by Daphne Barak
After Janis and Mitch split up, Janis moved with Alex and Amy to a house in East Finchley, another Jewishdominated area in North London. Amy is reported to have said that growing up there was ‘cool’, but it must have been very different to the life that she and her brother had had until then.
Janis recalls that Amy missed Mitch not being around and that this might be why there is a lot of anger in her songs. Mitch’s treatment of Janis and his affair with Jane is certainly something Amy deals with in her song ‘What Is It About Men’.
Aged 11, Amy moved to Ashmole Secondary School in Southgate, along with her friend, Juliette, where her musical tastes began to change and broaden. She listened to jazz, the music that Mitch liked so much and her uncles played, and sang along to artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, a singer who inspired Amy to realize that a ‘whisper can be so much more effective than just belting something out.’
Amy performed in amateur youth plays and school productions, sometimes more successfully than others, as Mitch noted in an early discussion. Recalling when he and Jane went to see a 12-year-old Amy sing at school, he commented, ‘She sang this song … and I said to Jane “Well, thank God she can have a career as an actress.” And the next year she [Amy] said, “Dad I am in this concert, will you come and see us?” So I said to my wife, “Well, we have got to go.” So, we went to see her and in a space of a year she could already sing. I remember the song she sang … the Alanis Morissette “Isn’t It Ironic” and it was great, so now in the space of a year she could sing. Whether it was in the right key I don’t know. She could sing and she was very good. …’
I ask Mitch at what point he believed Amy might be able to have a professional career as a performer.
‘She won a scholarship to go to Sylvia Young Drama School4, which is one of the top drama schools in London, but she went as an actress and dancer. The singing was – I don’t even know if they heard her sing and I think there was 800 applicants and there were two places and she won one of the places. …
‘My friend phoned me up, who is in show business, and said “Go out and buy The Stage [theatre paper].” … So, I went to about 10 newsagents before I found The Stage and there it was – Amy ha[d] won a scholarship and there was a picture of her …. We thought “Wow, now things are starting to move forward a little bit”, but even then we didn’t think about her singing … prior to that she had done a couple of pretty big acting jobs. She was at a theatre in a principal role, in a production as an actress, so that was more what we were really thinking, acting, maybe a little bit of dancing, tap dancing like Ginger Rogers, fabulous. … She loved to dance, but at that stage again there really wasn’t any sort of indication that she was a singer.’
Janis agrees with this when I interview her and Mitch together. ‘[Amy] was like the jolly kid, always a lovely, lovely child. She was like jolly and jumpy and happy and she was just enjoying it. And that was the most important thing. She enjoyed performing.’
‘So, you never pushed her?’ I ask Janis.
‘No. And I always said, “What do you call a mother that’s not a pushy Jewish mother” and she said, “Mummy, that’s you!”’
Mitch says that if anyone was pushy it was his mother, Cynthia, who Amy loved, so much so that she has her Nan’s name tattooed on her body. ‘Amy was always, “Mum, I don’t want to upset Nan,”’ Janis adds.
‘What about when she took her to the audition for Annie?’ Mitch recalls. ‘And there was a newspaper article the next day … They sent her along, it wasn’t Sylvia Young, it was Susi Earnshaw5, the one before, and they told us and they told Amy we are only sending you [along] for experience because the key’s not your key …. Somehow or other we forgot to tell my Mum about this. So, my Mum before Amy goes on the stage says “Now Amy, this is what you’ve got to do …” … but [Amy] said, “Nan, I’m only going for experience …”.
‘Of course, the song’s in the wrong key and she [Amy] comes off stage and my Mum wasn’t nasty to her, but it was, “Amy, why couldn’t you sing the song properly?”, “Nan, I’m trying to explain to you, it’s not my key. I’m only here for the experience.”
‘In the papers the next day, there was a review of the auditions and there was a whole section about pushy grandmothers and mothers. She [Cynthia] was [like], “You’ve got to do better.” To my Mum if you put your mind to it you could do anything you want [sic]. Which obviously you can do – but you can’t if it’s in the wrong key.’
Cynthia’s legacy is long-lasting and Amy frequently refers to her in interviews. We speak about Cynthia a few times in St Lucia and Amy tells me that she misses her still.
When Amy applied to Sylvia Young, all the applicants were asked to write a short essay about themselves and their dreams. The 13-year-old Amy wrote, ‘All my life I have been loud, to the point of being told to shut up. The only reason I have to be this loud is because you have to scream to be heard in my family. … I’ve been told … I have a lovely voice … I want to do something with the talents I’ve been “blessed” with. … Mostly, I have this dream to be very famous. … I want people to hear my voice and just … forget their troubles for five minutes. …’
At Sylvia Young, where Amy stayed for three years until 2000, she became good friends with Tyler James, a singer–songwriter, who later would help give her career a welcome boost.
Sylvia Young immediately spotted the young girl’s potential, commenting that Amy’s talent could have put her in the same league as Judy Garland or Ella Fitzgerald, but all was not completely well for Amy at the school. She was incredibly clever, but she was bored when she wasn’t performing and was often disruptive. She wouldn’t wear her uniform properly, had a nose ring and chewed gum in lessons.
It was about this time that Mitch also noticed Amy had began to act up in earnest. ‘… Maybe she was 14, and she would stay out all night. I had to go and find her and I was convinced that she was dead … I am morbid. That is the way that my mind works unfortunately.
‘I would be driving through the streets of North London looking for her, knocking on people’s doors … Completely irrational, but that’s the way you are where your children are concerned.’
I ask him if he thought Amy did it on purpose. ‘It’s possible. I don’t think so. I don’t think Amy has ever thought through the consequences of her actions. [Has] never taken responsibility for her actions. I don’t think she was any different to how she is now.’
At school, however, the teachers had had enough of Amy’s behaviour, it seemed. Janis recalls, ‘I got called into school … and the head teacher there said to me, “Well, Amy’s not doing what she could do … academically. She’s a very, very bright girl, should be doing such and such … And he’s talking all the talk, but saying “Find her another school.”’
It would have been a tough moment for any parent, I say, having not only their child but themselves as parents judged by this teacher.
Mitch continues, ‘Sylvia Young now will say that didn’t happen, but it did … But basically she [Amy] was asked to leave. …
‘In the normal academic school, 100 percent of the day is taken up with studying, apart from the physical activities. At this stage school, it’s probably two-thirds stage work, music and dancing and a third academia and Amy … just messed around. She couldn’t wait to get back into the performance so she was asked to leave. … We sent her to another private school and she made their life there hell for them.’
I ask Janis and Mitch if they were angry with Amy.
No,’ Mitch says. ‘You could never be angry with her … There are children who are nasty and they are malicious. She was never malicious. You know, she just laughs, even now ….’
Janis adds, ‘And that’s how she is with problems ….’
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 starte
d 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 Records6, 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.’
what is it about men
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 Tricky1. 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 Remi2 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 Berlin4 … [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 Fr
ank’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.
Without a doubt Amy was beginning to catch the attention of the media, sometimes for her talent, sometimes for her comments. In an interview with MusicOMH.com, she made it clear that she didn’t like being lumped together with Jamie Cullum and Katie Melua, just because their records came out at the same time. While adding that she felt bad for Jamie who must feel frustrated, she said of Katie, ‘SHE must think it’s her f**king lucky day.’