Amy, My Daughter. Mitch Winehouse
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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.
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