Saving Amy (5 page)

After leaving the Mount, in Mill Hill, North London, with five GCSEs, Amy moved to the BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology in Croydon, Surrey, in South England, where she lasted less than a year. While there, she started singing with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and performed in jazz clubs. In her spare time, she was hanging out with Juliette Ashby, her old friend from Southgate. She was also, by her own account, smoking marijuana.

Amy’s voice was drawing increasing amounts of attention. In 2001, her old friend Tyler James was signed to Brilliant, a division of Simon Fuller’s talent agency, 19 Entertainment Ltd. Knowing that manager Nick Godwin and A&R man Nick Shymansky were looking for a jazz singer, Tyler gave them a tape of Amy’s.

Godwin says, ‘We put it on and there was this amazing voice, fantastic lyrics. They were eight- or nine-minute poems, really. Quite awkward guitar playing, but utterly breathtaking.’

Mitch recalls that’s when he understood that she could really sing, when 19 were interested in signing her to their management company. ‘She was under 18, I had to sign for her. So I went up to the offices and they explained what they were going to do for her and they explained they already had offers from five, six publishing companies, five or six recording companies who were interested in signing Amy and we signed with them ….

‘What was going through my mind was that Amy by now had left the stage school and she was in a situation where she had to earn money to live and she was also at the time working for an Internet News Agency, a company
called “WENN” [through Juliette Ashby’s father]. She was writing articles as a journalist there … getting about £150 a week or something in those days, not enough to live on, so I was having to give her extra money, which you do as a parent. You do as a parent right?

‘She was okay. She had enough money to get by. … There were fairly decent advances. Nothing to retire on, but enough to enable her not to work anymore – and enough so that I didn’t have to give her any money anymore. She could look after herself from the advances and … she had five or six offers from all different kinds of recording companies and they settled on Island Records
⁶
, which is a part of Universal …. They are people who nurture their talent … and they are not looking for an album every six months. They are looking for longevity in their artists and they saw that in Amy … somebody who perhaps could have a long career ….

‘There … was no pressure on her to produce the album quickly. They said take your time, no problem, we will support you or help you and finally she produced her first album, which was
Frank
and it is my favourite album.

‘She only produced two albums, but I prefer
Frank
to …
Back To Black,
because
Back To Black
deals with certain subjects, which I am uncomfortable with. Whereas the first album … was pretty innocent.’

If you believe in luck, then Amy’s luck was at its height when she met Nick Shymansky, 19 Entertainment Ltd’s A&R man, and they began working together. From the beginning Shymansky realized that Amy’s talent would be best nurtured if she worked with a producer who understood her voice, background, range and diverse influences – from TLC, Mos Def and Nas to Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan – and who could help her develop her songs and lyrics. Amy’s choice was a West London-based producer named Major, who had worked with trip-hop legend Tricky
¹
. Shymansky brought them together.

Major and Amy worked hard together from the first time they met in September 2001, creating mesmerizing and attention-grabbing music – songs in which Amy would, with often disarming and heartbreaking honesty, document her life, her thoughts and her world for everyone to hear.

It was for this that Amy would become best known, particularly after the release of her album
Frank
, which she recorded after being signed by Darcus Beese, the influential A&R man at Island Records and Major’s friend.

Frank’s
production and road to release wasn’t a smooth one, however. In 2002, manager Nick Godwin arranged for Amy to work with a pair of young songwriters, Stefan Skarbek and Matt Rowe. Composer Felix Howard also occasionally worked with them. At the time, Amy was also experimenting with music, listening to all types and genres, from music picked up on shopping trips to shops like Oxfam in Kentish Town.

Amy, Skarbek and Rowe ended up recording a lot of material for what they thought would be her debut album. Some of the music they produced during that time shows Amy’s quirky sense of humour and observations of life. Word games between Amy and the boys formed the mainstay of the lyrics for the songs that they produced together.

As it became increasingly likely that Amy would sign with Island records, the pressure increased to have a unified, clear body of music that could form the basis of a successful debut album.

Eventually Amy signed a publishing deal with EMI Music Publishing Ltd, and with the advance from that agreement moved into a flat in Camden, North London, with her old friend Juliette Ashby, where Amy cooked, wrote and the girls both smoked dope. By December 2002, shortly after her 19th birthday, Amy’s luck – or talent –
resulted in her being a fully contracted member of the Universal–Island Records stable.

In the end, only ‘October Song’, a track apparently inspired by the death of the pet canary that Amy had forgotten to feed when she went away for a weekend, and ‘Amy, Amy, Amy’ made it onto
Frank
from the sessions with Skarbek and Rowe.

Co-produced by the brilliant Miami-based Salaam Remi
²
and New Jersey-based Commissioner Gordon, most of the songs on
Frank
are inspired by the heartache and pain caused by the break-up of Amy’s relationship with Chris Taylor.

‘I constantly want to look after people’, she said later, ‘but I’ve only met a couple of men in my life who deserved or appreciated it. My first proper long-term boyfriend Chris (he’s the fella that I wrote my first album about) was lovely, but he didn’t really appreciate it.’

‘Did you like Chris?’

Mitch replies, ‘Well, I didn’t really know him. He was a decent enough guy from what I can remember of him, but she is writing [in
Frank
] about … her first love. It is pretty innocent. Things go a bit wrong. She tries to put it back on track. He tries to get it back on track … He should have been more of a man and she writes about this.

‘She call[s] him a “lady boy”, or “are you a lady boy”
³
? But … he understood the situation. He understood that there wasn’t any malice in what Amy did and they still have got a pretty good relationship now.

‘It’s not everybody who can say they have had an album written about them, can they? … But this boy can.’

‘I really enjoy that album,’ Mitch says. ‘I think it’s good … the songs are great, although it didn’t sell that many.’

Frank
was actually a platinum-selling album. It was nominated for two BRIT Awards for British Female Solo Artist and British Urban Act, and ‘Stronger Than Me’ also won Amy the prestigious Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song.

‘It got to No. 7 in the British Charts [
Frank
actually reached No. 13 in the UK Charts]. It wasn’t released in America … it’s a well thought of, very critically acclaimed album. But it didn’t sell because Amy wasn’t as well known
… Back To Black
sold 10 million copies, so that’s a serious piece of work. I still prefer the first one.

‘I feel more comfortable with [
Frank
] more because I know what went into it. … That is why she is never going to be an Irving Berlin
⁴
… [He] wrote 4,000 songs in his life. He wrote about one song every week and that is what he was able to do. … Some of them … we know (‘White Christmas’), but some of them you wouldn’t know and some … are not very good at all. … But Amy will never be able to do that … Any song that she writes is like cutting an arm off. Every song is like pulling her heart out.’

‘Why “cutting her arm off”?’ I interject, ‘I would say, like “giving birth”.’

‘Yeah, you are right,’ he agrees. ‘That is a much better way of putting it … giving birth. Each song is a creation, which has come out of painful memories and painful experiences. It is not going to be a song about “how lovely the moon looks tonight” … It’s not going to be about that
kind of stuff. So, that’s why she really probably needs two to three years to write an album.’

In the lead-up to
Frank’s
release, Amy performed live three times at the 4 Sticks Live nights at the Cobden, a private members club in West London, where many live bands have performed. Acclaimed musician Annie Lennox caught one of Amy’s performances. She told
The Times,
‘I saw her at the Cobden Club when she was 18, and I was completely blown away. She was like a woman in her thirties, with a whole, seasoned delivery, not fazed by anything at all. I was in awe of her. I thought, wow, you have a special talent. God, you are 18, where did that come from?’

In October 2003, Island released ‘Stronger Than Me’ as a single. Despite being pushed by Island and receiving attention from critics who were intrigued by Amy’s unique sound, the song only reached No. 71 in the UK charts.
Frank
was released later that month and Amy found herself heralded as the new girl in Britain’s ‘new jazz’ movement, along with such musicians as Jamie Cullum and Norah Jones.

The subject matter of most of the songs on
Frank,
Amy’s ex-boyfriend, immediately brought her a lot of media attention, as did the originality of her music and the influence and mixture of different and, to some critics, contradictory music genres, including jazz.

Favourably reviewed by most of the major British press (the
Guardian
compared her sound on
Frank
as sitting between Nina Simone and Erykah Badu, at once ‘innocent and sleazy’; the
Daily Telegraph
commented ‘she writes like Cole Porter, sings like Billie Holiday, plays snooker like a pro’), Amy continued to perform live, supporting Jamie Cullum and opening for Finley Quaye. In December 2003, she took to the stage in her first major solo showcase since the Cobden, at the famous Shepherd’s Bush venue, Bush Hall, to an audience of over 300 people. Her reviews were mixed, however – her performance described by some as confused and nervous.