Amy Winehouse

I’d like to thank all those who granted me time for interviews, including Julie Burchill, Garry Mulholland, Paolo Hewitt, Mark Simpson and Zeddy Lawrence.

Thanks to Stuart Robertson and John Blake for the deal. To Andy Armitage for copy-editing, Amy McCulloch for easing the book to paperback and to Diana Colbert and Rosie Ries for always being brilliant.

Thanks to David J Brown for his “Ahhhs” and Katie Glass for her tip-offs. I am always grateful to my friends who encourage and inspire me, including Lucian Randall and the wonderful Frankie Genchi of fleckingrecords.co.uk.

Finally, thanks to Chris for everything.

The author blogs at www.newkey-burden.com

I
t was when Amy Winehouse learned that during a meeting of the United Nations she had been held responsible for African poverty that she knew she had heard it all. For so long, this talented singer had been an obsession for the tabloid press and had learned to live with their relentless glare. However, when Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, singled her out, saying she glamorised drug use and was thus ‘causing another disaster in Africa’, she must have wondered if the world had gone mad.

The report came at a busy time in Amy’s life – a period of activity that was in turn weird, wonderful and woeful. The media, of course, were there to document every moment of it. She called her audience ‘monkey c**ts’ during a shambolic
performance in Birmingham, and, that same evening, a
crossdressing
stalker was ejected from the venue, despite his pained insistence he could look after her while her husband was incarcerated. Most reporters and fans had little good to say about the show; it was left – somewhat bizarrely – to Andrew Lloyd Weber and David Frost to defend her, insisting as they did that the performance had many merits. To add to the surreal atmosphere, Lloyd Webber went on to write an open letter to Amy in the pages of
Hello
! magazine.

Not that the musical maestro’s support meant the media were about to turn the temperature down on Amy. One newspaper claimed some burnt foil was thrown from her tour bus and another asked, ‘Is it impolite to ask if you’ve been to powder your nose, Amy?’ after she was photographed with a white circle inside her nostril. By the time a video clip of a recent concert surfaced on the Internet showing her retrieve something from her beehive and move it towards her nose, nobody seemed interested in admitting that, studied properly, the footage seemed to show her doing nothing more sinister than wiping her nose with a tissue.

Soon, she was causing raised eyebrows in the air. ‘Our famous little friend is smoking in the toilet,’meowed a sour air hostess during Amy’s flight to Scotland. Naturally, raised voices were heard as the singer jostled her way through the airport. News that her tour manager had quit did little to calm matters and before long her family were showing their increasing concern. Her brother Alex surfaced on television, telling the GMTV viewers that Amy was fine and then, after
she returned to the capital, her parents called an ambulance to her home in the early hours after she had disappeared. A sick rumour shot across the Internet that the twenty-four-year-old had died of a drug overdose.

However, Amy was alive and receiving help and plaudits from all manner of people. Cheryl Cole of Girls Aloud spoke of Amy’s talent; Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon said he wanted to give her a good feed and admitted he was worried about her breasts. (Wild boy!) Then, rockers Queens of the Stone Age paid tribute to her live on stage. Her notoriety was becoming truly global. No wonder she was voted the ‘Most Buzzed About Star’ by a leading American entertainment magazine.

Back on stage, Amy was dedicating songs to her imprisoned husband Blake. ‘I can only phone him before or after
EastEnders
,’ she told her audience during an insightful mood. Away from the shows, she signed up for yoga lessons and chuckled when she learned that controversial
Big Brother
star Jade Goody and her fella had done a photoshoot dressed up as Amy and Blake. It didn’t look half as ridiculous as one might have thought. Finally, the media reported with some shock the tumultuous news that Amy had got a taxi home after a concert in Brighton. ‘It was really strange,’ said a shaken eyewitness. Hold the front page!

From being blamed for poverty in Africa to her shock-horror south-coast taxi stunner, via burnt foil, Simon Le Bon and so much more, it had been a busy week in the land of Amy.

S
he told us she was trouble, but we know that she’s so good. Amy Winehouse is one of the most talented, honest and newsworthy artists ever to emerge from the UK music scene. She has sold millions of records, won numerous awards and won critical respect from all ages, tastes and fanbases. Her songwriting skills and rich, soulful voice make her stand head and shoulders above the competition. However, in recent years Amy has become known less for her beautiful voice and wonderful songs than for her hedonistic, controversial lifestyle.

In one of her songs, Amy sings of dying a hundred times. She has certainly had more than her fair share of lives already. At just twenty-four years of age, the dynamic diva had won more musical awards, sparked more tabloid headlines and
written more memorable, classic songs than most artists could hope to in a lifetime. Yes, her profile and success have often come at a price but, while that has sometimes been uncomfortable for her, for those who choose to read a book about her life story it is a happier prospect, promising as it does a story full of drama and incident.

Amy’s musical image defies stereotyping or pigeonholing. Her music, which was in the early days steeped firmly in the jazz tradition, has become an increasingly multifaceted affair, taking in funk, soul, R&B and hip-hop among many other genres. Just as her music defies pigeonholing, so does her wider image. In any given week, Amy can be plastered over the front page of a tabloid newspaper for her latest rumoured indiscretion, photographed in a celebrity weekly leaving a bar, have her music discussed in music weeklies and also be chewed over as a cultural icon in the pages of broadsheet newspapers and during highbrow chattery on posh radio stations. She is, all-round, a glorious mass of contradictions. As renowned music critic Garry Mulholland put it, Amy ‘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.’

Her producer, Mark Ronson, expands on Amy’s multifaceted nature. ‘I’ve had the luxury of working with someone like Amy Winehouse, who’s such an iconic figure and makes it sound modern,’ he says. ‘Anyone else might have made it sound like some sort of retro pastiche.’ His assessment is, unsurprisingly, spot on. Her sound may be rooted firmly in traditional jazz and soul from deep back in the twentieth
century, but the subjects of her songs have distinctly
twenty-first
-century themes: footballers’ wives, rehab, Beastie Boys
T-shirts
. As for Amy, she has described herself as everything from being ‘very maternal’ to ‘an ugly dickhead drunk’.

Then there is contradiction of her stage performances. First there is the supreme confidence: witness the proud, almost sneering expression she pulls during the opening
a capella
line of ‘Me and Mr Jones’. Yet she can also appear enchantingly vulnerable and uncomfortable on stage, forever readjusting her dress and – of course – often taking to the stage after more than a few drinks, surely a sign of nerves as well as any wider issues.

LA Weekly
, writing up a concert she gave on the Sunset Strip, wrote,

Her true fans lap up all her contradictions, good and bad. Rarely has there been a more supportive fanbase than that
enjoyed by Amy. She might sing a song about being just friends, but her relationship with her real fans is true love, despite reports of disgruntled fans at her winter 2007 UK tour.

She has successfully reinvented her image, too. When she first stepped under the spotlight, Amy was a young,
fresh-faced
Jewish princess. A protégée of
Pop Idol
guru Simon Fuller, she had a voice beyond her years and was pleasingly curvy and well behaved. Well, comparatively well behaved. Then, after her first album was released, Amy disappeared off the radar. She then returned as a slimmer, cooler and decidedly darker star. Covered in tattoos with a huge beehive and an unpredictable nature, she was a million miles from her former self. When a television host told her how much he had liked and got along with the ‘first’ Amy during his interviews with her on Channel 4’s
Popworld
, she laughed and said, ‘She’s dead.’

But is the old Amy
really
dead? ‘I’m a nice girl,’ she protests. ‘Everyone says I’m a bitch, but, like the stuff in the papers, it’s only the bad stuff. It’s not going to make the papers if I cook dinner for twelve of my best friends and we have a lovely night doing nothing but talking and laughing, know what I mean?

‘That’s really the kind of person I am. I’m just a little Jewish housewife really. It’s just that I’m working so much at the moment that it’s hard for me to look after my baby,’ she said, referring to her then boyfriend. ‘I had my first day off for so long the other day and all I did was stay home and cook all day for my boyfriend, my family, my dad, my manager, clean the house. That’s what I like to do.’

If a single song sums up the new Amy, it is, of course, ‘Rehab’. Here she was at her defiant, controversial and most outspoken best. Her first album might have been called
Frank
– in reference both to her hero Mr Sinatra and to the directness of her lyrics – but with ‘Rehab’ (which was taken from her second album) she was at her frankest. It was also one of those moments that any artist kills for: a moment that captures everything you’d want in a song. Her chant of ‘no, no, no’ became ubiquitous across the nation.

Amy is a paid-up subscriber to the school of thought that says if you analyse and discuss your magical talent you might risk losing it. However, she has expanded on how she came to write ‘Rehab’, and makes the process sound so simple. ‘I just sang the hook out loud as a joke. It was quite silly really,’ she shrugs. ‘I sang the whole line exactly as it turned out on the record! Mark [Ronson] laughed and asked me who wrote it because he liked it. I told him that I’d just made it up but that it was true and he encouraged me to turn it into a song, which took me five minutes. It wasn’t hard. It was about what my old management company wanted me to do.’

Can it really be that simple to write a song that combines a wonderfully infectious riff with cheeky lyrics that played into the twenty-first-century obsession with the relationship between celebrity, addiction and rehabilitation? We’d all be doing it if that were so. Perhaps it really is that simple, but only for those who occasionally are struck and blessed by a moment of genius.

Whether or not Amy deserves the title of genius has been the subject of some debate. Those who feel she has not
earned such an accolade point to the modern era’s overuse of the word and argue that only an innovator can be justly awarded the status of genius and that, given the proudly derivative style of Amy’s music, a genius she is not. However, perhaps the entire debate is missing the point. Stand in any bar or club and see the effect that songs like ‘Rehab’ have on the masses. Watch as everyone in the club mouths along to the ‘no, no, no’. Amy’s music belongs not just to the intellectuals of the music press whose knowledge of pop history allows them to compare her to acts of yesteryear while rubbing their goatee beards; nor does it belong only to those who foam at the mouth with joy at her latest tabloid discretion. It belongs to all of us. To borrow and adapt a phrase, she is the people’s Jewish princess.

Often, artists are merely conduits for a range of human experiences and emotions that they might never have experienced themselves. Witness pop idol Gareth Gates singing ‘The Long and Winding Road’ at the age of just seventeen. However, in the confessional, touchy-feely twenty-first century, the public is increasingly receptive to artists who bare their souls on stage, singing about their own lives and experiences.

Robbie Williams sang about his own demons in numerous songs including ‘Strong’ and ‘Feel’, and Libertines frontmen Pete Doherty and Carl Barat portrayed their intense friendship in ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’. Concert halls are becoming more like therapy centres with the stage representing the couch and the audience becoming the shrinks. Amy fits as neatly as you like into this atmosphere. Her songs are nakedly about her own
experiences. Her first album,
Frank
, was almost entirely about her relationship with one man, and, even when the songs deviated from that theme, their origin was still personal, such as about her father’s infidelity.

Her second album,
Back to Black
, was largely about her tumultuous relationship with her husband Blake Fielder-Civil. Again, there were also songs about other aspects of her personal life, including the aforementioned ‘Rehab’ and also ‘Addicted’, which is her warning to a flatmate to stop her boyfriend smoking Amy’s weed. While Amy’s fearlessly honest lyrics may be bad news for those in her life who have their dirty laundry aired over the airwaves, for the public it is a joy to behold an artist who actually is – in that embarrassingly overused phrase – keeping it real. When asked how she would like to be remembered, she replied, ‘As genuine.’ It’s hard to see her wish not being fulfilled, though here’s hoping we will not need merely to remember her for a long, long time.

‘I’m much harder on myself on the album than I am to any man,’ she says of
Frank
. ‘I know he couldn’t help being a certain way, but it still frustrated me, so I lash out with my lyrics. But I’ve never had a man come up to me and say, “You hate men don’t you?” I love boys. That’s my problem. That’s why I’m so messed up. My ideal man would not play games. I’ve met a couple of the most beautiful men in the world, but just because I don’t know where their heads are I’m like “You’re a headache – goodbye!” I just can’t be bothered.’

The honest, confessional nature of her songwriting is no creative accident but is rather a deliberate method and tactic
on Amy’s part. It is also one that she has learned from her heroes. ‘I realised’, she once said, ‘that the Shangri-Las have pretty much got a song for every stage of a relationship. When you see a boy and you don’t even know his name; when you start talking to him; when you start going out with him; and then when you’re in love with him; and then when he f**king chucks you – and then you want to kill yourself.’

One can chart those different phases of a relationship through Amy’s discography. ‘A lot of music now is trying to be cool and, like, “Yeah, I don’t really care about you” – a really blasé attitude,’ she has said. ‘I think it’s much nicer to be in love, and throw yourself into it, and want to lie in the road for that person. It’s like the difference between having a dance in the middle of the party and standing around the outside with a beer bottle trying to look cool.’

Don’t expect Amy to stop reflecting her personal life in her music any time soon. ‘If I haven’t done it, I just can’t put it into a song. It has to be autobiographical.’ Songwriting for her is like keeping a journal; it’s almost her blog via the airwaves. ‘It’s an exorcism. I get all my stuff out there. If I didn’t have this medium to get my experiences across, I would be lost.’

Returning to those contradictions, where does Amy stand in musical tradition? She has been compared not just to many acts of yesteryear but a lot of today’s stars too. This includes male stars and, given their shared passion for drugs, Pete Doherty’s name is often mentioned in the same breath as Amy’s. The similarities are obvious, and Doherty has been a supportive friend to Amy and her husband Blake.

However, perhaps a more apt comparison would be with Oasis’s Noel Gallagher. He and Amy share a remarkable knack for songwriting and a tireless wit, and are both as exciting as interviewees as they are performers. What a breath of fresh air compared with the PR-trained acts who dominate the modern music scene! Also, Gallagher previously took drugs for England, but has since packed them in, without needing rehab to leave them behind. Despite the notoriety she has gained for her ruthless and hedonistic ways, it would be no surprise if tough Amy managed the same transition when the time is right for her.

It’s in the arena of interviews where the two are most similar. Indeed, if Amy is open in her lyrics, she is just as honest and frank during her interviews. People speak of ‘early disclosers’ and Amy is very much on the punctual side: she even once cut her stomach with a shard of broken mirror during one interview. While being quizzed about her
self-harming
, she was asked how it felt. Her reply was, ‘It feels like, “Ow, that fucking hurts.” It’s probably the worst thing I’ve done.’ Well, it’s a succinct answer.

She has described Dido’s sound as ‘background music – the background to death’ and said of pop princess Kylie Minogue, ‘she’s not an artist… she’s a pony.’ Elsewhere in interviews she once chimed up with the following sexual confession: ‘I would fuck Sting. I don’t know about ten hours, though!’ In the meantime, she can be just as unpredictable onstage as she is during interviews. As well as the notorious ‘you monkey c**ts’ incident at the Birmingham National Indoor Arena (NIA) in
2007, she has screamed ‘Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it!’ into her microphone during a concert in Cornwall, a performance that also featured her hitting her own head with her microphone in frustration at apparently forgetting her lyrics.

As a fan observed, ‘The gig became absolutely awful. Members of her entourage were coming on to the stage, obviously worried she couldn’t go on, and she would just shout “fuck off” at them. Everyone in the crowd just felt sorry for her.’ She has also punched a fan in the face and spat at another during a concert.