Saving Amy (7 page)

I ask Janis about that time during one of our discussions. I ask her when she first realized that her daughter was in trouble.

‘… She was losing weight,’ Janis murmurs. ‘… She really was. And … what Amy always does is deny … I would say, “Amy, why are you losing weight?” … I’d been informed that Amy was bringing up her food.’

‘She was bulimic?’ I ask.

‘Bulimic, yes … I can remember Amy saying to me that she’[d] got a great diet … “Well, you get the food and you chew it and get the taste of it; then you swallow the taste and spit it [the food] out.” And she even told Mitch that. “Look, Dad, there’s a really good diet…”’

I’m very surprised to hear this story from Janis. I would imagine that hearing these kind of comments from your daughter would be a mother’s worst nightmare. I find it strange that Janis wasn’t more alarmed by Amy’s issues with her weight and her relationship with food.

Janis continues, ‘… I believe the time we really knew she was throwing up was when she performed at a friend’s wedding and she was eating very well, but she was taking herself to the toilet and bringing it up. … It was heard … It all seemed to get out of control.’

Certainly, some British papers also picked up on Amy’s changed appearance, commenting on the amount of time Amy was spending in the gym – and also on her alleged image issues since the release of
Frank.

When I ask Mitch about Amy’s weight loss, he says, ‘She had that [bulimia] for some time, but certainly I would say from the time of the first album [
Frank
] … 2004 and 2005. She lost a lot of weight, which thankfully she has put back
on. She is like her Mum. Her Mum is slim and I am not ….’

Mitch adds that he told Amy many times that she needed to do something about the bulimia, ‘And she did. … She sought counselling … My understanding of [that] is they are teaching people how to eat again. How to keep the food down. We all know that it is not about food at all. It is generally about self-image. It is about how people are feeling about themselves.’

‘… She clearly found difficulties in dealing with her success. There is no question about it and I think the bulimia was merely the first stage of what would become a serious problem.’

I comment that bulimia and anorexia often stop the sufferer from menstruating. In many cases the sufferers don’t want to be treated as women; they want to be treated like little kids. Did he see Amy experiencing any of that?

‘I am not a doctor or a psychiatrist,’ he says. ‘But I would say that would be fairly accurate. She has found it difficult doing what she has done for so many reasons and maybe deep inside her mind, she would prefer it to be as it was. A lot less complicated when she was 14 years old …’

In the end, Amy went to see an addiction counsellor. She told the
Sun
in 2006 that she’d asked Mitch if she ‘needed’ to go to rehab and he told her ‘No’, but to give it a try. Amy followed her Dad’s advice, but only stayed long enough to explain to the counsellor that she drank because she’d been in love and ‘fucked up the relationship’ before walking out.
She believed if she couldn’t help herself, she couldn’t be helped at all.

Drawing on her experiences, Amy wrote one of the songs with which she would become most associated, and also the one that would catapult her from being a ‘new jazz’ artist to a mainstream, internationally known and respected musician. It was ‘Rehab’. This track eventually appeared on
Back To Black.

With several songs already written, most drawing on her relationship with Blake, it seemed likely to Island and Raye Cosbert at the Camden-based Metropolis Music, who now managed Amy, that she might finally be ready to get into a studio and start recording again. Salaam Remi, who had worked on
Frank,
was on board and Island’s Darcus Beese decided to mix things up a bit and get a new co-producer involved. He introduced Amy to the much talked-about and eclectic DJ and producer Mark Ronson.

Although Amy had initial reservations about working with Ronson, in fact, the couple had a lot in common – both were born in London (although Ronson subsequently moved to the States, where he was brought up), both are Jewish, and both have a great affinity to, and respect for, black music. The latter, in particular, shows through strongly on
Back To Black.

According to Ronson, Amy played him a whole load of ‘really cool’ music that she loved from the ’50s and ’60s, including the Shangri-Las, Tony Bennett and the Cadillacs. Inspired, Ronson sent her away and started messing around with a tambourine and a piano, creating overnight what would become the main sketch for ‘Back To Black’, the title track of the album. Ronson later commented that it was
hard to tell if Amy liked it when he first played it to her as she doesn’t, in general, really get excited – but then she murmured, ‘It’s wicked!’

Once the first track was set, Ronson and Amy worked hard to lay the basis for the rest of the tracks. As before, Amy worked with two producers and moved between New York, where Ronson was based, and Miami, to work with Remi, creating the vintage sound that works so successfully on the album, particularly on tracks like ‘Love Is A Losing Game’. The final mood of the album both complements Amy’s sultry voice and heartfelt lyrics and also is nostalgic in the sense that this was the kind of music she was listening to when she first hung out with Blake in the Hawley Arms.

Commenting on the difference in sound and tone between
Frank
and
Back To Black,
Amy said, ‘I wrote my first album when I was listening to a lot of jazz, a lot of hiphop …. [On] my second album, I was listening to a substantially smaller amount of music – soul, doo-wop, girl groups – and it shows.’

‘I don’t like to listen to it …,’ Mitch says of the album. ‘The song “Back To Black” … it’s about going back into depression and when [Blake’s] not there, she’s depressed and when he’s there, she’s not …

‘And it’s well documented how I view the relationship [with Blake] being totally … destructive. It’s not a good relationship … of course, I don’t want my daughter to be depressed either ….

‘… As I’ve told you she’s never going to be writing songs about how beautiful the moon is … each song that she writes is giving birth. Some of them are positive; some are negative. It’s a great album but you know I personally view it as a period of depression for her, which she is coming out of slowly.

‘Let’s hope the next album is going to be a little bit more cheerful – I doubt it ….’

In its first week of sales,
Back To Black
sold more than 40,000 copies in the UK, after which its sales increased, pushing it up the album chart until it reached No. 1. Amy’s career was, it seemed, made.

The reviews were fantastic. Amy was compared to Etta James and Edith Piaf, and she was praised for leaving behind the laid-back lounge influences of her former album and strutting into ‘gloriously ballsy, bell-ringing, bottleswigging, doo-wop territory.’

Amy’s star was certainly ascending and, on the domestic front, she seemed happy, too, having met a new man, Alex Claire. He was seemingly the antithesis to Blake: blond to Amy’s preferred type of ‘dark hair, dark eyes.’ Alex moved in with Amy within a month of meeting her and she claimed publicly, as she would do with Blake and others in her life later, that Alex was her ‘best mate.’

Ever frank, she also talked about her weight loss, blaming it on her healthier lifestyle, after she stopped smoking ‘£200 worth of weed a week, that’s two ounces’ and began going to the gym. However, within days the
press was going mad after Amy made a rather startling appearance on
The Charlotte Church Show
¹
; she was seemingly disorientated and forgot the words to Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’. The British tabloids reported that she was extremely drunk and had been asked by her label to cut down on her alcohol consumption. Many stories and rumours began to surface about her weight loss and eating disorders.

In November 2006, Amy set out on another UK tour, this time to promote the album. Most of the early reviews of her gigs focus on her changed appearance and her weight loss, one commenting that she had changed from a curvy teen to an ‘emaciated fitness addict.’

Amy’s bad girl image was also gaining credence at great speed, fuelled by a fracas with a member of her audience at one of her gigs and a much recounted appearance on
Never Mind the Buzzcocks,
when host Simon Amstell awkwardly joked about Amy coming onto the show full of ‘crack’ and concluded that the show wasn’t a pop quiz anymore but rather an ‘intervention.’

Amy was still proclaiming that she was ‘weed-free’ and much healthier, a result of Alex’s calming effect on her lifestyle. She admitted freely that she still loved to drink, but her relationship with Alex had made her realize that she was a bad and violent drunk.

2007 began with a bang. Amy played to rave reviews and an A-list music audience, including Jay-Z and Mos Def, at Joe’s Pub in New York. She embarked on a UK tour and
was nominated in February 2007 for a BRIT Award for British Female Solo Artist, which she won, modestly thanking her parents in her speech.

Back To Black
still topped the UK album charts and had sold more than half a million copies and Island had scheduled a US release for it in March of that year. But all was not well. Amy’s behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic and she was starting to miss performances.