Amy, My Daughter. Mitch Winehouse
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.
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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.
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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.’