap? Or hip-hop? The drum beat started, then Amy’s voice – as if she was in the room with me. To be honest, the first few times I played that CD I couldn’t have told you anything about the music. All I heard was my daughter’s voice, strong and clear and powerful. I turned to Jane. ‘This is really good – but isn’t it too adult? The kids aren’t going to buy it.’ Jane disagreed. I rang Amy, and told her how much we’d loved the sampler. ‘Your voice just blew me away,’ I said. ‘Ah, thanks, Dad,’ Amy replied. Apart from the sampler, though, I still hadn’t heard the songs that were on the short-list for Frank and Amy seemed a bit reticent about letting me listen to them. Maybe she thought lyrics like ‘the only time I hold your hand is to get the angle right’ might shock me or that I’d embarrass her. I teased her after I’d finally heard the song. ‘I want to ask you a question,’ I said. ‘That song “In My Bed” when you sing—’ ‘Dad! I don’t want to talk about it!’ Amy came over to Jane’s and my house when she was sorting out the tracks for Frank. She had a load of recordings on CDs and I was flicking through them when she snatched one away from me. ‘You don’t want to listen to that one, Dad,’ she said. ‘It’s about you.’ You’d have thought she’d know better. It was a red rag to a bull and I insisted she played ‘What Is It About Men’. When I heard her sing I immediately understood why she’d thought I wouldn’t want to listen to it: Understand, once he was a family man So surely I would never, ever go through it first hand Emulate all the shit my mother hates I can’t help but demonstrate my Freudian fate. I wasn’t upset, but it did make me think that perhaps my leaving Janis had had a more profound effect on Amy than I’d previously thought or Amy had demonstrated. I didn’t need to ask her how she felt now because she’d laid herself bare in that song. All those times I’d seen Amy scribbling in her notebooks, she’d been writing this stuff down. The lyrics were so well observed, pertinent and, frankly, bang on. Amy was one of life’s great observers. She stored her experiences and called upon them when she needed to for a lyric. The opening lines to ‘Take The Box’ – Your neighbours were screaming, I don’t have a key for downstairs So I punched all the buzzers… – refer to something that had happened when she was a little girl. We were trying to get into my mother’s block but I’d forgotten my key. A terrible row, which we could hear from the street, was going on in one of the other flats. My mother wasn’t answering her buzzer – it turned out that she wasn’t in – so I pressed all of the buzzers hoping someone would open the door. Of course the song had nothing to do with me buzzing buzzers: it was about her and Chris breaking up. But I was amazed that she could turn something so small that had happened when she was a kid into a brilliant lyric. For all I knew, she’d written it down when it had happened and, eight or ten years later, plucked it out of her notebook. She was a genius at merging ideas that had no obvious connection. The songs on the record were good – everyone knew it. By 2003, with the record all but done, loads of labels were desperate to sign her. Of all the companies, Nick Godwyn thought Island/Universal was the right one for Amy because they had a reputation for nurturing their artists without putting them under excessive pressure to produce albums in quick succession. Darcus Beese, in A&R at Island, had been excited about Amy for some time, and when he told Nick Gatfield, Island’s head, about her, he too wanted to sign her. They’d heard some tracks, they knew what they were getting into, and they were ready to make Amy a star. Once the record deal had been done with Island/Universal, suddenly it all sunk in. I sat across from Amy, looking at my daughter, and trying to come to terms with the fact that this girl who’d been singing at every opportunity since she was two, was going to be releasing her own music. ‘Amy, you’re actually going to bring out an album,’ I said. ‘That’s brilliant.’ For once, she seemed genuinely excited. ‘I know, Dad! Great, isn’t it? Don’t tell Nan till Friday. I want to surprise her.’ I promised I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t keep news like this from my mum and phoned her the minute Amy left. When I think about it now, I realize I took Amy’s talent for granted. At the time I actually thought, Good, looks like she’s going to make a few quid out of this. Amy’s record company advance on Frank was ?250,000, which seemed like a lot of money. But back then some artists were getting ?1 million advances and being dropped by their label before they’d even brought out a record. So, although it was a fortune to us, it was a relatively small advance. She had also received a ?250,000 advance from EMI for the publishing deal. Amy needed to live on that money until the advances were recouped against royalties from albums sold. Only after that had happened could she be entitled to future royalties. That seemed a long way off: how many records would she need to sell to recoup ?500,000? A lot, I thought. I wanted to make sure that we looked after her money so it didn’t run out too quickly. When Amy first got the advance she was living with Janis in Whetstone, north London, with Janis’s boyfriend, his two children and Alex. But as soon as Amy’s advances came through she moved into a rented flat in East Finchley, north London, with her friend Juliette. Amy understood very quickly that if her mum and I didn’t exert some kind of financial control she’d go through that money like there was no tomorrow. I had no problem with her being generous to her friends – for example, she wouldn’t let Juliette pay rent – but she and I knew that I needed to stop her frittering the money away. She was smart enough to understand that she needed help. Amy and Juliette settled into the flat and enjoyed being grown-up. I would often drop by. I’d left my double-glazing business and had been driving a London black taxi for a couple of years. On my way home from work, I’d go past the end of their road and pop in to say hello, but Amy always insisted I stay, offering to cook me something. ‘Eggs on toast, Dad?’ she’d ask. I’d always say yes, but her eggs were terrible. And we’d sing together, Juliette joining in sometimes. It was around this time that I first suspected Amy was smoking cannabis. I used to go round to the flat and see the remnants of joints in the ashtray. I confronted her, and she admitted it. We had a big row about it and I was very upset. ‘Leave off, Dad,’ she said, and in the end I had to, but I’d always been against any kind of drug-taking and it was devastating to know that Amy was smoking joints. * * * As time progressed, everyone at 19, EMI and Universal was so enthusiastic about Frank that I began to believe it was going to sell and that maybe, just maybe, Amy was going to become a big star. On some nights when she had a show, I’d go and stand outside the place where she was playing, like Bush Hall in Uxbridge Road, west London. Her reputation seemed to grow by the minute. I’d listen to what people were saying as they went in, and they seemed excited about seeing her. Afterwards Amy and I would go out for dinner, to places like Joe Allen’s in Covent Garden, and she would be buzzing, talking to other diners, having a laugh with the waiters. In those days she liked performing live – as a virtual unknown she felt no pressure and simply enjoyed herself; she was always happy after a show, and I loved seeing her like that. Her voice never failed to blow audiences away, but she needed to work on her stagecraft. Sometimes she’d turn her back on the audience – as though she didn’t want to face them. But when I asked if she enjoyed performing, she’d always say, ‘Dad, I love it,’ so I didn’t ask anything more. In the months leading up to Frank’s release, Amy did lots of gigs. Playing live meant auditioning a band to perform with her, and 19 introduced her to the bassist Dale Davis, who eventually became her musical director. Dale had already seen Amy singing at the 10 Room in Soho and remembers her flashing eyes – ‘They were so bright’ – but he didn’t know who she was until he went to that audition. Oddly enough, he didn’t get the job at that point, but when her bass-player wanted more money, Dale took over. Amy and her band played the Notting Hill Carnival in 2003. It’s always a very hard gig – the crowd is demanding – but when I spoke to Dale later, he said that Amy had carried the whole thing on her own. She didn’t need a band. He was knocked out by how great she was, just singing and playing guitar. She might not have been technically the greatest guitarist ‘but no one else could play like Amy and fit the singing and playing together’. Her style was loose, but her rhythm was good and the songs were so strong that it all locked together. As Dale says, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are not great guitarists: it’s all soul and conviction. ‘You just do it, and throughout the years of doing it you get there.’ Still, Amy’s live performances were not without their struggles. One gig I particularly remember was in Cambridge where she was supporting the pianist Jamie Cullum. Amy and Jamie hit it off and became friends, but when you’re young and just starting out, it’s an unenviable task to be the support act. That night people had come to see Jamie, not her – very few people in the Cambridge audience had even heard of Amy – and initially they weren’t very responsive. But when they heard her sing, they started to get into it. One of the most difficult things about being the support act is knowing when to stop and, as that night showed, Amy didn’t. I don’t blame her because she was inexperienced. Perhaps her management should have clued her up. Amy ended up doing about fifteen songs, which was probably eight too many. By the end, people were getting restless. I could hear them saying, ‘How much longer is she going to be?’ and ‘What time does Jamie Cullum come on?’ Even the people I’d heard say, ‘She’s good,’ were fed up and wanting to see the act they’d paid for – Jamie Cullum. Of course, being me, I ended up shouting at people to shut up and nearly had a fight with someone. Much to the audience’s relief, Amy finished the set, but instead of going backstage, she climbed down and came to stand with us. We all watched Jamie and really enjoyed his performance – Amy cheered, clapped and whistled all the way through. She was always very generous with other performers. With more gigs, and promotional events linked to the imminent release of Frank, Amy wanted to start planning ahead. As the lease on her flat in East Finchley was about to expire, Janis and I sat down with her and asked her what she wanted to do. She said she’d like to buy a place rather than keep renting, and I agreed with her. A flat would be a great investment, particularly if her singing career ever went wrong. Remember those days before the recession? You could buy a flat for ?250,000 one day and sell it the next for ?275,000 – I exaggerate a bit, but the property market was booming. Amy loved Camden Town and we soon found a flat there that she liked in Jeffrey’s Place. It was small and needed some work, but that didn’t matter because all of her favourite places were in walking distance. This was where she wanted to be and the flat had a good feel to it. To get to it, you had to be buzzed through a locked gate, which reassured Janis and me: Amy would be quite safe there. The flat cost ?260,000. We put down ?100,000 and took out a ?160,000 mortgage, which left a good bit of money from the advances. I sat down with Amy and worked out a budget with her. All of the household bills and the mortgage would be paid out of her capital and she would have ?250 a week spending money, which she was quite happy with. If she needed something in particular she could always buy it, but that didn’t happen too often. In those days Amy was quite sensible about money. She knew that she had a decent amount to live on and that we were looking after her interests. She also knew that if she developed lavish habits, her funds would soon run out. Although Amy was a signatory on her company’s bank account, she wanted a safeguard put in place to ensure that she couldn’t squander her money so we agreed that any cheque had to be signed by two of the signatories to the account. The signatories were Amy, Janis, our accountant and myself. It would be an effective brake, we hoped, because Amy was generous to a fault. When it was time to put the credits together for Frank – who had done what on this song, who had written what on that song – in the spring of 2003, her generosity was evident again. Nick Godwyn, Nick Shymansky, Amy and I crowded round her kitchen table to sort it out – there had been a leak in the bathroom the night before and the lounge ceiling had fallen in. So much for the glamorous life. (Mind you, a year on, the place looked like a bomb had hit it.) Nick Shymansky started off. ‘Right. How do you want to divide up the credits for “Stronger Than Me”?’ ‘Twenty per cent to …’ Amy began, and she’d name someone and Nick would ask her why on earth she’d want to give that person 20 per cent when all they’d done was come to the studio for an hour and suggest one word change. While it was certainly important to credit people for what they had done, and ensure that they were paid accordingly, she was giving away percentages to people for almost nothing. Amy was brilliant at maths, but I swear, if she’d had her way, she would have given away more than 100 per cent on a number of songs. * * * On 6 October 2003, three weeks prior to the release of Frank, the lead single, ‘Stronger Than Me’, hit the shops and peaked, disappointingly, at number seventy-one in the UK charts – it turned out to be the lowest-charting single of Amy’s career. When the album came out on 20 October 2003, it sold well, eventually making it to number thirteen in the UK charts in February 2004. It was also critically acclaimed, and sales were boosted later in 2004 when it was short-listed for a Mercury Music Prize, and Amy was nominated for the BRIT Awards for Best British Female Solo Artist and Best British Urban Act. I devoured all of the reviews, and don’t recall anything negative, although the hip-hop/jazz mix confused some at first. The Guardian wrote, ‘Sounds Afro-American: is British-Jewish. Looks sexy: won’t play up to it. Is young: sounds old. Sings sophisticated: talks rough. Musically mellow: lyrically nasty.’ I thought that Frank, which is still my favourite Amy album, was fantastic. One of the reasons I love it is because it’s about young love and innocence, and it’s funny, comical and has brilliantly observed lyrics. It wasn’t written out of the depths of despair. I still love listening to Frank and play it often. I was so proud of my little girl. Unfortunately Amy didn’t hear things quite as I did. She had mixed feelings about the final cut and complained that the record company had included some mixes that she had told them she didn’t like. It was partly her fault: she’d missed a few of the editing sessions, in typical Amy fashion. We were in the kitchen at her flat in Jeffrey’s Place, having a cup of tea, and the window was open. The builders working next door turned their radio up loud and one of the songs from Frank was playing. ‘Shut the window, Dad, I don’t want to hear that,’ Amy said. It had been on my mind for a while to ask her, so I said, ‘Were you thinking about anyone in particular when you wrote “Fuck Me Pumps”?’ She shook her head. ‘There’s the line … What is it? Hang on … Let me have a look at the CD. Where is it?’ ‘I don’t even know if I’ve got one, Dad.’ ‘What? You haven’t got a copy of your own album?’ ‘No, I’m done with it. It was all about Chris, and that’s in the past. I’ve forgotten about it, Dad. I’m writing other stuff now.’ This was news to me. I’d never seen this side of Amy, the way she could put something so deeply personal and important behind her, as if it didn’t matter any more. Nevertheless, she continued to promote Frank, and later that year she performed at some very prestigious venues: the Glastonbury Festival, the V Festival and the Montreal International Jazz Festival. No matter what, her music and her family came first. But her other priorities then were like so many other girls of her age – clothes, boys, going out with her friends, her image and style – she was, after all, a woman in her early twenties. She may have been dismissive about Frank but things happened with the album that made her realize it was special, like when ‘Stronger Than Me’, which she’d written with Salaam Remi, won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song Musically and Lyrically. The Novellos mattered to Amy: her peers, other composers and writers voted to decide the winners. Amy went to the ceremony and rang me to tell me she’d won. I was halfway down Fulham Road, taking someone to Putney in my taxi, when she called. ‘Dad! Dad! I won an Ivor Novello!’ I was so excited but I still had to drive this chap home and finish my shift. By then it was late and I had no one to bother so I went and woke up my mum. ‘Amy’s won an Ivor Novello!’ She was as pleased as I was. One disappointment we all shared was that Frank wasn’t initially released in America. 19 felt that Amy wasn’t ready for the States. They said that you only get one shot at breaking the States and this wasn’t the time, mostly because, in their view, her performance level wasn’t strong enough. Frustrating though it was, they were probably right. At this time Amy was still playing guitar onstage and 19 wanted to get the guitar out of her hands: she was always looking down at it instead of engaging with the audience. Sometimes it was as if they weren’t there and she was singing and playing for her own amusement. Her voice was great, but she wasn’t delivering a performance: she needed coaching in how to give the best to her audiences. Her act needed refining before she took it to the States. They told Amy that she had to communicate with the audience and the best way to do that was to show them she was having a good time. This, though, was what she struggled with. She loved singing and playing to family and friends, but as the gigs got bigger, so did the pressure, highlighting the fact that she wasn’t a natural performer. As Amy was outwardly so confident, no one imagined that inside she harboured a fear of being onstage, and that as she played in front of ever-increasing crowds, the fear didn’t go away. Over time it became worse. But she was so good at concealing it that even I wasn’t aware of how hard this was for her. Quite often, during a song, she’d still commit the cardinal sin of turning her back on the audience. I’d be watching and want to shout at her, ‘Speak to the audience, they love you. Just say, “Hi, how you doin’? You all havin’ a good time?”’ Amy never did figure out how to deal with stage fright. While she wasn’t physically sick, as some performers are, she sometimes needed a drink before she went on. Maybe even needed to smoke a little cannabis, but I don’t know for sure, because she wouldn’t have done that in front of me. What I certainly didn’t know and, with hindsight, perhaps I should have seen the warning sign for, was that she was starting to drink a lot more than was good for her, even then. As a teenage girl she’d suffered from a few self-esteem issues – what teenager doesn’t? – but I really don’t believe that was at the root of her stage fright; by the time she was performing regularly her self-esteem issues had gone. But 19 were right: she wasn’t ready to go to America. Before that Amy needed to work hard on her act and it would take time. Talking to the audience and showing them she was enjoying herself came later, and even when it did, I don’t think it was ever natural. To me, she always looked uncomfortable when she was doing it. It wasn’t easy to talk to her about a performance; after maybe a couple of days I could say things about what she was and wasn’t doing, but I had to be careful. Amy wasn’t so much strong-willed as cement-willed, and she did things her way. As the promotional gigs continued, her management started to talk about a second album. There were still some good songs that hadn’t been included on Frank. One in particular was ‘Do Me Good’. I told Amy that I thought it should go on the second album because it was fantastic, but she didn’t think so and reminded me of something she’d told me once before: ‘That was then, Dad. It’s not what I’m about now. That was written about Chris and I’m over it.’ All of Amy’s songs were about her experiences and by this time Chris was firmly in the past. With him no longer relevant to her life, that made the songs about him even less relevant. She’d started writing a lot of new material, and there could easily have been an album between Frank and Back to Black – there were certainly enough songs. But Amy didn’t want to bring out an album unless the songs had a personal meaning to her, and the ones she’d written after Frank and before Back to Black didn’t do it for her. She resisted the pressure from 19 to head back into the studio. Amy and I often talked about her song writing. I asked her if she could write songs the way Cole Porter or Irving Berlin did. Those guys were ‘guns for hire’ when it came to churning out great songs. Irving Berlin could get up in the morning, look out of the window and ten minutes later he’d have written ‘Isn’t This A Lovely Day?’. ‘Could you do that?’ I’d ask Amy. ‘Of course I could, Dad. But I don’t want to. All of my songs are autobiographical. They have to mean something to me.’ It was precisely because her songs were dragged up out of her soul that they were so powerful and passionate. The ones that went into Back to Black were about the deepest of emotions. And she went through hell to make it. 5 A PAIN IN SPAIN (#ulink_6339d263-da9b-5921-a93f-9d816945fd84) During the summer of 2004, in the midst of her first taste of success, Amy’s regular drinking habits were worrying me – so many of her stories revolved around something happening to her while she was having a drink. Just how much, I never knew. On one occasion, she had drunk so much that she fell, banged her head and had to go to hospital. Her friend Lauren brought her from the hospital to my house in Kent and they stayed for three or four days. After they arrived, Amy went straight to sleep in her room and I called Nick Godwyn and Nick Shymansky. They came over immediately and we sat down to discuss what they were referring to as ‘Amy’s drinking problem’. We had a sense that Amy was using alcohol to loosen up before her gigs, but the others thought it was playing a more frequent role in her life. The subject of rehab came up – the first time that anyone had mentioned it. I was against it. I thought she’d just had one too many this time, and rehab seemed an overreaction. ‘I think she’s fine,’ I told everyone, which she later turned into a line in ‘Rehab’. As we carried on talking, though, I saw the other side – that if she dealt with the problem now, it would be gone. Lauren and the two Nicks had seen her out drinking, and they, with Jane, were in favour of trying rehab, so I shut up. After a while, Amy came down, and we told her what we’d been discussing. As you’d expect, she said, ‘I ain’t going,’ so we all had a go at changing her mind, first the two Nicks, then Lauren, then Jane and I. Eventually Jane took Amy into the kitchen and gave her a good talking-to. I don’t know exactly what was said but Amy came out and said, ‘All right, I’ll give it a go.’ The next day she packed a bag and the Nicks took her to a rehab facility in Surrey, just outside London. We thought she was going for a week, but three hours later she was back. ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Dad, all the counsellor wanted to do was talk about himself,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got time to sit there listening to that rubbish. I’ll deal with this my own way.’ The two Nicks, who had driven her home, were still trying to persuade her to go back, but she wasn’t having any of it. Amy had made her mind up and that was that. Initially I agreed with her, since I hadn’t been totally convinced she needed to go in the first place. Later it came out that the clinic had told Amy she needed to be there for at least two months – I think that was what had made her leave. She might have stuck it for a week, but a couple of months? No chance. For Amy, being in control was vital and she wouldn’t allow someone else to take over. She’d been like that since she was very young; it had been Amy, after all, who’d put in the application to Sylvia Young, Amy who’d got the singing gig with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, and Amy who’d got the job at WENN. She’d had help, yes, but she’d done it – not Janis, not me. Amy headed to the kitchen. ‘Who wants a drink?’ she called over her shoulder. ‘I’m making tea.’ * * * Frank sold more than 300,000 copies in the UK when it was first released, going platinum within a matter of weeks. Based on sales, you would have thought Amy’s career was in the ascendant, but that wasn’t the case. By the end of 2004 there wasn’t much work coming in and I was beginning to think it was all over as quickly as it had started, although Amy wasn’t worried and continued being out there and having a good time. The people around her seemed unaware that nothing was happening with her career and carried on treating her as if she was a big star. I guess if enough people tell you you’re a big star, you come to believe it. Only my mother could bring Amy back to earth. She didn’t often have a go at her but when she did it was relentless. We were at her flat one Friday night when she told Amy, ‘Get in there. If they’re finished, get everyone’s plates, bring them into the kitchen and do the washing-up.’ Amy wasn’t happy about that, but when everyone else had left, Mum called Amy to her again: ‘Come here, you, I want to talk to you.’ ‘No, Nan, no.’ Amy knew what was coming. She had said something earlier that my mum had considered out of line. ‘Never let me hear you say that again. Who do you think you are?’ It did the trick. My mother was a stabilizing influence on Amy and made sure her feet were firmly on the ground. So, it was no surprise that it hit Amy hard when her grandmother fell ill in the winter of 2004. I drove round to Amy’s, dreading the moment when I had to say, ‘Nan’s been diagnosed with lung cancer.’ When Amy opened the front door of her flat I choked out the words before we fell into each other’s arms, sobbing. Alex moved into my mum’s flat in Barnet for a couple of months to be with her, and when he moved out Jane and I took his place. We wanted to make sure she was never on her own because there had been a mix-up with one of my mum’s prescriptions: she had inadvertently been taking ten times the correct dose of one particular drug. It had spaced her out to such an extent that we thought the cancer must have spread to her brain. Once we discovered the mistake and rectified it, she was back to normal within a couple of days. All of the things that you would normally associate with lung cancer didn’t apply in my mum’s case. She was a bit breathless so she had an oxygen machine, but other than that she was very comfortable. During the last three months of her life she actually improved – well, outwardly she did. Then one evening in May 2006 I came home to find her on the floor. She’d had a fall. She didn’t appear too bad, but I called the paramedics just to be on the safe side. They took her to Barnet General Hospital, and while they were checking her over there, she looked at me and said, ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough.’ I asked what she meant. ‘I’ve had enough,’ she said. I told her not to be silly, that after a good night’s sleep she’d feel better and I’d be taking her home the following day. ‘I’ve had enough,’ she repeated. And those were the last words my mother ever spoke to me. That night she fell into a coma and a day and a half later she passed away peacefully. I felt awful because my mother had asked me to stay with her, and once she was asleep I’d gone home for a couple of hours’ rest. ‘Don’t be silly, Dad,’ Amy said. ‘She was in a coma.’ My mother’s death had an enormous impact on Amy and Alex. Alex went into a state of depression and withdrew into himself, and Amy was unusually quiet. But the depth of Amy’s sorrow didn’t surprise me. Five days after my mum died my friend Phil’s sister Hilary got married for the first time, aged sixty, to a lovely guy called Claudio. Although we were in mourning, we felt we should go to the wedding. Jane, Amy and I went, but Alex couldn’t face it. Weeks before the wedding Amy and I had been asked to sing at the reception. My wedding present to them was a pianist. I’d worked with him before so I didn’t need to rehearse with him. That night I got up and sang. It was only a few days after my mum had passed away so it was difficult, but I managed it. Then Amy got up to sing and just couldn’t. She couldn’t sing in front of the guests, she was too upset. Instead, she went into another room with the microphone, so the guests couldn’t see her, and sang a few songs from there. Although she sounded fantastic, I could hear the pain in her voice. ‘Dad, I don’t know how you could get up in front of all those people and sing,’ she said to me afterwards. ‘You’ve got balls of brass!’ I’ve always been able to put my emotions to one side, but Amy couldn’t. She loved singing, but I’ve never felt that she really loved performing. * * * After Frank came out, Amy would begin a performance at a gig by walking onstage, clapping and chanting, ‘Class-A drugs are for mugs. Class-A drugs are for mugs …’ She’d get the whole audience to join in until they’d all be clapping and chanting as she launched into her first number. Although Amy was smoking cannabis, she had always been totally against class-A drugs. Blake Fielder-Civil changed that. Amy first met him early in 2005 at the Good Mixer pub in Camden. None of Amy’s friends that I’ve spoken to over the years can remember exactly what led to this meeting. But after that encounter she talked about him a lot. ‘When am I going to meet him, darling?’ I asked. Amy was evasive, which was probably, I learned later, because Blake was in a relationship. Amy knew about this, so initially you could say that Amy was ‘the other woman’. And although she knew that he was seeing someone else, it was only about a month after they’d met that she had his name tattooed over her left breast. It was clear that she loved him – that they loved each other – but it was also clear that Blake had his problems. It was a stormy relationship from the start. A few weeks after they’d met, Blake told Amy that he’d finished with the other girl, and Amy, who never did anything by halves, was now fully obsessed with him. A couple of months later I saw Blake for the first time, although I didn’t actually meet him then, at the Queen’s Arms, in Primrose Hill, north-west London, where I’d arranged to meet Amy one Sunday lunchtime. I walked into the busy pub and saw her sitting on some fella’s lap. They were kissing passionately. The pub was packed and I thought, This isn’t on. I got hold of her, took her outside and gave her a piece of my mind – she shouldn’t have been doing that in a public place. We had a bit of a row and Amy told me she had been kissing her boyfriend, Blake. I said I didn’t care who he was, and I was about to walk off when I stopped and turned round. ‘And another thing,’ I said. ‘What’s with all the big hair and the makeup? Who are you meant to be?’ ‘Don’t you like it, Dad? It’s my new look.’ I thought she’d looked nicer when she was a bit smarter, though I had to admit the look suited her, but I didn’t say so then. ‘Come on, Dad, come and have a drink with us,’ she said. I was still seething so I made some excuse. It was none of my business where and whom my twenty-one-year-old daughter kissed but I’ve always been a bit hot-headed, especially where my kids are concerned. * * * Amy’s old friend Tyler James says that he noticed a massive change in Amy when she first met Blake. To Tyler, the day Amy met Blake, she fell in love with him, and after that they wouldn’t leave each other’s side. He became the centre of Amy’s world and everything revolved around him. Tyler told me that the first time Blake visited Amy’s flat at Jeffrey’s Place, he offered Tyler a line of cocaine while they were watching TV – not something that Tyler or Amy would normally have come across. Amy was, as I said, dead against class-A ‘chemical’ drugs, as she called them, and while Blake was doing cocaine, Amy stuck to smoking cannabis (which led to her lyrics on ‘Back to Black’, ‘you love blow and I love puff’). And she was still drinking. I found out later that Blake had been dabbling in heroin when Amy had first met him. Tyler, who was staying at the Jeffrey’s Place flat at the time, would wake up in the morning and throw up because of passive heroin intake but he didn’t know for sure that Blake was a user until Amy told him. Tyler wasn’t the only one who saw a change in Amy. Nick Shymansky remembers a pivotal moment around this time when he called Amy from a ski trip. She sounded ‘really different’. ‘I’ve just met this guy,’ she told Nick. ‘You’ll really love him. He’s called Blake and we’ve fallen madly in love.’ Nick came back from his trip and saw immediately that Amy must have lost a stone and a half in weight while he had been away. She started phoning him in the early hours of the morning when she was drunk. One night she called saying she had had a row with Blake and was in a pub in Camden and wanted Nick to pick her up. Nick always felt protective towards Amy so naturally he went to collect her. This was the first time since Chris that Amy had been in love and, according to Nick, it was a terrible two or three weeks. Everyone was worried about her and they all knew something was up. Amy and Blake’s turbulent relationship only got worse. As if the drug use wasn’t bad enough, Amy soon found out that Blake was cheating on her with his old girlfriend, a discovery that culminated in the first of their many splits. According to Tyler, Amy ended the relationship because of the heroin and the other woman. Until then, Amy and Blake had been together every day, and then they simply weren’t. She took the break-up hard. Not long afterwards, Amy and I were walking on Primrose Hill – she loved our walks there and, back then, few people recognized her so we weren’t mobbed by fans. That afternoon I could tell she was miserable. ‘You know, I really want to be with him, Dad, but I can’t,’ she told me. ‘Not while he’s still seeing his ex.’ I didn’t know whether to be encouraging or realistic. After all, I didn’t know anything about Blake at that time. ‘You know what’s best, darling. I’ll support whatever decision you make.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘It’s me, isn’t it, Dad? I always pick the wrong boys, don’t I?’ ‘Tell you what,’ I said, wanting to do something, anything, to make her feel better. ‘You know Jane and I are off to Spain on holiday? Why not come with us?’ I didn’t think for a moment she’d agree, but I was delighted when she did. The three of us stayed at Jane’s dad Ted’s place in Alicante. It’s a lovely old farmhouse, secluded, with a pool. We’d all been there before and had a great time. On that trip we’d gone to a nearby jazz caf? where Amy had stood up and sung with the band. I felt this holiday would give her a chance to forget about Blake and write some more songs without too many interruptions. The only problem was that she’d forgotten to bring her guitar. We went into the nearby village of Gata de Gorgos and bought her one from a fantastic workshop owned and run by the brothers Paco and Luis Broseta – we were in there for hours. Amy must have tried out a hundred before she settled on a really nice small one, perfect for someone of her size. When we got home, Amy went to her room to start writing. I could hear her strumming, then pausing to write down the song. She never brought the guitar out of her room to play any of her songs to us, it all went on privately. This went on for quite a while and then there was quiet. After about an hour, I went to her room and she was on the phone to Blake. When she finished the call, she came outside and happily told me that he wanted to get back with her. After that, they were on the phone for hours – and I do mean hours. Amy was missing the best parts of the holiday, shutting herself away with the phone. Even dinnertime meant nothing to her. ‘Will you come out of your bloody room?’ I said to her. ‘You’re driving us mad.’ So she would leave her room and start walking up and down in the garden – but she’d still be on the phone all the time. It went on and on and on, every day of the holiday. When we got back to England, Amy and Blake were together for a few weeks until they split up again. And so it began. It was around that time that Amy met a guy named Alex Clare, and they were together on and off for about a year. Alex was really nice and I got on very well with him. We both loved Jewish food and we’d often go with Amy and Jane to Reubens kosher restaurant in Baker Street in London’s West End to eat together. Shortly after Amy met Alex he moved in with her and, initially, they were very happy. At one point they even talked about getting married. Amy loved cats and dogs, and not long after Alex moved in, she bought a lovely dog called Freddie, but he was like a raving lunatic. One day Amy and Alex were out with him for a walk and Freddie got lost. ‘He’d probably had enough of me and ran away,’ Amy said. ‘I don’t blame him!’ He was never found. 6 FADE TO BLACK (#ulink_1e4a84fe-0067-52f9-aec1-bf5744ebd880) Looking back on the period between the end of the promotion for Frank and the release of Back to Black, I realize I had no idea of what was about to happen to Amy musically or in her private life. Her habit of writing highly autobiographical songs meant that when she was happy she didn’t turn to her guitar often. There weren’t that many gigs, but she didn’t seem bothered. I began to wonder if there would ever be a second album. I felt she was drifting. 19 were also wondering about the next album. They’d been ready for her to do something as early as 2004, but with her focus elsewhere, there had been little development. Towards the end of 2005, Amy’s contract with them was running out and my impression was that she and 19 were tiring of each other. 19 had set up meetings at restaurants with Nick Gatfield, head of Island Records, and Guy Moot, head of EMI Publishing, and Amy had not shown up. These were big people in the music business, so her no-shows were embarrassing for 19 and they started to lose faith in her. Amy, in turn, was disappointed that they hadn’t broken her into the US market. And, of course, she hadn’t been happy with the final cut of Frank. When it came time to think about the follow-up, those issues reappeared. Regardless of the problems each side had with the other, the reality was that no money was coming in and I was starting to worry about Amy’s finances. Jane and I went to see her play at a pub in east London where the room was thick with smoke (this was before the smoking ban), and she was paid just ?250 (I didn’t know that she was playing as a favour to a friend). The next day, I told Amy we might have to think about selling the flat unless the money started coming in. ‘Dad, you can’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to bring out another album.’ I knew she meant it, but those words had been floating around for so long I was beginning to doubt them. All I knew was that she’d written a few songs when we were in Spain, probably not enough for an album; I didn’t know how many others she’d worked on previously or since. ‘How many songs have you got?’ I asked her. ‘I’m doing it, Dad,’ Amy replied, ‘I’m doing it, so don’t worry about it.’ And that was all she’d say to me. She was never comfortable talking about her writing – especially when she wasn’t doing any. I wasn’t seeing Amy as regularly as I used to, although I spoke to her on the phone every day. I put this down to her seeming obsession with Blake, and I noticed she mentioned Alex Clare less and less. But she was a grown-up and it was none of my business, so I kept my mouth shut. When Amy’s management contract with 19 came up for renewal she told Nick Shymansky that she was not sure about carrying on with them. He didn’t know what to say because he felt that she still wanted him in the picture but not 19. Amy had issues with Nick Godwyn on a day-to-day level but Nick Shymansky, by his own admission, didn’t have enough experience or knowledge to manage her by himself, so he tried to get Amy to work things out with 19. Around this time Nick took Amy to meet record producer and songwriter Paul O’Duffy. He’d worked with Swing Out Sister and produced the John Barry soundtrack for the James Bond film The Living Daylights. The song he and Amy wrote together was ‘Wake Up Alone’ for Back to Black. I was pleased she was getting down to some work but, of course, she wouldn’t play me the song. In the car driving back from Paul’s house, Amy said that if Nick wouldn’t leave 19 and manage her, then Blake and his mates would take over. Naturally there was no way Nick would allow that to happen – on a few occasions he’d had to pull her out of the pub when she’d been with Blake and his pals to go to meetings. When Nick heard about it he went mad and the two of them got into a huge argument that ended with him telling Amy that, whatever happened, Blake and his mates would not be managing her. It was then that Nick raised the possibility of Raye Cosbert managing her. Raye was already promoting some of Amy’s gigs and she had built up a great relationship with him. Everyone at Island knew and liked Raye too. Amy had known Raye since 2003 and I knew that she liked and trusted him. Importantly, he and Amy shared similar tastes in music. I’d first heard of Raye in the middle of 2005 when I’d gone to Amy’s dressing room after a show and found a bottle of champagne from him. I asked Amy who he was and she told me it was Raye Cosbert of Metropolis Music, who’d been promoting a lot of her gigs. I’d seen a big black guy with dreadlocks hanging around the gigs quite a bit and now I realized he must have been Raye. One night I introduced myself to him and we got chatting. He told me that, apart from seeing me at some of Amy’s gigs, I was vaguely familiar. ‘Do you go to the football?’ he asked. ‘I’m a season ticket holder at White Hart Lane,’ I said. He was too. Then he asked me to turn round with my back to him – I thought he was mad, but I did it anyway. ‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘I recognize the back of your head!’ It turned out that my seat was four rows in front of his, just to the left. We’re both ardent Spurs fans so we had an immediate rapport. After that we became great friends and always found each other at half-time to have a catch-up. Once Nick had suggested Raye as a possible manager, Amy, Raye and I had a dinner meeting at the Lock Tavern, a gastro pub in Camden Town, to talk about Amy’s management and discuss Raye’s experience. I was concerned because I knew him as a promoter, but Amy assured me he was right for her. It was raining that night and Amy came in late, as usual. She arrived wearing a borrowed coat and I suggested she buy one like it because it suited her. She was wearing a dress, her hair was long, and she looked beautiful, smart and stylish. ‘Hello, darling. You look lovely tonight,’ I told her. ‘Aaaah, Dad, thanks.’ She beamed at me. She seemed a bit tipsy so I made a point of not refilling her glass as quickly as she emptied it. Over dinner Raye outlined his plans for Amy. He impressed us with his forward-thinking ideas, saying that she needed to move on. He suggested it was time to break her in America, and take her to number one there as well as in the UK. He also pushed the idea of a new album and more gigs: if we did this right we were definitely going to crack it. I didn’t know it at the time but Amy had already played him some of her new songs and he thought they were fantastic. Raye speculated that 19 probably felt that doing a second album with Amy might be difficult as Amy wasn’t happy with the final cut of Frank. They didn’t want her to leave them but he thought they wouldn’t stand in her way if she decided to go. After everything Amy and I had heard from Raye, we decided she should sign a management deal with Metropolis. We’d made some marvellous friends at 19, some of whom remained her friends, but it was time for a change. (Amy always accumulated friends rather than dropping them.) 19 had done some great things for her: without them she probably wouldn’t have got record and publishing deals, but I think they probably felt they had taken her as far as they could. When it came down to it, I was reminded of Amy’s schools: they were quite pleased to see her go. * * * Leaving 19 was a tough decision but it turned out to be the right one. In the end, Amy’s relationship with Raye Cosbert and Metropolis became, in my view, one of the most successful artist/manager partnerings in the music business. Very quickly, Raye set up meetings with Lucian Grainge at Universal, and Guy Moot at EMI. Raye’s energy was just what Amy’s career needed – like a kick up the arse. For some time Guy Moot had wanted Amy to get together with the talented young Mark Ronson, a producer/arranger/songwriter/DJ. In March 2006, a few months after she’d signed with Metropolis, Raye encouraged her to meet Mark in New York so the two of them could ‘hook up’. She knew very little about him before she walked into his studio on Mercer Street in Greenwich Village, and on first seeing him, she said, ‘Oh, the engineer’s here.’ Later she told him that she’d thought he would be an older Jewish guy with a big beard. That meeting was a bit like an awkward first date. Amy played Mark some Shangri-Las tracks, which had the real retro sound that she was into, and she told him that was the sort of music she wanted to make for the new album. Mark knew some of the tracks Amy mentioned but otherwise she gave him a crash course in sixties jukebox, girl-group pop music. She’d done the same for me when I’d stumbled over a pile of old vinyl records – the Ronettes, the Chiffons, the Crystals – that she’d bought from a stall in Camden Market. That had been where she’d developed her love of sixties makeup and the beehive hairdo. They met again the following day, by which time Mark had come up with a piano riff that became the verse chords to ‘Back to Black’. Behind the piano, he put a kick drum, a tambourine and ‘tons of reverb’. Amy loved it, and it was the first song she recorded for the new album. Amy was supposed to be flying home a few days later, but she was so taken with Mark that she called me to say she was going to stay in New York to carry on working with him. Her trip lasted another two weeks and proved very fruitful, with Amy and Mark fleshing out five or six songs. Amy would play Mark a song on her guitar, write the chords down for him and leave him to work out the arrangements. A lot of her songs were to do with Blake, which did not escape Mark’s attention. She told Mark that writing songs about him was cathartic and that ‘Back to Black’ summed up what had happened when their relationship had ended: Blake had gone back to his ex and Amy to black, or drinking and hard times. It was some of her most inspired writing because, for better or worse, she’d lived it. Mark and Amy inspired each other musically, each bringing out fresh ideas in the other. One day they decided to take a quick stroll around the neighbourhood because Amy wanted to buy Alex Clare a present. On the way back Amy began telling Mark about being with Blake, then not being with Blake and being with Alex instead. She told him about the time at my house after she’d been in hospital when everyone had been going on at her about her drinking. ‘You know they tried to make me go to rehab, and I told them, no, no, no.’ ‘That’s quite gimmicky,’ Mark replied. ‘It sounds hooky. You should go back to the studio and we should turn that into a song.’ Of course, Amy had written that line in one of her books ages ago. She’d told me before she was planning to write a song about what had happened that day, but that was the moment ‘Rehab’ came to life. Amy had also been working on a tune for the ‘hook’, but when she played it to Mark later that day it started out as a slow blues shuffle – it was like a twelve-bar blues progression. Mark suggested that she should think about doing a sixties girl-group sound, as she liked them so much. He also thought it would be fun to put in the Beatles-style E minor and A minor chords, which would give it a jangly feel. Amy was unaccustomed to this style – most of the songs she was writing were based around jazz chords – but it worked and that day she wrote ‘Rehab’ in just three hours. If you had sat Amy down with a pen and paper every day, she wouldn’t have written a song. But every now and then, something or someone turned the light on in her head and she wrote something brilliant. During that time it happened over and over again. The sessions in the studio became very intense and tiring, especially for Mark, who would sometimes work a double shift and then fall asleep. He would wake up with his head in Amy’s lap and she would be stroking his hair, as if he was a four-year-old. Mark was a few years older than Amy, but he told me he found her very motherly and kind. This was a very productive period for Amy. She’d already written ‘Wake Up Alone’, ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ and ‘You Know I’m No Good’ when we were on holiday in Spain, so the new album was taking shape. Before she’d met Mark, Amy had been in Miami, working with Salaam Remi on a few tracks. Her unexpected burst of creativity in New York prompted her to call him. She told him how excited she was about what she was doing with Mark, and Salaam was very encouraging. Jokingly, she said to him, ‘So you’d better step up.’ Later she went back to Miami to work some more with Salaam, who did a fantastic job on the tracks he produced for the album. When Amy returned to London she told me excitedly about some of the Hispanic women she’d seen in Miami, and how she wanted to blend their look – thick eyebrows, heavy eye-liner, bright red lipstick – with her passion for the sixties ‘beehive’. By then, Mark had all he needed to cut the music tracks with the band, the Dap-Kings, at the Daptone Recording Studios in Brooklyn. Shortly after that my mother passed away and Amy, along with the rest of the family, was in pieces. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, in June 2006, that Amy added the last touches to ‘Back to Black’, recording the vocals at the Power House Studios in west London. I went along that day to see her at work – the first time I’d been with her while she was recording. I hadn’t heard anything that she’d been doing for the new album, so it was amazing to listen to it for the first time. The sound was so clear and so basic: they’d stripped everything back to produce something so like the records of the early sixties. Amy did the vocals for ‘Back to Black’ over the already-recorded band tracks, and I stood in the booth with Raye, Salaam and one or two others while she sang. It was fascinating to watch her: she was very much in control, and she was a perfectionist, redoing phrases and even words to the nth degree. When she wanted to listen to what she’d sung, she’d get them to put it on a CD, then play it in my taxi outside, because she wanted to know how most people would hear her music, which would not be through professional studio systems. In the end, Back to Black was made in just five months. Amy’s CD sleeve for the Back to Black sampler. Amy still loved her heart symbol and drew a good self-portrait. She still seemed a schoolgirl at heart. The album astonished me. I knew my daughter was good, but this sounded like something on another level. Raye carried on telling us that it would be a huge hit all around the world, and I was getting very excited. It was hard to read Amy: I couldn’t tell if she expected it to be a triumph, as Raye did, but she was much happier with the final cut than she had been with Frank. This had been a much more hands-on process for her. Back to Black was released in the UK on 27 October 2006, and during its first two weeks it sold more than 70,000 copies. It reached number one on the UK Albums Chart in the week ending 20 January 2007. On 14 December 2007 it was certified six times platinum in the UK in recognition of more than 1.8 million copies sold. By December 2011 Back to Black had sold 3.5 million copies in the UK and more than 20 million copies worldwide. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/mitch-winehouse/amy-my-daughter/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.