Amy Winehouse

by Chas Newkey-Burden

  That told him!

  Later on while recalling the night, McCormick wrote, ‘I watched her perform in a Pizza Express with her father Mitch, a Sinatra-singing taxi driver, and met a loving family clearly proud of Winehouse’s success.’ Amy was winning a huge reputation as a live act at this point in her career. The Daily Mirror previewed a concert of hers thus:

  She has an incredible voice, a great talent and a real knack for putting her foot in it. But frank comments about fellow performers aside, it is in the live arena that Amy has to be savoured. Madonna may, or may not, mime, but Amy has a voice of such intensity as to make Madge look like a karaoke singer.

  Reviewing a concert of hers at the UEA Norwich, John Street wrote in The Times,

  To begin with, her voice seems almost to take her over, like a headstrong dog dragging its owner across muddy fields and flooded ditches. As the show proceeds, these vocal mannerisms tend to become repetitive, as if trapped in a single emotional and musical register. Her voice is at its best on the more tightly arranged songs, where the attention is on the detail: ‘Stronger Than Me’, ‘What is it About Men?’, or ‘Help Yourself’. The swoops and dives, the half-checked angry bark, populate these numbers with a twisting trail of sensations.

  Amy has always said that performing live is what it is ‘all about’ to her. ‘I love being on tour, but I wish I could work off the crowd better; be more of a showman,’ she says. ‘For me, it’s all about the songs, and I’m so busy concentrating on that, I’m not paying as much attention to the audience.’

  Meanwhile, her growing reputation domestically was being echoed around the world. A Singapore newspaper wrote of Amy,

  Sporting thick black eyeliner and singing songs like ‘F*** Me Pumps’, this London native is surely the genre’s bad girl. Although she sings in typical jazz-blues fashion, the beats reflect mainstream hip-hop and R&B more than scat or even soul.

  However, it was at home that Amy’s star was shining brightest. Around this time, the Observer Music Monthly dispatched a journalist to pen the first major feature on Amy. Respected music critic Garry Mulholland landed the gig and had several interview sessions with Amy for the feature. During an interview with the author, he recalled the experience fondly. ‘She’s a dream interviewee,’ he says, smiling. ‘Firstly, because she’s an unstoppable quote machine. Secondly because she’s a really lovely girl who is easy to get along with, very warm. I was going through an incredibly difficult period in my personal life at the time. When I turned up to meet Amy I was not in the world’s greatest place so I was quite nervous. I thought, “If she’s difficult in any way, I’m going to find this quite hard.”

  ‘She was hugely revealing, incredibly honest, fantastic company. She made what could have been a very difficult situation into a very easy one. I was just very grateful to her for that. We sat down in this restaurant in Camden Town and proceeded to get incredibly drunk on sangria. Despite her reputation, I was definitely outdrinking her two to one.’

  A journalist who interviewed Amy in Canada remembers a similar atmosphere. When Amy attempted to stretch out across the seating in the restaurant, a waiter expressed his distaste, prompting Amy to moan loudly, ‘You ever just want to go to McDonald’s?’

  She was once also rather frank to a journalist during an interview, often and ostentatiously yawning from the offset. ‘Sorry, but it doesn’t come naturally, talking about myself,’ she said, following another yawn. ‘I don’t see what’s important about it. No offence to you, but I could be at my nan’s house right now. Or I could be waiting at home for the plumber to come and fix the washing machine.’

  Even a telephone interviewer was not spared a moment of Amy drama. ‘Sorry, I’ve just been having a wee,’ said the then brazen twenty-year-old. Yes, Amy Winehouse was on the loo. ‘I’m sorry. I do it all the time. Whenever I go to the toilet I take the phone with me.’

  Then she asked her telephone interrogator, ‘Have you had sex to my album? Do you know anyone who has? I’d love to know who has,’ she said. ‘That’s the test of a wicked album. Ask all your friends if they’ve ever had sex to my album. That would be cool. It would mean people can totally be themselves with my music.’

  Garry Mulholland expands on this theme. ‘She came over to me as completely gauche, someone who just didn’t care,’ he says. ‘She will say exactly what’s on her mind. If it offends you or someone else, tough. At one point she was being so revealing about this guy she’d been out with, who was the subject of the songs on the first album. She started to say his name and talk about him in a lot of detail. I actually stopped the interview and said, “You know what? I really think you should stop because I could print his name and all these details. You’d really regret it, so I’m actually suggesting you stop.”

  ‘So I actually had to rein her in, whereas it’s normally the other way round. With Amy I had to stop her because it didn’t seem fair to this guy. She’s similar to Pete Doherty: she doesn’t have a self-censoring button. If I’d asked her the exact length and dimensions of her ex-boyfriend’s penis, she would have told me. It was extraordinary.’

  Mulholland has interviewed an entire galaxy of musical stars during his career, so where does Amy fit in to his experiences? ‘She was the most honest interviewee I’ve ever sat down with,’ he says, ‘and it didn’t seem to be contrived shock tactics. She wasn’t bitchy, it was just as if she was sitting talking to her best friend about sex.’

  He insists that her honesty and openness is on a different level from that displayed by certain other artists, such as Robbie Williams. ‘Robbie always comes across as someone who’s constantly begging the public for sympathy. There’s no self-pity in Amy’s revelations. Her take on it is, “This happened and that happened and now I get to write great songs about it.” When she’s talking about things like sex, there’s that “London girl” thing: a girl who can’t resist blabbing about sex to everyone. But there’s a tomboy element to it: she neither solicits your sympathy nor flirts with you. She never plays an “I’m a girl” game. She’s bullish, forthright and assertive.’

  Although back in 2004, Amy was far from the celebrity she is today, Mulholland recalls that she already had that elusive quality: the X factor. ‘She got up and went to the loo, it was a Jessica Rabbit moment,’ he says. ‘Literally everyone in this restaurant just turned round and watched her wriggle along this restaurant. It was more than sex: it was charisma. People didn’t know who she was, so it wasn’t to do with fame. It was pure lust and fascination.’

  Charisma she had plenty of, and she had just as much eccentricity, says Mulholland. ‘When we did the second interview, she turned up with these pink ballet shoes on. She looked like she’d stolen them off a tramp on the street. They were so worn down, they didn’t even have toes on them any more. Once more, I thought, “This person is really on her own planet.” She’s a genuine eccentric, it’s not contrived “I’m wild and crazy”. Even if she hadn’t got a record deal she would still be this insane girl who completely marches to the beat of her own drum. She was a sweetheart, even though she was quite obviously nuts.’

  Even given her relative lack of fame at the time, Mulholland still found her to be enormously trusting. ‘When I met her for the first interview, it was after a concert,’ he recalls. ‘We got in the cab and she said, “Actually, I’ve really got to take the guitar and the amp back home. Would you mind coming round to mine?” So we went back to her flat, in Camden Town, and it was just really sweet. I realised I was climbing the stairs to Amy Winehouse’s home, carrying her guitar and amp. Her flat was perfectly nice, if a bit of a mess, as you might expect. How many other pop stars would invite a journalist to their home? It was just a very sweet gesture.’

  In an interview with the author, respected author and cultural commentator Mark Simpson also contrasted Amy with Robbie Williams. ‘She’s the man that Robbie Williams dreams of being,’ he said. ‘Her tattoos are much better than his, and so is her wig. She’d wipe the floor with h
im in a pub fight. She wrote a song about not going to rehab – all his songs are about going to rehab. With his mum. It goes without saying that the voice is also much better. Even if Williams’s voice actually got around to breaking, it wouldn’t come close.’

  Chris Cooke paints a similar portrait of the ‘interviewing Amy’ experience to the one Mulholland outlined: ‘Was she a bit erratic during my interview? Well, yes, a bit – side conversations with her boyfriend and an assistant being sent out with dinner requirements did make the whole thing slightly hard to follow. But, at the same time, I would have been disappointed had it turned out any other way, because that’s why we love Amy. And, while the slight yet harmless chaos made me sound like the dullest person on Earth when I tried to pull the conversation back on topic or sought a clarification or two, in amongst it all I think I managed to get the insight I wanted on the brilliant album that is Back to Black.’

  She has also once fallen asleep during an interview with the hip US magazine Blender. When asked if she did drugs she told the interviewer Jody Rosen, ‘I don’t have the time.’ Asked whether she was an alcoholic or not she said, ‘I don’t know. I’m a really big drinker. I used to be there before the pub opened, banging on the door.’ She then began falling asleep, then saying, ‘Oh, God! What is wrong with me? There’s something wrong with me. I’m just really drowsy at the moment. I’m so sorry.’

  Her interviewer said,

  Amy has never exactly been a picture of health, but tonight she looks especially worse for wear – hunched, heavy-lidded and just frail… Now her words are slurred, her eyelids drooping. Her head wobbles into a nod. She falls asleep for a second, wakes up with a start, mutters and drops off again. The smouldering cigarette in her left hand falls to the floor.

  Another journalist, Aidan Smith, of Scotland on Sunday, expanded in his feature on Amy the ‘bit of a mess’ Mulholland hinted at in Amy’s household. ‘The fence is broken, a Yellow Pages rots by the gate, and empty cans of Stella litter the garden,’ he wrote, and continued:

  Wading through the jumble of shoes in the hall, I reach the living-room. It looks like a crime scene, with mess everywhere: CDs and videos…discarded clothes – pants! – and half-drunk cups of coffee… a pair of giant comedy sunglasses and a cushion embroidered with a crude likeness of Patrick Swayze. I ignore the football in the corner; only a woman could live here.

  Amy confirms the widespread tomboy perception of her when she says, ‘I’m not really a girl. I’m not even a boy’s girl. I’m a man’s man – and that doesn’t mean I’m a big dyke. Men are far more straightforward. They don’t dwell on things and play psychological games. I’m not saying all women are like that, or that some men don’t play those games, but on the whole, men are more easygoing and don’t piss time up the wall. Life’s short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there’s no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.’

  Having come so close twice to winning a major award so early in her career, Amy hit the jackpot later in the year with arguably the most prestigious of musical honours. The Ivor Novello Awards were first given in 1955. Named after Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, singer and actor who became one of the most popular British entertainers of the early twentieth century, the awards are now given by the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters. The Academy, formed in 1999, represents the interests of UK music writers across all genres. The Award itself is a solid bronze sculpture of Euterpe, the Greek muse of music. Former winners of this prestigious prize include Iron Maiden, the Darkness, the Feeling, Madonna, Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Richard Thompson, David Bowie, Ray Davies, Kate Bush, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Annie Lennox, Phil Pickett, Paul McCartney, Madness, Duran Duran, George Michael, Pet Shop Boys, Dave Stewart, Sting, Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow.

  She was delighted to be nominated for an Ivor Novello, far more than she was to be nominated Best Female at the BRITs. ‘The Ivor Novellos are a songwriter’s award and that’s what I am,’ she says. ‘I’m not trying to be best female, I’m just trying to write songs.’ However, in the wake of Frank’s success and Amy’s disagreements with many aspects of the album and its promotion, she found writing songs more difficult than ever.

  ‘I had writer’s block for so long,’ she says looking back. ‘And, as a writer, your self-worth is literally based on the last thing you wrote… I used to think, “What happened to me?” At one point it had been two years since the last record and [the record company] actually said to me, “Do you even want to make another record?” I was, like, “I swear it’s coming.” I said to them, “Once I start writing I will write and write and write. But I just have to start it.”

  ‘I take out my anger and frustration by writing songs and that’s really where Frank came from. And now I’m having a great time – everything is going really well with the record. I’m doing a lot of gigs and singing is the thing I love doing most. I’ll have to start writing for a new album at some point, so I think I’m going to have to take time off and live a normal life so that things can happen to me again that aren’t all good. Otherwise, I’ll have nothing to write about on the next album.’

  As we shall see, Amy’s hope that normal things ‘that aren’t all good’ would happen to her came true – but surely in a bigger way than she could ever have expected.

  Chapter Five

  BACK ON TRACK

  When she returned to the public eye with her new album, Amy’s hairstyle had moved towards the beehive style she is now synonymous with. From Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, to Bet Lynch in Coronation Street, to Marge in The Simpsons, to Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous through to most of the women in the cartoon The Far Side, the beehive hairstyle is a popular one. It originated in the 1950s when Margaret Vinci Heldt, a hairdresser from Elmhurst, Illinois, was asked to create a new style. ‘It’s kind of nice to know maybe in my own way I was able to give something to my profession that became a classic,’ she said. ‘It still has a touch of glamour, doesn’t it?

  ‘It was sort of the peak of hairdressing,’ said Heldt. ‘Everybody wanted the beehive, even women with real, real short hair. They looked more like anthills than a beehive then they got bigger and bigger and became hornets nests.’

  ‘It really was the last great hairdo we’ve seen in thirty years,’ adds Jackie Summers of Modern Salon magazine.

  Meanwhile, UK Vogue’s fashion features writer Sarah Harris says, ‘It is about fashion, owning a style, individuality and confidence, as well as success and talent. Not just with clothes but beauty, too. Amy Winehouse’s hair has become as much a signature as her clothes.’ Not just her signature, but an enduring mystery, too. ‘Amy won’t even tell her stylist, who also happens to be her best friend, what she does to get her hair like that,’ says a friend. Amy’s obsessed with her hair and only does it herself – it’s been a huge secret.

  Celebrity hairdresser Alex Foden, who designs and makes Amy’s £150 hairpieces, cracks some of the mystery: ‘Amy originally created the look herself but on a much smaller scale. But since I started working with her the beehive has simply got bigger and bigger – the bigger the better. Although she backcombed her own hair in the beginning, now we use furballs made from part synthetic, part real hair. These are stuffed inside hairnets and Amy’s own hair is placed over the top of them and held in place with hairpins.

  ‘It takes about forty minutes to fit a new hairpiece but only about five minutes to pin it up every morning once it’s been made. The beehive is particularly big in the capital but is taking off everywhere as Amy becomes more popular. She is getting through one hairpiece a week at the moment so they are fairly high-maintenance, but as long as you do not sleep in one or go to the gym wearing one they can last a lot longer. As well as being very versatile, a taller, thinner beehive can alter the appearance of a person’s natural body shape, adding height and making the face and body look leaner.’

  It has very much caught on, too. ‘Amy Winehouse has a lot to answe
r for!’ laughs Lorraine Ellis, manager at the Hair Spa in Thornton Hall Hotel in Thornton Hough. ‘But big hair is a really key trend this season and that means everything from the beehive look with a high crown, like Amy’s, to a 1980s wavy style that Coleen’s [McLoughlin, Wayne Rooney’s fiancée] been seen with of late. That’s a great look because you can wear it in the day and keep it quite soft using heated rollers, and then use Velcro rollers and tongs to glam it up a bit for night.’

  The period between Frank and Back to Black is shrouded in mystery. Amy says, ‘I started drinking and I fell in love.’

  And she wrote a great album.

  Back to Black has a dark name and a dark background. ‘I was very hurt by something but I managed to make something good out of a bad situation,’ says Amy. ‘I think when I wrote Back to Black I was left in a situation where I wasn’t working, and when I split up with this fellow I didn’t have anything to go back to. I guess when you pick up the pieces from a relationship you go back to what you know and try to throw yourself into something. And I had nothing – I wasn’t working. So I was just playing pool every day, getting drunk.’

  While playing pool, Amy was filling the jukebox of her local pub with coins and the music she heard inspired her to write new songs. Shirley Bassey and the Angels were among the acts she was listening to but, as ever, the Shangri-Las were an inspiration. ‘I know there are people in the world who have worse problems than falling in love and having it blow up in your face,’ she said of the problems she was encountering with her boyfriend Blake at this time. ‘But I didn’t want to just wake up drinking, and crying, and listening to the Shangri-Las, and go to sleep, and wake up drinking, and listening to the Shangri-Las. So I turned it into songs, and that’s how I got through it.