‘Hello, darling. You look lovely tonight,’ I told her.
‘Aaaah, Dad, thanks.’ She beamed at me.
She seemed a bit tipsy so I made a point of not refilling her glass as quickly as she emptied it.
Over dinner Raye outlined his plans for Amy. He impressed us with his forward-thinking ideas, saying that she needed to move on. He suggested it was time to break her in America, and take her to number one there as well as in the UK. He also pushed the idea of a new album and more gigs: if we did this right we were definitely going to crack it. I didn’t know it at the time but Amy had already played him some of her new songs and he thought they were fantastic.
Raye speculated that 19 probably felt that doing a second album with Amy might be difficult as Amy wasn’t happy with the final cut of Frank. They didn’t want her to leave them but he thought they wouldn’t stand in her way if she decided to go.
After everything Amy and I had heard from Raye, we decided she should sign a management deal with Metropolis. We’d made some marvellous friends at 19, some of whom remained her friends, but it was time for a change. (Amy always accumulated friends rather than dropping them.) 19 had done some great things for her: without them she probably wouldn’t have got record and publishing deals, but I think they probably felt they had taken her as far as they could. When it came down to it, I was reminded of Amy’s schools: they were quite pleased to see her go.
* * *
Leaving 19 was a tough decision but it turned out to be the right one. In the end, Amy’s relationship with Raye Cosbert and Metropolis became, in my view, one of the most successful artist/manager partnerings in the music business.
Very quickly, Raye set up meetings with Lucian Grainge at Universal, and Guy Moot at EMI. Raye’s energy was just what Amy’s career needed – like a kick up the arse. For some time Guy Moot had wanted Amy to get together with the talented young Mark Ronson, a producer/arranger/songwriter/DJ. In March 2006, a few months after she’d signed with Metropolis, Raye encouraged her to meet Mark in New York so the two of them could ‘hook up’. She knew very little about him before she walked into his studio on Mercer Street in Greenwich Village, and on first seeing him, she said, ‘Oh, the engineer’s here.’ Later she told him that she’d thought he would be an older Jewish guy with a big beard.
That meeting was a bit like an awkward first date. Amy played Mark some Shangri-Las tracks, which had the real retro sound that she was into, and she told him that was the sort of music she wanted to make for the new album. Mark knew some of the tracks Amy mentioned but otherwise she gave him a crash course in sixties jukebox, girl-group pop music. She’d done the same for me when I’d stumbled over a pile of old vinyl records – the Ronettes, the Chiffons, the Crystals – that she’d bought from a stall in Camden Market. That had been where she’d developed her love of sixties makeup and the beehive hairdo.
They met again the following day, by which time Mark had come up with a piano riff that became the verse chords to ‘Back to Black’. Behind the piano, he put a kick drum, a tambourine and ‘tons of reverb’. Amy loved it, and it was the first song she recorded for the new album.
Amy was supposed to be flying home a few days later, but she was so taken with Mark that she called me to say she was going to stay in New York to carry on working with him. Her trip lasted another two weeks and proved very fruitful, with Amy and Mark fleshing out five or six songs. Amy would play Mark a song on her guitar, write the chords down for him and leave him to work out the arrangements.
A lot of her songs were to do with Blake, which did not escape Mark’s attention. She told Mark that writing songs about him was cathartic and that ‘Back to Black’ summed up what had happened when their relationship had ended: Blake had gone back to his ex and Amy to black, or drinking and hard times. It was some of her most inspired writing because, for better or worse, she’d lived it.
Mark and Amy inspired each other musically, each bringing out fresh ideas in the other. One day they decided to take a quick stroll around the neighbourhood because Amy wanted to buy Alex Clare a present. On the way back Amy began telling Mark about being with Blake, then not being with Blake and being with Alex instead. She told him about the time at my house after she’d been in hospital when everyone had been going on at her about her drinking. ‘You know they tried to make me go to rehab, and I told them, no, no, no.’
‘That’s quite gimmicky,’ Mark replied. ‘It sounds hooky. You should go back to the studio and we should turn that into a song.’
Of course, Amy had written that line in one of her books ages ago. She’d told me before she was planning to write a song about what had happened that day, but that was the moment ‘Rehab’ came to life.
Amy had also been working on a tune for the ‘hook’, but when she played it to Mark later that day it started out as a slow blues shuffle – it was like a twelve-bar blues progression. Mark suggested that she should think about doing a sixties girl-group sound, as she liked them so much. He also thought it would be fun to put in the Beatles-style E minor and A minor chords, which would give it a jangly feel. Amy was unaccustomed to this style – most of the songs she was writing were based around jazz chords – but it worked and that day she wrote ‘Rehab’ in just three hours.
If you had sat Amy down with a pen and paper every day, she wouldn’t have written a song. But every now and then, something or someone turned the light on in her head and she wrote something brilliant. During that time it happened over and over again.
The sessions in the studio became very intense and tiring, especially for Mark, who would sometimes work a double shift and then fall asleep. He would wake up with his head in Amy’s lap and she would be stroking his hair, as if he was a four-year-old. Mark was a few years older than Amy, but he told me he found her very motherly and kind.
This was a very productive period for Amy. She’d already written ‘Wake Up Alone’, ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ and ‘You Know I’m No Good’ when we were on holiday in Spain, so the new album was taking shape. Before she’d met Mark, Amy had been in Miami, working with Salaam Remi on a few tracks. Her unexpected burst of creativity in New York prompted her to call him. She told him how excited she was about what she was doing with Mark, and Salaam was very encouraging. Jokingly, she said to him, ‘So you’d better step up.’ Later she went back to Miami to work some more with Salaam, who did a fantastic job on the tracks he produced for the album.
When Amy returned to London she told me excitedly about some of the Hispanic women she’d seen in Miami, and how she wanted to blend their look – thick eyebrows, heavy eye-liner, bright red lipstick – with her passion for the sixties ‘beehive’.
By then, Mark had all he needed to cut the music tracks with the band, the Dap-Kings, at the Daptone Recording Studios in Brooklyn.
Shortly after that my mother passed away and Amy, along with the rest of the family, was in pieces. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, in June 2006, that Amy added the last touches to ‘Back to Black’, recording the vocals at the Power House Studios in west London.
I went along that day to see her at work – the first time I’d been with her while she was recording. I hadn’t heard anything that she’d been doing for the new album, so it was amazing to listen to it for the first time. The sound was so clear and so basic: they’d stripped everything back to produce something so like the records of the early sixties. Amy did the vocals for ‘Back to Black’ over the already-recorded band tracks, and I stood in the booth with Raye, Salaam and one or two others while she sang.
It was fascinating to watch her: she was very much in control, and she was a perfectionist, redoing phrases and even words to the nth degree. When she wanted to listen to what she’d sung, she’d get them to put it on a CD, then play it in my taxi outside, because she wanted to know how most people would hear her music, which would not be through professional studio systems. In the end, Back to Black was made in just five months.
Amy’s CD sleeve
for the Back to Black sampler. Amy still loved her heart symbol and drew a good self-portrait. She still seemed a schoolgirl at heart.
The album astonished me. I knew my daughter was good, but this sounded like something on another level. Raye carried on telling us that it would be a huge hit all around the world, and I was getting very excited. It was hard to read Amy: I couldn’t tell if she expected it to be a triumph, as Raye did, but she was much happier with the final cut than she had been with Frank. This had been a much more hands-on process for her.
Back to Black was released in the UK on 27 October 2006, and during its first two weeks it sold more than 70,000 copies. It reached number one on the UK Albums Chart in the week ending 20 January 2007. On 14 December 2007 it was certified six times platinum in the UK in recognition of more than 1.8 million copies sold. By December 2011 Back to Black had sold 3.5 million copies in the UK and more than 20 million copies worldwide.
I was blown away, beyond proud. But deep down I never wanted Amy to write another album like it. The songs are amazing but she went through hell to write them. I don’t like Back to Black as much as I like Frank; I never really did. And that’s for one reason only: all of the songs on Back to Black, apart from ‘Rehab’, are about Blake. It occurred to me recently that one of the biggest-selling UK albums of the twenty-first century so far is all about the biggest low-life scumbag that God ever put breath into. Quite ironic, isn’t it? Mind you, you don’t get albums written about really good people like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, do you? Good people’s places in Heaven may be assured, but nobody’s going to have a chart-topping album full of songs about someone’s good deeds.
While the album’s success altered Amy’s career in every way imaginable, it came with a high price tag. The nature of the songs made it hard for her to feel as excited as you might expect about the album’s reception and success. Whereas people might walk along the street humming ‘Love Is A Losing Game’, to Amy it was like a knife in the heart, a reminder of the worst of times.
I knew what the songs meant because she always wrote about her life, and I didn’t want to discuss them with her when I knew how painful she found it to listen to them.
Even though Amy was with Alex Clare, Blake wasn’t far away. Sometimes with Amy, sometimes not, but an all-important figure to her nonetheless. The fact was, although Amy loved Alex, she was not in love with him. She was in love with Blake.
Alex wasn’t stupid and he soon found out that Amy was seeing Blake. He told me that he thought Amy had been smoking heroin with Blake. He said he could smell it on her. I laughed, and told him the ‘Class-A drugs are for mugs’ story. At that point, Amy was still opposed to hard drugs, and Alex was wrong: Amy wasn’t doing heroin then, but Blake was smoking it in front of her, which was why her clothes smelt of it.
Alex wanted to have it out with Blake and I said I’d go with him. I didn’t want him to walk on his own into a situation he couldn’t handle. Blake used to drink regularly in a pub called the Eagle in Leonard Street, east London, but every time we went to confront him, he was never there; I’m pretty sure Amy rang him to tell him we were on our way.
Eventually, around the start of 2007, Alex and Amy split up. Then Amy was back with Blake full time, and I finally got to meet him at the Jeffrey’s Place flat. Despite everything I’d heard from Tyler and Alex, I decided, given how Amy felt about him, that I wanted to make up my own mind about him.
My first impression was that he seemed to be a decent and respectful guy, if a bit scruffy. Amy had talked about him off and on during the Alex Clare period, but I didn’t know much about him. I wondered about his age, as his hair seemed to be receding, and he looked like he could do with a good meal. We had a bit of a chat and he told me that he had been born in Lincolnshire and had come to London when he was sixteen. He said he was working as a video production assistant and wanted to get into pop videos. On that occasion Amy and Blake looked very happy together, and he didn’t strike me as a drug-user, so I thought that perhaps Alex had been mistaken about him. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In the light of what happened later, I’m pretty sure that Amy had started smoking heroin and crack cocaine by then, although at the time I had no idea.
* * *
Amy’s last time in New York with Mark Ronson was in December 2006. They were talking about Motown Christmas songs, and how all the great soul artists of the sixties and seventies had brought out a Christmas record.
‘Why aren’t there any great Jewish-holiday records?’ Amy wondered. Later that week she went with Mark to the studio where he did his regular radio show and they hosted it together as ‘Two Jews and a Christmas Tree’. They decided that that might make a good title for a Jewish-holiday song. By the next day Amy had come up with a whole load more great titles including, ‘Heart Of Coal’ and ‘Alone Under The Mistletoe’. To Mark, everything Amy came up with was an instant classic, even if it was just a throwaway line.
Doing the promotion for Back to Black brought Amy back into the public eye, and she appeared in the newspapers regularly. They were all in love with her new look but far less kind about her drinking: she was often pictured going into and coming out of pubs. ‘Amy, darling, you’ve got to do something about your drinking,’ I said to her. ‘You’re not doing yourself any favours.’
I got the usual Amy shrug. ‘Yeah, yeah, Dad.’
There were also allusions to drugs, but I didn’t believe these for one minute.
In March 2004, as part of the ongoing promotion for Frank, Amy had appeared on BBC2’s irreverent weekly pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks. It had been a pretty good show – Amy was very funny and got quite a few laughs – so in November 2006 when she was promoting Back to Black she was invited back. It didn’t hurt that her look was so striking that the cameras loved her and – unlike with Frank – her beehive image was now everywhere.
Now, there was a long time between Amy arriving at the studio and the recording starting. She got bored and had too much to drink. By the time the recording got going Amy was drunk, and while she was very funny on the show, in hindsight it’s clear to me that this was when her reputation for being out of control began to take shape.
Amy was on the comedian Bill Bailey’s team. She hit it off with the host, Simon Amstell, when he introduced her: ‘Bill’s first guest is Amy Winehouse, the Ivor Novello Award-winning “Jazz Jew”. Amy’s likes include Kelly Osbourne and the smell of petrol. I quite like matches. Let’s do lunch.’
Amy got her first big laugh when GMTV presenter Penny Smith, who was on the other team, asked Amy if her beehive was her own hair.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Amy replied. ‘Yeah, it’s all mine. Cos I bought it, yeah.’
Shortly after that Amy asked Simon if she could have another drink and Simon refused, which led to some friendly banter. Amy said she was seeing Pete Doherty later that night to talk about doing a tune together.
‘He wants to sell you drugs,’ Simon yelled. ‘Don’t go near him! Do something with Katie Melua. There you go.’
‘I’d rather have cat AIDS, thank you,’ Amy replied.
When it came to the ‘Intros’ round, where two of the panel sing an intro to a tune the other panellist has to name, Amy stood up, saying, ‘Pssssh,’ as she did so.
‘What’s the push-push?’ asked Simon Amstell.
‘I dunno. It’s my new thing,’ said Amy.
Quick as a flash, Amstell retorted, ‘Is it? I thought that was crack.’
Amy didn’t take offence, just gestured towards herself. ‘Do I look like Russell Brand?’ Then, in mock-horror, she buried her head in her hands when the audience laughed.
Amstell snapped back, ‘Yes!’
When she sat down again Amy took a drink of water, then turned and spat over her shoulder.
‘This is not a football match,’ Simon said to her. ‘You come here full of… crack… spitting all over things…’
Amy jokingly pleaded, ‘Let it die, please. Let it die… please.’
‘The addiction I’d like to die…’ Simon replied. ‘This isn’t even a pop quiz any more. It’s an intervention, Amy.’
Amy laughed and told me later she’d thought that was the best line on the show. I think Amy liked Simon Amstell. She let him get away with remarks she wouldn’t have taken from someone she didn’t like.
The following day I went round to see her. ‘You know, you really shouldn’t drink when you’re working,’ I lectured. ‘Everybody could see you were drunk, and it was embarrassing.’
We had a bit of a row. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad,’ Amy said. ‘Everyone laughed.’
‘They were laughing at you, not with you.’
‘Watch it again, Dad, and you’ll see what I mean,’ she insisted.
‘But I’m right. Stop bloody drinking.’ I stormed off.
7
‘RONNIE SPECTOR MEETS THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN’
By the beginning of 2007 Back to Black was at number one in the UK and we had a celebration to mark it. Amy drank more than she should have but everyone was so happy about the success of the album that I let it go. ‘Congratulations, darling,’ I said.
‘Are you proud of me, Dad?’
I couldn’t believe my talented daughter needed to ask that. ‘Always, darling. I’m always proud of you, whatever you do.’
Back to Black was due to be released in the US in March; so on Tuesday, 16 January Amy did a couple of shows at Joe’s Pub, a live showcase venue in Manhattan, New York. It wasn’t the best night of the week for an American début but both shows were sell-outs. Amy performed a fifty-minute set in each to enthusiastic audiences. The next day the reviews were pretty good. My favourite, though, which made us both laugh, was from an online blog. It described Amy’s look as ‘Ronnie Spector meets the Bride of Frankenstein’.
Amy, My Daughter Page 7