Amy Winehouse (8 page)

She has also once fallen asleep during an interview with the hip US magazine
Blender
. When asked if she did drugs she told the interviewer Jody Rosen, ‘I don’t have the time.’ Asked whether she was an alcoholic or not she said, ‘I don’t know. I’m a really big drinker. I used to be there before the pub opened, banging on the door.’ She then began falling asleep, then saying,
‘Oh, God! What is wrong with me? There’s something wrong with me. I’m just really drowsy at the moment. I’m so sorry.’

Her interviewer said,

Another journalist, Aidan Smith, of
Scotland on Sunday
, expanded in his feature on Amy the ‘bit of a mess’ Mulholland hinted at in Amy’s household. ‘The fence is broken, a Yellow Pages rots by the gate, and empty cans of Stella litter the garden,’ he wrote, and continued:

Amy confirms the widespread tomboy perception of her when she says, ‘I’m not really a girl. I’m not even a boy’s girl.
I’m a man’s man – and that doesn’t mean I’m a big dyke. Men are far more straightforward. They don’t dwell on things and play psychological games. I’m not saying all women are like that, or that some men don’t play those games, but on the whole, men are more easygoing and don’t piss time up the wall. Life’s short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there’s no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.’

Having come so close twice to winning a major award so early in her career, Amy hit the jackpot later in the year with arguably the most prestigious of musical honours. The Ivor Novello Awards were first given in 1955. Named after Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, singer and actor who became one of the most popular British entertainers of the early twentieth century, the awards are now given by the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters. The Academy, formed in 1999, represents the interests of UK music writers across all genres. The Award itself is a solid bronze sculpture of Euterpe, the Greek muse of music. Former winners of this prestigious prize include Iron Maiden, the Darkness, the Feeling, Madonna, Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Richard Thompson, David Bowie, Ray Davies, Kate Bush, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Annie Lennox, Phil Pickett, Paul McCartney, Madness, Duran Duran, George Michael, Pet Shop Boys, Dave Stewart, Sting, Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow.

She was delighted to be nominated for an Ivor Novello, far more than she was to be nominated Best Female at the BRITs. ‘The Ivor Novellos are a songwriter’s award and that’s what I
am,’ she says. ‘I’m not trying to be best female, I’m just trying to write songs.’ However, in the wake of
Frank
’s success and Amy’s disagreements with many aspects of the album and its promotion, she found writing songs more difficult than ever.

‘I had writer’s block for so long,’ she says looking back. ‘And, as a writer, your self-worth is literally based on the last thing you wrote… I used to think, “What happened to me?” At one point it had been two years since the last record and [the record company] actually said to me, “Do you even want to make another record?” I was, like, “I swear it’s coming.” I said to them, “Once I start writing I will write and write and write. But I just have to start it.”

‘I take out my anger and frustration by writing songs and that’s really where
Frank
came from. And now I’m having a great time – everything is going really well with the record. I’m doing a lot of gigs and singing is the thing I love doing most. I’ll have to start writing for a new album at some point, so I think I’m going to have to take time off and live a normal life so that things can happen to me again that aren’t all good. Otherwise, I’ll have nothing to write about on the next album.’

As we shall see, Amy’s hope that normal things ‘that aren’t all good’ would happen to her came true – but surely in a bigger way than she could ever have expected.

W
hen she returned to the public eye with her new album, Amy’s hairstyle had moved towards the beehive style she is now synonymous with. From Holly Golightly in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, to Bet Lynch in
Coronation Street
, to Marge in
The
Simpsons
, to Patsy from
Absolutely Fabulous
through to most of the women in the cartoon
The Far Side
, the beehive hairstyle is a popular one. It originated in the 1950s when Margaret Vinci Heldt, a hairdresser from Elmhurst, Illinois, was asked to create a new style. ‘It’s kind of nice to know maybe in my own way I was able to give something to my profession that became a classic,’ she said. ‘It still has a touch of glamour, doesn’t it?

‘It was sort of the peak of hairdressing,’ said Heldt.
‘Everybody wanted the beehive, even women with real, real short hair. They looked more like anthills than a beehive then they got bigger and bigger and became hornets nests.’

‘It really was the last great hairdo we’ve seen in thirty years,’ adds Jackie Summers of
Modern Salon
magazine.

Meanwhile, UK
Vogue
’s fashion features writer Sarah Harris says, ‘It is about fashion, owning a style, individuality and confidence, as well as success and talent. Not just with clothes but beauty, too. Amy Winehouse’s hair has become as much a signature as her clothes.’ Not just her signature, but an enduring mystery, too. ‘Amy won’t even tell her stylist, who also happens to be her best friend, what she does to get her hair like that,’ says a friend. Amy’s obsessed with her hair and only does it herself – it’s been a huge secret.

Celebrity hairdresser Alex Foden, who designs and makes Amy’s £150 hairpieces, cracks some of the mystery: ‘Amy originally created the look herself but on a much smaller scale. But since I started working with her the beehive has simply got bigger and bigger – the bigger the better. Although she backcombed her own hair in the beginning, now we use furballs made from part synthetic, part real hair. These are stuffed inside hairnets and Amy’s own hair is placed over the top of them and held in place with hairpins.

‘It takes about forty minutes to fit a new hairpiece but only about five minutes to pin it up every morning once it’s been made. The beehive is particularly big in the capital but is taking off everywhere as Amy becomes more popular. She is getting through one hairpiece a week at the moment so they
are fairly high-maintenance, but as long as you do not sleep in one or go to the gym wearing one they can last a lot longer. As well as being very versatile, a taller, thinner beehive can alter the appearance of a person’s natural body shape, adding height and making the face and body look leaner.’

It has very much caught on, too. ‘Amy Winehouse has a lot to answer for!’ laughs Lorraine Ellis, manager at the Hair Spa in Thornton Hall Hotel in Thornton Hough. ‘But big hair is a really key trend this season and that means everything from the beehive look with a high crown, like Amy’s, to a 1980s wavy style that Coleen’s [McLoughlin, Wayne Rooney’s fiancée] been seen with of late. That’s a great look because you can wear it in the day and keep it quite soft using heated rollers, and then use Velcro rollers and tongs to glam it up a bit for night.’

The period between
Frank
and
Back to Black
is shrouded in mystery. Amy says, ‘I started drinking and I fell in love.’

And she wrote a great album.

Back to Black
has a dark name and a dark background. ‘I was very hurt by something but I managed to make something good out of a bad situation,’ says Amy. ‘I think when I wrote
Back to Black
I was left in a situation where I wasn’t working, and when I split up with this fellow I didn’t have anything to go back to. I guess when you pick up the pieces from a relationship you go back to what you know and try to throw yourself into something. And I had nothing – I wasn’t working. So I was just playing pool every day, getting drunk.’

While playing pool, Amy was filling the jukebox of her local
pub with coins and the music she heard inspired her to write new songs. Shirley Bassey and the Angels were among the acts she was listening to but, as ever, the Shangri-Las were an inspiration. ‘I know there are people in the world who have worse problems than falling in love and having it blow up in your face,’ she said of the problems she was encountering with her boyfriend Blake at this time. ‘But I didn’t want to just wake up drinking, and crying, and listening to the Shangri-Las, and go to sleep, and wake up drinking, and listening to the Shangri-Las. So I turned it into songs, and that’s how I got through it.

‘I think all the stuff I was listening to, like a lot of doo-wop, a lot of sixties soul, Motown, girl groups, I tend to be influenced by whatever I’m listening to, so I think, I guess it’s all stuff from the jukebox from when I used to go and play pool in the pub. It’s jukebox music.’

It was here that Amy developed her own cocktail. She calls it the Rickstasy, and the drink consists of three parts vodka, one part Southern Comfort, one part banana liqueur, and one part Bailey’s. ‘By the time you’ve had two of them you’re like, “Don’t even try and go anywhere. Sit down and stay down, until the birds start singing.”’

She should get one of the big breweries to release an Amy Winehouse-endorsed Rickstasy. It would sell like hot cakes.

After the disappointment she felt over so many aspects of the album
Frank
, Amy decided to enforce changes for her new venture. ‘I didn’t want to play the jazz thing up too much again,’ she says. ‘I was bored of complicated chord structures
and needed something more direct. I’d been listening to a lot of girl groups from the fifties and sixties. I liked the simplicity of that stuff. It just gets to the point. So I started thinking about writing songs in that way.’

The differences told in many ways and Amy felt they gave her a more mature edge. ‘All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends or family. When I did the last album,
Frank
, I was a very defensive, insecure person, so when I sang about men it was all like, “Fuck you. Who do you think you are?” The new album is more, “I will fight for you; I would do anything for you”, or “It’s such a shame we couldn’t make it work.” I feel like I’m not so teenage about relationships.’

It was to be an album made of songs that she would be proud of and would therefore speak more fondly of than she did
Frank
. ‘I try to think about things before I say them nowadays,’ she confessed. ‘I’m a lot less defensive with this record. I’m just so proud of it. I think the record speaks louder than any of my stupid actions or things that I say.’

Whereas
Frank
earned full respect and recognition only some time after its release,
Back to Black
was to be an immediate hit in every sense of the word. Often dark, occasionally despairing but always beautiful and assured, it was an absolute triumph and firmly put Amy on the map of not just those who follow the music business keenly, but everyday folk, too, who simply appreciate a fine tune and a cracking vocal delivery.

It opened with the famous track, ‘Rehab’. Blending
traditional soul with a modern twist, ‘Rehab’ is a joyful, brazen romp of a song that Aretha Franklin would have been proud of. With Mark Ronson at the production controls, the Motown-style horn section builds the drama over the backdrop of bells, handclaps, Wurlitzer organ and piano. It’s defiant, brash and unforgivably catchy. Lyrically, it is of course famously about her management team’s attempts to make her go into rehabilitation to address her drinking. As for Amy, she’d rather stay at home with her Ray Charles albums. She’s convinced she’ll be fine, in part because her dad has told her so. ‘Rehab’ is Amy’s most widely recognised song. It has been covered by Girls Aloud, Paolo Nutini, Justin Timberlake and Taking Back Sunday.

Of the song, Amy says, ‘I guess when you’re quite young and angry at the world, I didn’t want to write any songs about love, ever. Then I fell in love and I was like, “Oh, shit!” You know. I used to listen to a lot of stuff like Beastie Boys. I wanted to write loads of tongue-in-cheek songs like that so it was really easy to do something like “Rehab”.

The song was written about the time her management tried to get her to check in to the Priory Clinic in Southgate, North London. ‘I went in and the guy behind the desk says, “What we do is we’re filling out forms.” I said, “Oi, listen, don’t waste your time.” Then he goes, “Why do you think you’re here?” and I said, “I don’t think I’m an alcoholic, but I’m, you know, depressed. I think it’s symptomatic of depression.” And he said to me, “Well, I am an alcoholic, I’ve been here.” People who have that kind of rehab mentality, all they wanna do is tell you
their story, so you feel better about telling them yours, but you just end up [saying], “Oi, I ain’t that bad.”’

Next up, the album slows into the sparse, groovy ‘You Know I’m No Good’. Blending jazz and R&B, the song is supported by a catchy saxophone line. The lyric concerns Amy’s confession of infidelity. However, far from being furious with her for her cheating, when her lover catches her out, he merely shrugs it off. In common with several tracks on her albums, the traditional tune is contrasted by a distinctly modern-day lyric with its mentions of skull T-shirts, chips and pitta. ‘You Know…’ was used to promote the television show
Mad Men
and as the opening to ITV’s
Secret Diary of a Call Girl
. Arctic Monkeys covered it on Jo Wiley’s
Live Lounge
on Radio 1.

While ‘You Know…’ is a little moody and dirty, the doo-wop fun of ‘Me and Mr Jones’ soon lightens the mood with its sauntering, 1940s feel. Amy bellows out the lyric in a style reminiscent of Dinah Washington. But what are those words about? The Mr Jones of the title is believed to be rapper and Salaam Remi act Nas Jones. The link would seem to be the mention of Destiny, the name of Jones’s child with ex-girlfriend Carmen, and of the number 14, because 14 September is the birthday that Winehouse and Nas share. Amy berates him for making her miss a Slick Rick gig. However, she remains in awe of him, her second favourite black Jew after ‘Sammy’ (presumably Sammy Davis Jr). She might let him make it up to her, she says, and suggests they try again on Saturday.

‘A rapper like Nas can tell a story about being in a room, and you feel like you’re standing in the corner of that room,’ she
has explained. ‘You know the way it smells, and if someone’s smoking.’ Her music has the same quality and nowhere is this more true than on ‘Me And Mr Jones’.

‘Just Friends’ maintains the lighter mood. With its gorgeous jazz inflections and Amy’s Aretha Franklin-style delivery, it bounces along joyfully. Amy wonders whether she and the man in question can ever be just friends. Although she doesn’t resolve the question during the song, and although she is singing of hurt and pain, the music remains upbeat, as does the atmosphere. Which is just as well, as the next song, the titular ‘Back to Black’, is as dark as they come. Perhaps her most sombre tune, ‘Back to Black’ is the ultimate heartbreak song and Amy’s pain oozes from it like blood. To a doomladen backdrop of reverb guitar, strings and bells, Amy sings of the heartache and despair she feels at the infidelity of her lover. The lyric is almost suicidal, speaking of dying a hundred times and the ultimate low: going back to black.

‘There’s never a dull moment with Amy… and that includes her album’s title track, a gorgeously opulent-but-bitter tale of a tangled love affair gone wrong,’ cheered the
Sunday Mirror
, when ‘Back to Black’ was released as a single. ‘It’s impossibly smooth and ridiculously good. She is simply on fire on this track,’ purred the Scottish
Daily Record
.
Music Week
added that the single is ‘a choice cut so soulful you can almost smell the bar-room smoke while listening to it’. The
Financial
Times
is a fan of this song, too, one reviewer saying it sounds ‘like the sort of brilliantly florid lament that Ennio Morricone used to write for spaghetti westerns’.

Musically, the song has been compared to both ‘Baby Love’ and ‘Jimmy Mack’ by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. The descending melody matches the descending mood of Amy as she deals with her heartbreak and pain. Manchester’s
Evening News
described ‘Back to Black’ on its release as ‘one of the best singles of the year’. It’s hard to argue. It has been covered by the Rumble Strips and was also sung on
The X Factor
by the hopeful girl band Hope.

If you want a heartbreak song but one that soothes the soul rather than plunges it into deeper agony, then ‘Love is a Losing Game’ is for you. Again, any sense of redemption is absent from the lyric but it does at least have a calm and resigned feel to it. Musically, a ballad with wonderful strings and a guitar line that has been compared to both the Isley Brothers and Curtis Mayfield, it is like a musical comfort ballad, wrapped round a lovesick soul. Many have commented that ‘Love Is…’ sounds more like the Amy of the
Frank
era, rather than the Amy of the
Back to Black
days. It has been covered live onstage by Prince. Note, too, the reference to the final frame, no doubt influenced by the many games of pool Amy was playing as she wrote the album. The song was released as a single in December 2007.

Perhaps Amy’s most vocally rich song, ‘Tears Dry on Their Own’ is one of the best-known tracks on the album. It attempts the classic Northern Soul technique of combining a sad theme with a happy, upbeat tune and pulls it off marvellously. Sampling the Motown classic ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, written by Ashford & Simpson and
recorded by Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye, and Diana Ross, it is instantly catchy and danceable. Here, Amy is once more heartbroken but she has grown up and toughened up. Therefore, though she cries over the loss, her tears can dry on their own this time.

Ushered in by some choppy chords on a reverb-laden guitar, the dreamy air of ‘Wake Up Alone’ reflects its lyric, in which Amy describes the aftermath of a break-up. She is staying strong during the day and brings herself up when she finds herself crying. Keeping herself busy, she can stay on top of her emotions while awake. However, it is in her sleep that she has sweat-soaked dreams about him and is, of course, then hurt when she wakes up alone. When she dedicated this song to her imprisoned husband Blake during her winter tour she reduced many audience members to tears, this author included.