Amy Winehouse

by Chas Newkey-Burden

  ‘Amy was a character at school. She was a wild girl but it was different from the trouble she’s in now. She would call herself a witch. She used to joke she could put spells on people. One time she lay on the floor in the history class and started crawling along towards Billie, saying, “Wilhelmina” – her nickname for Billie – “I’m coming to get you” in a witchy voice.’

  Naughty as Amy could be at times, reports that she was expelled from the school are dismissed as a ‘myth’ by Young. She claims that, without her knowledge, another teacher rang Amy’s mother and told her she would fail her GCSEs unless she was removed from the school. Young was livid. ‘I was very unhappy to discover this, and the teacher who made the call left us shortly afterwards,’ she snaps. ‘I told Amy’s mother that she wasn’t the type of child who naturally enjoys a school environment but that she would be happier with us and the vocational side of her studies than in an all-girl academic school.’

  Janis remembers, ‘The principal phoned up and asked me to come in and see him. He said, “I think you should take her away.” He didn’t want children who weren’t going to get good grades and Amy wasn’t going to. She was very bright but she was always messing around. The same day, I had to take the family cat Katie to the vet. I dropped off the cat, went to the school and then went back to the vet’s. We had the cat put down. My joke is I should have had Amy put down and the cat moved on.’

  So it was that Amy was removed from the school. She says that she ‘cried every night’ after she left. ‘The thing about stage school is that it prepares you as a person,’ she has said since. ‘It’s excellent for building character.’ So impressed was Young with her former student that she stayed in touch with her.

  ‘When I left Sylvia Young, I hated school so much that I didn’t want to go at all. That was horrid. I was gutted when I left, because there are some really dedicated people there, and Sylvia herself is brilliant. I pierced my nose when I was thirteen. They didn’t like that. I brought my guitar to school every day because I was a guitarist and they’d tell me I couldn’t. I was like, “Well, look, I’m a singer, a musician, not an academic…” But that’s what made me a better person, it showed me that you can’t really be taught stuff: you have to go out there and find out for yourself.

  She then attended the Mount School in Mill Hill. Established in May 1925, the Mount has as its motto ‘To be, rather than to seem to be’. When it was last inspected, the report found that it had a friendly, family atmosphere, with a caring and supportive ethos. Amy, though, was bored out of her wits there.

  ‘There was nothing to do at that school but run the teachers,’ she says, referring to the absence of the opposite gender to taunt and tease. ‘I got a D in music because my teacher wouldn’t submit my course work because I used to be so nasty.’

  Cannabis was a great comfort to her at this point, as was music of course. Her favourite around this time included Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Clifford Brown and Sarah Vaughan. ‘To hear subtle music like that, like a trio could give more to me than a big band, that’s when I learned about less is more,’ she said. ‘I started loving jazz and getting so much from it. There was nothing out there for me [musically]. Everything I liked, to this day, that was new was spoken word, rappers. To me that’s the new jazz. I’m talking about progressive rap, not stuff like P Diddy. Mos Def, Nas, Busta Rhymes – those are the Miles [Davis] to me now.’

  Even at this point, Amy’s relatives were already doing their best to drum up support for her musical career. Iconic writer Julie Burchill is, as we’ve seen, an enthusiastic admirer of Amy nowadays. However, in an interview with the author, Burchill reveals that she was first made aware of Amy years before she became famous. While Burchill was making a television programme about her father’s death from asbestosis, she crossed paths with Amy’s aunt, Debra Milne, who is a consultant histopathologist in Sunderland. Milne examined Burchill’s father’s autopsy for the programme and is featured talking to her on camera.

  ‘When the cameras stopped rolling,’ remembers Burchill, ‘she asked me, “Do you still write about music?” I said, “Not really,” and Debra added, “Because I wondered if you’d like to see my niece next week. She’s really great though she’s only sixteen. Her name is Amy Winehouse. Years later, suddenly Amy was everywhere I looked. Names are the one thing I always remember, and also because it was a Jewish name and so pretty it stuck in my mind particularly.’

  Around the same time, Amy had her first, fleeting, brush with fame when she appeared on the BBC comedy sketch programme The Fast Show. Created by university pals Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse, The Fast Show was a hit throughout for the 1990s with its characters such as Ted and Ralph, and the Suits You duo. Another memorable character was Competitive Dad, and it was in one of his sketches that Amy appeared. Dressed as a fairy in a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Amy acts with other children onstage until an exasperated Competitive Dad heckles and goes up on stage himself. In 2007, Paul Whitehouse revealed that the young girl on the stage was Amy. ‘We didn’t know she was going to be famous at the time,’ he said. ‘We only found out about it when she mentioned it in an interview.’ The Daily Mail duly made the link public, headlining its story, AMY WINEHOUSE ON TV BEFORE SHE WAS INFAMOUS.

  However, perhaps the most significant outcome from the Sylvia Young school for Amy came in the form of the friendship she found there with a young man from Canning Town, south London, called Tyler James. James grew up in a household dominated by women after his dad left home, and his childhood home was always full of music with his mother’s recordings of Motown acts such as Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley. His elder sister added TLC, SWV and Erykah Badu. As for James himself, he was a fan of Babyface, Boyz II Men and mainstream jazz acts. He went on to become a soul singer of some repute, winning the T4 One To Watch award at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party in 2005. He said, ‘In ten years’ time I want to be able to look at myself and say “Yeah, I started off with few opportunities in life and look where I am now.” I want that feeling of satisfaction; I want to make my mum proud; I want to make my family proud and I think I can do that and make a record that I’m proud of.’

  His debut album, The Unlikely Lad – which included a duet with Amy on the track ‘Best of Me’ – received praise from many. The Sun described him as the UK’s answer to Justin Timberlake – praise indeed. ‘A refreshingly modern album drawing on vintage soul, jazz and pop,’ gushed the Observer, adding that it was ‘likeable and human’.

  The Times declared,

  Despite sporting the worst haircut since that bloke from A Flock of Seagulls, James demonstrates, on his new single, ‘Foolish’, that he can cut the mustard (the retro, big-band video is superb) and carry a tune… With radio support, James will be mega, dodgy thatch or not.

  The Daily Star described him as ‘less gobby’ than Amy. ‘His music is a slick mix of funky rhythms and cool-as-ice vocals. He was also praised by NME, Time Out and Face.’

  Amy described herself and James as ‘mates who shag… My Nan thinks he looks like Leonardo DiCaprio but he’s much better-looking.’

  They took it in turns to do the washing-up. ‘If I’ve been in all day, I’ll have his dinner ready when he comes home. I do everything for him, but we have our own lives. I’m a very sexual person but sex is a minor thing in our relationship – we’ve got so much more than that. And we let each other see other people. Tyler might stay away for a couple of days with a girl. We don’t just sit around and cuddle like your average couple: we give each other space.’ However, James was soon to give Amy something far more significant than space.

  A spell at the BRIT Performing Arts & Technology School in Croydon followed for Amy. The school, which has been compared to New York High School for the Performing Arts – the subject of 1980s film Fame – is funded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, but independent of the local education authority’s control. Si
nce 1992 it has received sponsorship from the BRIT Trust, the body behind the BRIT Awards, where Amy was to achieve recognition further down the line. It has a fantastic academic record: in 2006 for instance, 93 per cent of its pupils gained five or more ‘A’ to ‘C’ grades in GCSEs.

  (Incidentally, the first fully selective arts academy is now being built in Birmingham. Based on the BRIT School, the Birmingham institution in the city’s Eastside will train students in music, theatre, painting and other arts. The school, which will teach up to 950 pupils aged fourteen to nineteen, is one of three academies planned in the city.)

  Among those who have studied at the BRIT are the Kooks, Katie Melua, Floetry, Dane Bowers, the Feeling, the Noisettes, Imogen Heap and Leona Lewis. One teacher observed that the BRIT school is for ‘the non-type. The school fits round their personality, rather than asking them to fit their personality round the school.’ Another adds that many of their pupils might have had negative experiences in their past, due to their creativity – ‘like bullying or being the only boy dancer in a south London comprehensive – before they came here’.

  It has been said that the best way to find the school is ‘to take a train from London Bridge, disembark at Selhurst and follow the teen wearing bright-yellow drainpipe jeans, a leather motorcycle jacket and bird’s-nest hairstyle’. There’s a lot of truth to it. When Amy first arrived at the school she found two main buildings: an oblong pavilion and redbrick building, which was built in 1907. There are at any given time 850 pupils studying at the school, all of whom enrol at the age of fourteen or sixteen. As a state-funded creative school, it is very popular and only one in three applicants is successful, as Amy was.

  One teacher remembers Amy as being ‘exciting, but nerve-racking. She was an artist from the age of sixteen, and she wasn’t exactly suited to being institutionalised.’ Nick Williams, the principal, agrees: ‘You would have had to be mad not to realise that Amy was a very, very talented young woman and that she had what it took to be extremely successful. Katie Melua and Amy Winehouse are two very different people – the one thing they have in common is that there isn’t anyone who is exactly like them. They’re not factory-farmed. What we do is attract people into the school who are creative – that means things will happen.

  ‘We acknowledge that when kids leave here and find their way their experiences might be harsher, edgier or more difficult. We see no purpose in treating young people in a competitive way. Lots of bands don’t want to talk about coming from the BRIT School, and the reason is obvious: if you’re in a band, you don’t want people to feel that, somehow, someone allowed you to do that. I’m really sanguine about people who leave the school and say, “I did this, it’s nothing to do with where I went to school.”’

  As for Amy, the advantage of the BRIT school was that there were hardly any boys. ‘I was like, “Where’s the men? What is going on?” So I used to lock myself away from the time of fifteen and just do music, because I hated the school. Every lunchtime, every break, I’d be up in the music room playing a guitar or piano.’

  As well as her hours in the music room, it was this time that Amy first fell in love with getting tattoos. ‘I just wanted a Betty Boop on my bum,’ she chuckled. ‘I just like tattoos. My parents pretty much realised that I would do whatever I wanted, and that was it, really.’

  Of her experiences of two stage schools, Amy is as forthright as one would expect. ‘I’m always happy to blow up any misconceptions that people have about stage school ’cos everyone thinks it’s really nasty there, but it’s not,’ she says of the star-maker factory. ‘I went to the BRIT School as well and that was shit. But Sylvia Young set me up to be a strong person,’ she decides. So it’s not all boobs out, bums in? ‘No, it is like that, but…’

  Amy might be dismissive of the BRIT School but many associated with it are hugely proud of her involvement. BBC 6 Music DJ Natasha Desborough said, ‘The likes of the Kooks and Amy Winehouse have put Croydon on the map because of the success of the BRIT School. Even though they’re not originally from Croydon, they’ve been nurtured here, which should make everyone proud – I certainly am.’

  However, Amy was ready to make her first big splash.

  Chapter Three

  SIMON SAYS

  By this stage, Amy was singing regularly with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. While performing with the orchestra, she was spotted by some very well-connected people. One of the people they were associated with was a certain Simon Fuller.

  Fuller has been described in many different ways, some of them hysterically complimentary, some of them wildly derogatory. Born on 17 May 1960, Fuller has become perhaps the most important figure in the entertainment business. He has also been named by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. ‘My business is creating fame and celebrity, and I’m one of the best in the world. I know it to the finest detail.’ Not half! He started off working at Chrysalis, in publishing and then A&R. In the mid-1980s he discovered the artist Paul Hardcastle and branched out on his own at the age of just twenty-five. His first single with Hardcastle, ‘19’, was a Number 1 hit and, off the back of the success, Fuller set up his own management company – calling it 19 Management.

  Next, he discovered singer-songwriter Cathy Dennis and helped her to a string of worldwide smash hits during the 1990s. Then, he plucked Annie Lennox from her post-Eurythmics lull and relaunched her as a phenomenally successful solo artist. However, even these achievements were dwarfed by the success he had with the Spice Girls. He took over their management in 1996, and within months the band were a major success and their debut single, ‘Wannabe’, went to Number 1 in thirty-six countries. Next up, he launched S Club 7 who had eleven top-five singles in the UK. Ever with his eye on a dynasty, when the band split Fuller had a ready-made replacement – S Club Juniors.

  Then came his move into television with Pop Idol and then American Idol. These shows smashed television viewing records and American Idol has gone on to become the most valuable TV format on the planet. Up to 74 million votes were cast during the American Idol final in 2007.

  Fuller has also entered the sports world, guiding the careers of Steve McManaman and David Beckham. He owns the commercial rights to the name and images of Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate. Most recently, he has reunited with the Spice Girls to promote their reunion world tour. Worth £450 million, Fuller has been described as ‘the man who wants to rule the world’. Well, if that’s true then he’s pretty close to realising his ambition.

  For Amy’s part, she was not a fan of Fuller’s Pop Idol franchise. ‘I never wanted any of this and that’s the truth,’ she says of her fame, adding, ‘I would have been happy to sing in a covers band for the rest of my life. And I wouldn’t have gone on one of those shows in a million billion years, because I think that musicality is not something other people should judge you on. Music’s a thing you have with yourself. Even though the people who go on those shows are shit, it’s really damaging to be told that you are.’

  There are conflicting reports on how Amy came to Fuller’s attention. One story has it that Sylvia Young arranged for two of his colleagues to come and watch her perform with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra; the other has it that James, who was already signed up to a subsidiary of 19 Management called Brilliant 19, put a word in for her with his managers.

  Whatever the case, once at Brilliant 19, Amy was managed by Nick Godwin. A sharp music man, Godwin had been involved with the Spice Girls. He followed the tried-and-tested Brilliant 19 path of honing and nurturing talent. Amy had not long since stopped working as an entertainment journalist, writing for a music magazine and a fledgling showbiz news agency. Now, however, she was ready to step onto the other side of the showbiz divide.

  Amy puts the link with 19 down to her friend Tyler James. ‘I had one gig with the National Jazz Orchestra and my friend Tyler, he was with his A&R guy Nicky [Shamansky], and Nicky said to him, “I heard this girl singing jazz
on the radio,” and Nicky said, “Well my friend Amy sings jazz and she’s great.” I think I must have been about sixteen. So I think Nicky was the one who convinced me to make a tape.’

  As with the BRIT School, Amy is now keen to distance herself somewhat from the 19 Management experience. ‘I met Simon Fuller, like, two times!’ she once sighed when an interviewer asked her about her involvement with him. Indeed, she once also claimed that the extent of Fuller’s involvement with her was that he happened to share a building with her management company Brilliant 19. In fact, Fuller funded that company. When asked what impression he made on her, she says haughtily, ‘Businesspeople don’t leave an impression with me. They go out of my head straightaway.’

  When pressed on her time under Fuller’s guidance, she says, ‘It was never right. My manager on paper was not the person doing the day-to-day stuff. He was a lovely fellow but he didn’t care about music. He was definitely one of those people who left their work in the office. I needed someone else. I needed someone who really cared.’

  However, Fuller insists, ‘Music is my first love. I have hundreds and hundreds of CDs! And I understand it. Music is a positive force.’ Fuller was said to be horrified by Amy’s increasingly bitchy remarks about other artists, including Madonna, of whom she said, ‘She’s an old lady. She should get a nice band, just stand in front of them and fucking sing.’ Reportedly, he was unimpressed by her bitchy remarks about other pop stars, including his artist Rachel Stevens. A source said, ‘Amy is under the wing of Pop Idol’s Simon Fuller and he is upset about her remarks on his stars.’ Was she under pressure to sell a certain number of records? ‘I don’t think he cares if he gets a return on me. He’s got Pop Idol and his empire. He’s a smart man.’ Amy has also been asked whether she was really uninterested in making money at this stage of her career. ‘No. Well, I am. Everyone’s interested in money. But if someone offered me three million pounds to make a Rachel Stevens cover record, I’d take it. Ha-ha! No.’