Amy Winehouse (3 page)

‘I was cute up to the age of about five but then I got naughty. I was very naughty. Very, very, very naughty. When everyone else went out for first play we went through all their lunchboxes and ate all their crisps. And, when they came in from play, half of their lunches would be missing. I grew out of it by the time I was about nine, though.’

When Janis wrote an open letter to her daughter through the pages of the
News of the World
in 2007, she spoke of Amy’s childhood:

Amy’s naughtiness came from boredom at school. She felt smothered and frustrated by the regimen of education. ‘I didn’t like being told what to do,’ she shrugs, the scowl returning to her face. ‘I was on report all the time. It gets to you after a while, having to sign a piece of paper after every lesson. So I left.’

By this time, Amy had endured the painful experience of watching her parents split up. ‘We never argued,’ Janis remembers of the circumstances leading to the split. ‘We’d had a very agreeable marriage but he was never there. He was… away a lot, but for a long time there was also another woman, Jane, who became his second wife. I think Mitchell would have liked to have both of us but I wasn’t happy to do that.’

For any child of nine, to watch their parents split up would be almost unbearably difficult. For Amy, the experience was typically painful and her mother believes that this has influenced Amy’s music. ‘People talk a lot about the anger in Amy’s songs,’ said Janis. ‘I think a lot of it was that her father wasn’t there. Now he’s trying to make up for that and he’s
spending more time with her, but what he’s doing now is what he should have been doing then.’

Interestingly, a live performance at Shepherds Bush Empire once saw Amy spend a lot of time during the show gazing up at Blake, who was in the circle to the right of the stage. As she sang lines about his infidelities, she fixed her focus on him. However, she also spun round and sang a few of the lines at her father Mitch, who was in the circle to the left of the stage. Nowadays, Amy sniffs, ‘My dad was shady. He moved house every two years – I’ve no idea what he was running from.’

An old ‘friend’ of Amy’s spoke about this period of her life in an interview with a celebrity magazine. ‘After Amy’s dad Mitch moved out when she was nine, she felt that she could do anything she wanted,’ reveals the old pal. ‘She started wearing short skirts and makeup. Her mum Janis struggled to control her. Amy lost her virginity at fifteen… and told her mum, who made her go on the Pill. She was treated badly by the boy and I don’t think her head was in a good space about it. It traumatised her and she speaks about it even now.’

Recently, Amy returned to her first school and the visit turned out to be suitably chaotic. ‘My old teacher was there – this cold-blooded bitch, she bleeds ice. She’s had the same haircut since 1840,’ chuckles Amy. ‘I was there with my friend and after the shoot we were like, “Miss, hello, miss, can we have a look round the school?” She was like, grudgingly, “OK”, and we went to the art room and my friend wandered off. Next thing, he shouted, “Run! I’ve smashed the fire alarm!” and the
whole school was evacuated. It was the highlight of my life. I was saying, “I do hope it’s just a drill, miss” – and her face was a picture.’

As a child Amy was comforted not only by her love of music: she was also a huge fan of American wrestling. An unnamed friend recalls that she was addicted to shows such as
SmackDown
and
Raw
. She even got to meet one of her heroes, Chris Jericho, who was one of the biggest names in the sport. ‘Amy was so excited about meeting him, she wouldn’t stop talking about it. She was much more excited to meet a wrestler than any musician.’ She was also a fan of Rob Van Dam and would, reportedly, ‘go crazy’ whenever he was on TV.

At the age of twelve, Amy took the first step towards fame herself.

T
he Sylvia Young Theatre School was originally established in 1981 on Drury Lane. It moved to Marylebone in 1983. Such has been the success of the school that Young herself was given an OBE in 2005. However, it has also been the subject of controversy, with actress Billie Piper claiming in her autobiography that students were encouraged to become ‘lighter, smaller and thinner’ and that eating disorders among the students were often ignored by teachers.

Fellow Sylvia Young graduate Denise Van Outen was outraged by Piper’s comments. She stormed, ‘I was a big Billie Piper fan, but in her book she was very negative about Sylvia and the school and I think that’s wrong and unfair. If it wasn’t for Sylvia, she wouldn’t be where she is. And she really
wouldn’t be where she is because she got all her breaks during her schooling years.’ Young herself was more to the point, describing Piper’s remarks as ‘poisonous’.

Sylvia Young remembers Amy very well. ‘It is hard to overstate just how much she struck me as unique, both as a composer and performer, from the moment she first came through the doors at the age of thirteen, sporting the same distinctive hairstyle that she has now,’ she says, adding that she believes Amy could well have become like Judy Garland or Ella Fitzgerald. ‘But the emphasis is on that word “could”. Sadly, there is a danger that Amy will be better known for her personal life than for her God-given musical gifts.’

Young remembers her first encounter with Amy. ‘She was one of a crowd of enthusiastic new pupils milling around the old-fashioned corridors of our school. I auditioned her myself. She did some acting, and showed great potential. She danced for us and proved she was a good mover. When she sang, however, we were blown away. It was not quite such a deep voice as she has now, of course. But her delivery of “On the Sunny Side of the Street” was rich and wonderful all the same.’ Amy was offered a scholarship and Young says that she very quickly realised she had not just a huge talent on her hands, but also a ‘real character’ who was in her own world and insisted on doing things her own way. Like all applicants, Amy was asked to write a short essay, explaining why she wanted to come to the school.

This is what she wrote:

All my life I have been loud, to the point of being told to
shut up. The only reason I have had to be this loud is because you have to scream to be heard in my family.

My family? Yes, you read it right. My Mum’s side is perfectly fine, my Dad’s family are the singing, dancing, all-nutty musical extravaganza.

I’ve been told I was gifted with a lovely voice and I guess my Dad’s to blame for that.

Although unlike my Dad, and his background and ancestors, I want to do something with the talents I’ve been ‘blessed’ with.

My Dad is content to sing loudly in his office and sell windows. My mother, however, is a chemist. She is quiet, reserved.

I would say that my school life and school reports are filled with ‘could do betters’ and ‘does not work to her full potential’.

I want to go somewhere where I am stretched right to my limits and perhaps even beyond.

To sing in lessons without being told to shut up (provided they are singing lessons).

But mostly I have this dream to be very famous. To work on stage. It’s a lifelong ambition.

I want people to hear my voice and just… forget their troubles for five minutes.

I want to be remembered for being an actress, a singer, for sellout concerts and sellout West End and Broadway shows.

For being just… me.

The first half of Amy’s first week at the school was spent doing standard academic studies, and then in the second half she
studied dance. ‘She was completely focused on her music, showing dedication and high standards,’ Sylvia Young remembers. ‘But nothing else interested her and, when she wasn’t singing, she was naughty. The misdemeanours were never serious, but they were persistent.’

The misdemeanours included not wearing her school uniform in the correct manner, chewing gum during class and wearing a silver nose ring. Young asked Amy to remove it which she did – only to replace it an hour later. ‘We found a way of coexisting,’ Amy’s teacher remembers. ‘She would break the rules; I would tell her off; and she would acknowledge it. She could be disruptive in class, too, but this was largely because she didn’t concentrate.’

Amy was also not overfriendly with her fellow pupils. ‘I wasn’t gregarious,’ she shrugs. There were lots of totally insufferable kids there who’d come into class and announce, “My mummy’s coming to pick me up for an audition at three o’clock.” I was a little weirdo, I suppose, in that young, random way, but I wasn’t a loner. Friends would go, “Come and be weird with us!”’

Amy was, however, in Young’s own words ‘wonderfully clever’. She particularly enjoyed English lessons. She was, accordingly, moved one year ahead of her age group. ‘In class she would write extraordinary notes to her friends. These were not mere jottings. Amy was prolific. Every millimetre of the page was crammed with her writing, which seemed to flow off the paper with her energy.’ These notes would frequently include swearwords and sometimes lyrics, too.

Amy says now, ‘I was at stage school for a year and a half but
all I did was sing songs with other people. You can’t be taught how to sing. After I left school I wanted to earn a living and I got lucky when a friend of a friend came to see me at a jazz gig and helped me get a break.’

One of her fellow pupils was Matt Willis, who went on to find fame with the pop band Busted and then as the king of the jungle on
I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!
. ‘We all loved Matt at school and, yeah, I fancied him. I still do, he’s a lovely boy.’ Busted’s label mates and friends McFly are led by singer/songwriter Tom Fletcher, who remembers Amy from Sylvia Young, too. ‘I think she was asked to leave, which is the polite way of saying she was expelled,’ he says. ‘She was always in trouble, as far as I remember. I didn’t really know her but I saw her at school every day. She liked to speak her mind. I don’t remember ever hearing her sing.’

As we’ll see, the expulsion rumour was a misunderstanding.

Gem Allen, a fellow pupil, says there were few signs of Amy’s future wild ways back at Sylvia Young Theatre School. ‘I wouldn’t have predicted she would go as wild as this. Some pictures of her now are heartbreaking. I just think, “She’s my old schoolfriend, I hope she’s OK.” I hope Amy’s sorting herself out but it is shocking to see things such as when she pulled out of the MTV awards. I couldn’t believe it because that had always been her dream.

‘Amy was a character at school. She was a wild girl but it was different from the trouble she’s in now. She would call herself a witch. She used to joke she could put spells on people. One time she lay on the floor in the history class and started
crawling along towards Billie, saying, “Wilhelmina” – her nickname for Billie – “I’m coming to get you” in a witchy voice.’

Naughty as Amy could be at times, reports that she was expelled from the school are dismissed as a ‘myth’ by Young. She claims that, without her knowledge, another teacher rang Amy’s mother and told her she would fail her GCSEs unless she was removed from the school. Young was livid. ‘I was very unhappy to discover this, and the teacher who made the call left us shortly afterwards,’ she snaps. ‘I told Amy’s mother that she wasn’t the type of child who naturally enjoys a school environment but that she would be happier with us and the vocational side of her studies than in an all-girl academic school.’

Janis remembers, ‘The principal phoned up and asked me to come in and see him. He said, “I think you should take her away.” He didn’t want children who weren’t going to get good grades and Amy wasn’t going to. She was very bright but she was always messing around. The same day, I had to take the family cat Katie to the vet. I dropped off the cat, went to the school and then went back to the vet’s. We had the cat put down. My joke is I should have had Amy put down and the cat moved on.’

So it was that Amy was removed from the school. She says that she ‘cried every night’ after she left. ‘The thing about stage school is that it prepares you as a person,’ she has said since. ‘It’s excellent for building character.’ So impressed was Young with her former student that she stayed in touch with her.

‘When I left Sylvia Young, I hated school so much that I didn’t want to go at all. That was horrid. I was gutted when I
left, because there are some really dedicated people there, and Sylvia herself is brilliant. I pierced my nose when I was thirteen. They didn’t like that. I brought my guitar to school every day because I was a guitarist and they’d tell me I couldn’t. I was like, “Well, look, I’m a singer, a musician, not an academic…” But that’s what made me a better person, it showed me that you can’t really be taught stuff: you have to go out there and find out for yourself.

She then attended the Mount School in Mill Hill. Established in May 1925, the Mount has as its motto ‘To be, rather than to seem to be’. When it was last inspected, the report found that it had a friendly, family atmosphere, with a caring and supportive ethos. Amy, though, was bored out of her wits there.

‘There was nothing to do at that school but run the teachers,’ she says, referring to the absence of the opposite gender to taunt and tease. ‘I got a D in music because my teacher wouldn’t submit my course work because I used to be so nasty.’

Cannabis was a great comfort to her at this point, as was music of course. Her favourite around this time included Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Clifford Brown and Sarah Vaughan. ‘To hear subtle music like that, like a trio could give more to me than a big band, that’s when I learned about less is more,’ she said. ‘I started loving jazz and getting so much from it. There was nothing out there for me [musically]. Everything I liked, to this day, that was new was spoken word, rappers. To me that’s the new jazz. I’m
talking about progressive rap, not stuff like P Diddy. Mos Def, Nas, Busta Rhymes – those are the Miles [Davis] to me now.’

Even at this point, Amy’s relatives were already doing their best to drum up support for her musical career. Iconic writer Julie Burchill is, as we’ve seen, an enthusiastic admirer of Amy nowadays. However, in an interview with the author, Burchill reveals that she was first made aware of Amy years before she became famous. While Burchill was making a television programme about her father’s death from asbestosis, she crossed paths with Amy’s aunt, Debra Milne, who is a consultant histopathologist in Sunderland. Milne examined Burchill’s father’s autopsy for the programme and is featured talking to her on camera.

‘When the cameras stopped rolling,’ remembers Burchill, ‘she asked me, “Do you still write about music?” I said, “Not really,” and Debra added, “Because I wondered if you’d like to see my niece next week. She’s really great though she’s only sixteen. Her name is Amy Winehouse. Years later, suddenly Amy was everywhere I looked. Names are the one thing I always remember, and also because it was a Jewish name and so pretty it stuck in my mind particularly.’

Around the same time, Amy had her first, fleeting, brush with fame when she appeared on the BBC comedy sketch programme
The Fast Show
. Created by university pals Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse,
The Fast Show
was a hit throughout for the 1990s with its characters such as Ted and Ralph, and the Suits You duo. Another memorable character was Competitive Dad, and it was in one of his sketches that
Amy appeared. Dressed as a fairy in a school production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, Amy acts with other children onstage until an exasperated Competitive Dad heckles and goes up on stage himself. In 2007, Paul Whitehouse revealed that the young girl on the stage was Amy. ‘We didn’t know she was going to be famous at the time,’ he said. ‘We only found out about it when she mentioned it in an interview.’ The
Daily Mail
duly made the link public, headlining its story, A
MY
W
INEHOUSE ON
TV BEFORE
SHE WAS INFAMOUS
.

However, perhaps the most significant outcome from the Sylvia Young school for Amy came in the form of the friendship she found there with a young man from Canning Town, south London, called Tyler James. James grew up in a household dominated by women after his dad left home, and his childhood home was always full of music with his mother’s recordings of Motown acts such as Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley. His elder sister added TLC, SWV and Erykah Badu. As for James himself, he was a fan of Babyface, Boyz II Men and mainstream jazz acts. He went on to become a soul singer of some repute, winning the T4 One To Watch award at the
Smash
Hits
Poll Winners Party in 2005. He said, ‘In ten years’ time I want to be able to look at myself and say “Yeah, I started off with few opportunities in life and look where I am now.” I want that feeling of satisfaction; I want to make my mum proud; I want to make my family proud and I think I can do that and make a record that I’m proud of.’

His debut album,
The Unlikely Lad
– which included a duet
with Amy on the track ‘Best of Me’ – received praise from many.
The Sun
described him as the UK’s answer to Justin Timberlake – praise indeed. ‘A refreshingly modern album drawing on vintage soul, jazz and pop,’ gushed the
Observer
, adding that it was ‘likeable and human’.

The Times
declared,

The
Daily Star
described him as ‘less gobby’ than Amy. ‘His music is a slick mix of funky rhythms and cool-as-ice vocals. He was also praised by
NME, Time Out
and
Face
.’

Amy described herself and James as ‘mates who shag… My Nan thinks he looks like Leonardo DiCaprio but he’s much better-looking.’