His anxiety increased when his father remarried. Don’s new wife had children of her own, and she and Don had another son in 1979, making Kurt feel even more marginalised, ‘something in the way’, as he sang expressively in the song of that title. ‘He [Dad] got married and after that I was one of the last things of importance on his list,’ Kurt complained. ‘He just gave up [on me].’ Kurt was sent to stay with relatives, including Wendy’s brother Chuck and his wife. Chuck played drums in a rock band and helped Kurt develop an interest in music, buying him an electric guitar and arranging for him to have lessons. ‘[His] main goal was to play “Stairway to Heaven”, which he denied later on,’ says Warren Mason, who taught Kurt guitar and gave him advice on songwriting. ‘I have to say he is one of the last people I would ever have predicted would make it, because he was so laid back. He just didn’t show any drive …’ In his introverted way, however, Kurt became as obsessive about the guitar as Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix. Like Hendrix, he played left-handed.
A school photo of Kurt at this time shows a fresh-faced boy with a broad smile. He looks like a member of the Brady Bunch, yet he felt like a misfit, becoming, in his words, ‘fully withdrawn’ by his early teens. His mother was so worried that she sent him to a psychiatrist. Kurt began to develop odd and disturbing obsessions, significantly with death and suicide, which became a lifelong preoccupation. He got it into his head that Great Uncle Burle had killed himself ‘over the death of Jim Morrison’. Although there was no connection, this shows that Kurt was already aware of the rock stars who had died at 27. He couldn’t have failed to know something about Jimi Hendrix, the biggest rock star ever to come from Washington state. Kurt’s preoccupation with suicide increased and became personal. At fifteen, he made a home movie titled ‘Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide’. This was more than a joke: it was a fixation, and a warning. Textbooks say that the children of divorced parents are at greater risk of suicide. Kurt bore that out.
The unhappy teenager continued to be passed around the family, living for a while with his grandparents, Iris and Leland Cobain, in their stationary trailer at Montesano, a short drive from Aberdeen. Kurt adored Iris, who shared his interest in art and music. ‘He liked his grandmother better than he did his own mother,’ asserts Leland. ‘He was [also] pissed at his dad, because his dad got married again.’
Kurt moved from his grandparents to stay with Uncle Jim Cobain. Then he moved back to his mother’s, transferring to Aberdeen High, a short walk from home. It was Kurt’s bad luck to be placed in a class with a group of athletic boys whose parents had more money than Kurt’s, and who formed a clique with the pretty girls, a clique from which Kurt felt excluded. ‘The boys weren’t necessarily as handsome [as Kurt], but they were preppy, they wore the polo shirts and the nice sweaters and their hair was always done. They got all the attention,’ says classmate Penny Lloyd, who was part of the in-crowd. She found Kurt to be painfully shy: ‘He would barely look at me or talk to me.’ Ostracised and introverted, Kurt found expression in music and art. His art teacher, Bob Hunter, recalls Kurt making ‘incredible drawings’, including an excellent caricature of President Reagan, and cartoon Smurfs trying to kill each other.
Around this time Kurt’s enthusiasm for classic rock gave way to punk, a form of music practised by a local band, the Melvins, who went on to fame. Kurt became acquainted with members of the nascent group, who were slightly older than him, and started to hang around the Aberdeen home of the drummer. Concurrently, he began to experiment with drugs, which became, with music, the dominant force in his life. Drug use was depressingly common among Kurt’s generation in Aberdeen, Kurt being one of a number of local boys who became heroin addicts, sometimes with fatal consequences. Drug use began as a laugh. Kurt and his friends would crawl under the Young Street Bridge to smoke dope in private, while cars rumbled overhead, including hearses on their way to the cemetery. It wasn’t long before Kurt was coming into school stoned. ‘When he was high, it was obvious,’ says Bob Hunter. ‘We’d take a walk to the door. I didn’t feel it was doing a lot of good to refer him to counsellors, so [I’d say], “See you tomorrow.”’
Wendy Cobain remarried in 1984, to a man named O’Connor, whom Kurt disliked as much as his stepmother. He despised both parents. In a letter to his father in later life, he wrote: ‘I’ve never taken sides with you or my mother because while I was growing up I had equal contempt for you both.’ Arguments at home led Wendy to ask Kurt to leave, after which he stayed with friends and relatives, sleeping on sofas, even in a car. The following year he dropped out of school, before graduation, and moved into an apartment with a friend. He went back to school briefly, to work as a janitor. That summer he was fined for spraying graffiti on the SeaFirst Bank downtown: ‘HOMO SEX RULES’. Kurt had few sexual relationships, and those that are known about were heterosexual, but he empathised with gay people as fellow outsiders and used this as a way of taunting the conservative citizens of Aberdeen.
Unable to pay his rent, Kurt was kicked out of his apartment and found himself virtually homeless. It was at this juncture that he returned to the riverbank under the Young Street Bridge, later giving the impression in interviews that he had lived under the bridge. He may have slept there on one or two nights, but it is unlikely to have been much longer, still less likely that he sustained himself by fishing in the river, as he suggested.
Before things became truly desperate, Kurt was rescued by two school friends, brothers Steve and Eric Shillinger, whose father, Lamont, taught English at Aberdeen High. ‘One evening Steve and Eric came home and said, “Our friend Kurt got into a fight [at home] and they kicked him out of the house. Could he stay with us for a few days?”’ recalls Lamont Shillinger. He and his wife agreed to give Kurt the use of their hide-away bed. ‘He lived with us for about a year.’ Even though the Shillinger home is a short walk from Wendy O’Connor’s house in Aberdeen, Lamont Shillinger says he had no contact with Kurt’s family while Kurt stayed with them. ‘We never heard one word from his mom, dad, grandpa, anything.’
Such was Kurt Cobain’s start in life. As with many of the 27s, it was a rocky beginning. But history shows that artistic people are often born in adversity and thrive on pain. In a sense we should thank the parents of the 27s, inadequate as many were, for creating an environment conducive to artists. If Mummy and Daddy had provided happier homes, their sons and daughters might have passed into anonymity. They might still be alive, but who would have heard of the optometrist Brian Jones, assuming he had followed the career his parents envisaged? Who would have known Jimi Hendrix, landscape gardener, or care about Janis Joplin, Port Arthur housewife; who would read the sociologist Jim Morrison, or given a damn about school janitor Kurt Cobain? As for Amy Winehouse, she worked briefly as a reporter before she went into show business, and might have been in journalism still, had her background and character been different.
* For clarity Linda Lawrence is referred to throughout by her maiden name.
* The divorce rate more than doubled in the USA between 1965 and 1975. This was partly because of changes to the law, which made divorce easier, but was also the result of the ideas of the women’s-liberation movement rippling out through America, with women like Wendy Cobain wanting freedom from unfulfilling marriages.
Two
DADDY’S GIRL
There was a little girl Who had a little curl Right in the middle of her forehead, When she was good She was very, very good, But when she was bad she was horrid.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Although her family were Reform Jews, who did not observe all the traditions of the faith strictly, Amy Winehouse’s Jewish background was a vital part of her identity. She often spoke of her Jewishness, sometimes introducing herself by saying: ‘My name is Amy Winehouse – that’s a Jewish name.’
The family is Russian-Jewish. Amy’s great-great-grandfather, born in Minsk, was named Wienhaus. He was among the hundreds of thousands of Jews who fled persecution
at the end of the nineteenth century, immigrating to Britain while other Russian Jews, such as Bob Dylan’s ancestors the Zimmermans, fled to America. The family name was seemingly anglicised to Winehouse upon arrival in England in 1890; at which time the first name of Amy’s great-great-grandfather was registered as Harris, which also sounds anglicised. As a result Winehouse is a highly unusual, if not unique, family name with the hundred or so Winehouses in the United Kingdom descended from Harris and his family.
Like many immigrants, the Winehouses settled in Spitalfields, a cheap, crowded area of east London, Harris arriving two years after Jack the Ripper had terrorised the neighbourhood. Harris was a tailor, a typical Jewish trade, probably working from home on a pedal-operated Singer sewing machine. His son Ben (Amy’s great-grandfather) served in the British Army in the First World War, after which he established a hairdressing business on Commercial Street, Ben’s Toilet Saloon, in which his son, Alex (Amy’s grandfather), also worked. Family legend has it that Alex cut the hair of some of the East End’s notorious gangsters. Alex was an extrovert, ‘full of laughter and comedy,’ says Amy’s cousin Jonathan Winehouse. The Winehouses are typically friendly, gregarious and wilful, quick to joke and sing. Alex married Cynthia Gordon, Amy’s beloved grandmother, whose name and image Amy had tattooed on her arm. In her youth, Cynthia dated the jazz saxophonist and club owner Ronnie Scott. Another show-business connection was made when cousin Neville Winehouse married Frankie Vaughan’s sister.
Amy’s father, Mitchell, was born in 1950 to Alex and Cynthia Winehouse in Stoke Newington, the family moving soon afterwards to Stepney in the East End. Mitch grew into a heavy-set young man with curly dark hair who wore a moustache in early adulthood. In character he was and remains chatty and ebullient, full of jokes, a natural show-off who loved to sing at family gatherings in the style of his heroes, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. Amy’s success would change Mitch’s life beyond imagination. His daughter’s celebrity was an entrée to showbiz, putting Mitch in a position where he could meet and get to know Tony Bennett and record his own album.
In 1976, when Mitch was 25 and working in a casino, he married a 21-year-old pharmacist named Janis Seaton, who had been born in the United States, but had grown up in the Jewish community of east London. Janis is a tiny, twinkly woman, the image of her daughter, as many comment. She cheerfully agrees: ‘Whenever I see Amy appearing on TV … I think, Hang on, that’s me!’
When the Winehouses had made a little money they moved from the inner city to the suburbs. Mitch’s parents relocated to Southgate, in the north London Borough of Enfield, one of the dormitory suburbs that spread around the capital in the 1930s. It was a pleasant, affordable place in which to raise a family, with convenient high-street shops, parks and schools, and within commuting distance of work by Underground. Southgate is anonymous and slightly dull, yet many 27s came from such places. This was where Mitch completed his education. His father died young, but Cynthia continued to live locally, and when Mitch and Janis married they set up home near his mother and started their own family.
A son, Alex, was born in 1979, at which time Mitch was driving a black taxi cab, another traditional occupation for working-class Jewish Londoners. The Winehouses bought a semi-detached house on Osidge Lane, where they were living when Amy Jade Winehouse was launched upon the ocean of life at Chase Farm Hospital, on 14 September 1983, completing the family.
Amy was an attractive, clever and curious child with a tendency to get into trouble. ‘She was mischievous, bold and daring,’ Mitch writes in his book, Amy, My Daughter, going on to document the times Amy scared her parents by getting lost or choking. When Amy saw the fuss her parents made of her brother when he choked on his food one day, she pretended to choke, the start of a lifelong habit of attention-seeking.
Mitch and Janis are very different people. Janis is quiet, even timid. Mitch is much more outgoing, quick to chat, make a joke and lose his temper. While he was a lively and loving parent, he was not an ideal husband to Janis. He was often away from home, working long hours as a cabbie. When he came in, he had a habit of waking Amy up to play with him, which Janis found disruptive. Yet Mitch doted on Amy, and Amy adored her father. She was Daddy’s Girl, later having that phrase tattooed on her shoulder. She copied her father when he sang, and Mitch encouraged her. By the age of five Amy had decided that she wanted to go into show business. She was, as cousin Beryl Winehouse notes, ‘definitely an unusual child – very precocious’. At the same time there was a quieter, less confident side to Amy. ‘She was always very cheery, but she was also shy,’ Janis Winehouse has said. ‘She’s never been an easy child.’
Amy made friends readily at nursery school, then at Osidge Primary School, a short walk from home. ‘One of our best routines was that one of us would run out of the classroom in tears, and the other would say that they’d have to go out and comfort her. And then we’d just sit in a room somewhere, laughing our heads off,’ says one early friend, Juliette Ashby. She also recalled Amy and herself teasing a boy: they told him they wouldn’t be his friends unless he pulled his underpants down – which they claim he did to their joy. ‘That was when we truly bonded.’* Another friend, Lauren Franklin, remembers Amy as an advanced reader, a spelling-bee champ and a whiz at mathematics (a talent Amy inherited from her mother). Amy took lifelong pleasure in books, puzzles and word games. She also had a precocious interest in boys. ‘She was quite a naughty girl,’ says Lauren. ‘I remember my mum shouting at her in the playground because she had told me stuff that I shouldn’t have known at such a young age.’ Amy was to become naughtier still, her behaviour linked to a change in family circumstances.
In the short time he’d been married Mitch Winehouse had pursued three careers. He had worked in the gaming industry, as a taxi driver and latterly as a double-glazing salesman. In the last business he worked alongside a marketing manager named Jane, a woman thirteen years his junior (she turned twenty the year she started with Mitch’s firm). Jane and Mitch became friends, close enough for Jane to visit the family at Osidge Lane where she met Janis and the children. Mitch says there was no more than a friendship between them ‘for ages’, but then there was an affair. Janis found out and seemingly tolerated it initially. ‘He was a salesman so he was away a lot, but for a long time there was also another woman, Jane,’ she has said. ‘I think Mitchell [Janis always called him that] would have liked to have both of us, but I wasn’t happy to do that.’ In 1992 Mitch made the decision to leave home and live with Jane, who turned 28 that year (he was 42 in December). He stayed at home until Alex turned thirteen, and had his bar mitzvah, then he and Janis told the children.
‘The children were in shock,’ Janis says, of the moment when she and Mitch told Alex and Amy that they were separating. ‘They couldn’t understand it because they didn’t see any animosity between us and we never rowed.’ Alex withdrew into himself. Amy seemed less disturbed at first, but it became clear that the break-up had a profound effect upon her. As with Kurt Cobain, this could be said to have been the turning point in her young life. Mitch stayed in regular contact with his children after he had left home, keeping a room for them wherever he was living and seeing them frequently, but Amy came to describe her father censoriously, in a 2003 interview with the Guardian, as a ‘shady’ sort of man who ‘moved house every two years’ after the separation. ‘I’ve no idea what he was trying to run from.’
Part of the problem was that Mitch was in financial trouble. He was declared bankrupt in 1993, around the time he left home, an episode he neglects to mention in his book, Amy, My Daughter. He was declared a ‘debtor’s bankrupt’ (meaning he applied to become bankrupt because he could not pay his debts) at the High Court in London on 16 November 1993, discharged three years later. He was described at the time in the London Gazette (which publishes London bankruptcies) as a sales consultant and company director of Greenside Close, Whetstone, where the Winehouse family had recently moved. Aside from their previous home in Osid
ge Lane, two further addresses were given for Mitch in the bankruptcy notice. Over the next few years he continued to move about, living in London, Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent, which explains Amy’s comment about his peripatetic lifestyle.
Mitch writes in his book that he felt guilty about leaving his family, and he admits to over-indulging his children to assuage this guilt, buying Alex and Amy expensive gifts, and giving them money. So, Amy suffered the double upset of seeing her parents split up and being spoilt by a father trying to compensate for his misdemeanour. It was a recipe for trouble.
Although the break-up of a marriage is not uncommon, it is very unfortunate for the children, and Mitch Winehouse’s decision to start a new life with another woman at a tender stage in Amy’s development seems to have shaped her character and behaviour, particularly her attitude to men. For years Amy tried to figure out why Dad had cheated on Mum, expressing her thoughts in a song, ‘What is it About Men?’, which Mitch concedes is partly about him. In this song, Amy sings critically about someone who was originally ‘a family man’, expressing the hope that she will not repeat his mistakes, behaviour that had caused her mother anguish (she referred specifically to her mother in the song). The burden of the deeply personal and revealing lyric was that, while she didn’t want to repeat history, she felt almost doomed to do so. And, sadly, Amy proved a faithless and unsuccessful spouse in turn. As Larkin wrote, our parents fuck us up and give us the faults they had.
2
Following her separation from Mitch (they would later divorce), Janis Winehouse enrolled Amy at a Saturday-morning stage school run by a former actress named Susi Earnshaw, who observes that mothers and daughters often bicker after Dad leaves home, the daughter blaming Mum, however unfairly, for driving him away. Typically, Mum feels guilty and tries to do something nice for her daughter, such as, in Amy’s case, sending her to stage school. ‘It’s so common,’ says Earnshaw. ‘It’s a way of making them happy, and it also could be a way that a parent could have a break. It’s a Saturday, and it’s three hours where your child is happy doing something, and you can have a rest, and they might be in a good mood when they come home.’
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