by Daphne Barak
Musically though, Amy was receiving critical attention from her peers and the public as well. Nominated for two BRIT Awards (British Female Solo Artist/British Urban Act), on 17 February 2004, she lost in both categories to Dido and Lemar respectively, but Amy was grabbing attention and to the media and her public she seemingly appeared more confident and more self-assured with every interview she gave.
Appearing on The Jonathan Ross Show in March 2004, a beautiful Amy – hair sleek and slim but curvaceous in a form-fitting short halter neck dress and high heels – explained to Ross that Frank was a ‘straight jazz–hip-hop cross. There is no blues or folk ….’ She added that she just wanted to write music that was ‘emotional’, something ‘that people would want to listen to and connect with.’
In that interview, Amy comes across as a normal, bright, lovely young woman, sure of her own opinions and views. Only the occasional movement of her hands betrays possible nervousness or just her youth. When Ross asks if her management company had tried to change her – her look, her way of speaking or behaviour – she jokes to the audience that someone tried to mould her into a big triangle shape and that she said ‘No-oh!’, to much laughter from everyone around her, Ross included. She then continues more seriously, ‘No, I’ve got my own style and I wrote my own songs and, you know, if someone has so much of something already, there’s very little you can add.’
Watching Amy give a mesmerising performance of ‘I Heard Love Is Blind’ from Frank at the end of that interview, playing an acoustic guitar, it’s hard to equate that self-assured and alluring young woman with the one who I meet in St Lucia in 2009.
So, I have to ask myself, what happened to Amy? When did things begin to go wrong? What caused this train wreck to happen? Do the reasons lie in her past? And why could – or did – no one stop her? I think about my first meeting with Janis, when she very bluntly, almost cruelly, says ‘I cannot help Amy unless she helps herself.’ Does that have something to do with it?
‘Do you remember the first time you felt “Wow, something else is going on in her life?”’
‘Well, you know,’ Mitch replies. ‘I have to say first of all, and it is well documented, that when she was interviewed about drugs, she was anti Class A drugs.
‘Since the age of about 17,’ he continues, ‘she smoked weed or marijuana, or whatever you call it, but not to the extent that it would make her psychotic – to relax and whatever. I don’t personally agree with it, that is something she has done.’
He adds that neither he nor Janis has tried it.
‘… Were you aware [at the time] that she was trying light drugs, like marijuana?’ I ask.
‘No. I think that Janis kind of kept that from me. When the first album came out, there is a picture of her [Amy] … on the album and my friend said to me, “You know she is rolling a spliff” [joint], and I said, “What are you talking about?”… I didn’t even know what a spliff was.
‘I said [to Amy], “Are you smoking marijuana?” And she said, “Oh, Dad, don’t be silly.”
‘I said, “I am not happy about that.” She said, “I am over 18, Dad. I can do what I like.”
‘So, what can I do?’ Mitch asks me. ‘She is over 18. I can’t lock her up.’
During my time with the Winehouses I’m struck by the different approaches that Mitch and Janis take to their daughter’s problems. Although Mitch states that he can’t ‘lock her up’, he is always keeping an eye on Amy. Her bodyguards are constantly reporting back to Mitch on Amy’s whereabouts and he seems to devote all of his time to trying to save his daughter from her addictions. As I’ve already mentioned, Janis’s attitude is completely different – her fatalistic view and her almost cold acceptance that only Amy can help herself is the opposite of Mitch’s behaviour.
Janis is right. Amy does need to recognize and face her own problems in order to start recovering but perhaps both these attitudes, however well-intended, are too extreme. For Amy to overcome her addictions she needs to get proper treatment. As I’ve discovered through my extensive interviews with other celebrities who suffer with addictions, rehab only works when the whole family is involved and opens up. But from what I’ve seen of the Winehouse family, it is clear that they are not ready to do this.
Maybe they don’t understand that this is what’s needed? Or maybe they dread having to go down this route? Either way, anything less than full rehab treatment is only a quick fix for Amy.
Mitch emphasizes the fact that at that time Amy declared publicly in several interviews that she was opposed to Class A drugs. ‘She said that “Anybody who takes Class A drugs is a ‘mug’.” Now a “mug” in English terminology is someone who is stupid – and, of course, she didn’t take Class A drugs.’
‘Were you convinced?’ I have to ask him.
‘It wasn’t a question of being convinced,’ he replies. ‘That was the truth. …’
‘At that point you didn’t think something was wrong?’ I persist.
‘There wasn’t anything wrong, apart from her smoking marijuana. It wasn’t only me saying that. People who know her. Her friends. They confirmed that she was a complete opponent of Class A drugs. She would not take Class A drugs. She regarded anyone who took [them] as a fool. She didn’t want to be in their company. Then, unfortunately she did meet somebody who did take Class A drugs.
‘And the rest, as they say, is history.’
you know i’m no good
By the end of 2004, Amy should have been riding on a high. She’d seen her debut album go platinum and received critical success with nominations for the BRITs and the Ivor Novello awards, the latter of which she’d won. She’d performed at Glastonbury Festival in June on the Jazz World Stage and at V in August. September had seen her sing at the prestigious Mercury Music Prize awards in London for which she had herself received a nomination, along with other rising stars such as Franz Ferdinand, The Streets, Belle and Sebastian and Snow Patrol. It was good company to be amongst, even though she lost to Franz Ferdinand.
Amy had also gone on two UK tours and she was now showing the world that she was an artist – and a woman – to be reckoned with. But now Island Records was asking: what next?
Amy had begun to think about her second album, but what could she write about? What would inspire her? She wrote about the world as she experienced it after all? Her life, her friends, her loves, her disappointments. What would be next?
She apparently found her answer at her local pub in Camden, the Hawley Arms, where she often played pool and listened to a lot of ’50s and ’60s music on the jukebox. There, in early 2005, she met a man who, quite literally, would change her life, Blake Fielder-Civil.
Blake was Amy’s ideal type – ‘at least five nine, with dark hair, dark eyes and loads of tattoos.’
Their relationship was turbulent from the offset and continued to be so for the intense six months that it lasted until Blake went back to his girlfriend. Amy later commented that she shouldn’t have got involved with him in the first place as Blake was involved with someone else ‘too close to home.’
Mitch and Janis both talk to me about Amy’s relationship with Blake when they first met.
‘Well, she wasn’t dating him. They didn’t date,’ Janis denies.
‘No,’ Mitch comments. ‘He was seeing somebody else. What happened was that he [Blake] started to see Amy for the first time on a casual basis just after Frank came out. But, of course, after six months, the interest [in the album] started waning a little bit, so it seemed that Blake’s interest in Amy started to wane a bit … He was seeing another girl … And, I saw him with Amy. We went out for a walk and he was in a pub across the road … I saw him in there and they were kissing and cuddling … there were hundreds of people in there.
‘I said, “Amy, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t show affection, but he’s somebody else’s boyfriend anyway and you really don’t want to be doing that in a room ….” I was quite sensitive about things like that. And she said, “D
ad, you’re right.” So, we left and you know, that was really the first time that I saw him and he didn’t turn up again until Back To Black was No. 1.”’
‘She wrote a lot of those songs [about] him,’ Janis comments.
‘The second album?’ I ask.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she confirms.
‘That’s why,’ Mitch interjects, ‘I don’t like to listen to it ….’
Under pressure from her record company to get into a studio and record her second album, and heartbroken over Blake, Amy began to spiral out of control. Summing up that time, she said, ‘My ex went back to his girlfriend and I went back to drinking and dark times.’
Island Records suggested that she needed to cut down on her drinking and Amy’s friends and family began to worry about her boozing and also the amount of weight she was losing.
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 i
n 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 Show1; 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.