Amy, My Daughter. Mitch Winehouse
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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.
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