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Authors: Mitch Winehouse

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #music, #Personal Memoirs, #Composers & Musicians, #Individual Composer & Musician

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BOOK: Amy, My Daughter
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She was always interested, though, in music. I always had it playing at home and in the car, and Amy sang along with everything. Although she loved big-band and jazz songs, she also liked R&B and hip-hop, especially the US R&B/hip-hop bands TLC and Salt-n-Pepa. She and Juliette used to dress up like Wham!'s backing singers, Pepsi & Shirlie, and sing their songs. When Amy was about ten she and Juliette formed a short-lived rap act, Sweet 'n' Sour – Juliette was Sweet and Amy was Sour. There were a lot of rehearsals but, sadly, no public performances.

I was devoted to my family, but as Amy and Alex got older, I was changing. In 1993, Janis and I split up. A few years earlier, a close friend of mine, who was married, confided in me that he was seeing someone else. I couldn't understand how he could do it. I remember telling him that he had a lovely wife and a fantastic son: why on earth would he want to jeopardize everything for a fling? He said, ‘It's not a fling. When you find that special someone you just know it's right. If it ever happens to you, you'll understand.'

Unbelievably I found myself in a similar situation. Back in 1984 I had appointed a new marketing manager, Jane, and we had hit it off from the start. There was nothing romantic: Jane had a boyfriend and I was happily married. But there was definitely a spark between us. Nothing happened for ages and then eventually it did. Jane had been coming to my house since Amy was eighteen months old and had met Janis and the kids loads of times. She was adamant that she didn't want to come between me and my family.

I was in love with Jane but still married to Janis. That's a situation which just can't work indefinitely. It was a terrible dilemma. I wanted to be with Janis and the kids but I also wanted to be with Jane. I was never unhappy with Janis and we had a good marriage. Some men who stray hate their wives but I loved mine. You couldn't have an argument with her if you tried: she's such a sweet, good-natured person. I didn't know what to do. I really didn't want to hurt anybody. In the end I just wanted to be with Jane more.

Finally, in 1992, I made up my mind to leave Janis. I would wait until after Alex had had his Bar Mitzvah the following year, and leave shortly afterwards. Telling Alex and Amy was the hardest thing; I explained that we both loved them and that what was happening was nothing to do with anything they'd done or not done. Alex took it very badly – who can blame him? – but Amy seemed to accept it.

I felt awful as I drove away to live with Melody in Barnet. I stayed with her for six months before I moved in with Jane. Looking back now, I was a coward for allowing the situation to go on for so long, but I wanted to keep everybody happy.

Strangely, after I left I started seeing more of the kids than I had before. My friends thought that Amy didn't seem much affected by the divorce, and when I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, she said, ‘You're still my dad and Mum's still my mum. What's to talk about?'

Probably through guilt, I over-indulged them. I'd buy them presents for no reason, take them to expensive places and give them money. Sometimes, when I was starting a new business and things were tight, we'd go and eat at the Chelsea Kitchen in the King's Road where I could buy meals for no more than two pounds. Years later, the kids told me they'd liked going there better than the more expensive places, mostly because they knew it wasn't costing me a lot.

Two things never changed: my love for them and theirs for me.

Amy in a contemplative mood. My birthday card in 1992.

2
TAKING TO THE STAGE

Wherever I was living, Amy and Alex always had a bedroom there. Amy would often stay for the weekend and I'd try to make it special for her. She loved ghost stories: when I lived in Hatfield Heath, Essex, the house was a bit remote and quite close to a graveyard. If we were driving home on a dark winter's night I used to park near the graveyard, turn the car lights off and frighten the life out of her with a couple of grisly stories. It wasn't long before she started making up ghost stories of her own, and I had to pretend to be scared.

On one occasion Amy had to write an essay about the life of someone who was important to her. She decided to write about me and asked me to help her. It had to be exciting, I decided, so I made up some stories about myself but Amy believed them all. I told her I'd been the youngest person to climb Mount Everest, and that when I was ten I'd played for Spurs and scored the winning goal in the 1961 Cup Final against Leicester City. I also told her I'd performed the world's first heart transplant with my assistant Dr Christiaan Barnard. I might also have told her I'd been a racing driver and a jockey.

Amy took notes, wrote the essay and handed it in. I was expecting some nice remarks about her imagination and sense of humour, but instead the teacher sent me a note, saying, ‘Your daughter is deluded and needs help.' Not long before Amy passed away, she reminded me about that homework and the trouble it had caused – and she remembered another of my little stories, which I'd forgotten: I'd told her and Alex that when I was seven I'd been playing near Tower Bridge, fallen into the Thames and nearly drowned. I even drove them to the spot to show them where it had supposedly happened and told them there used to be a plaque there commemorating the event but they had taken it down to clean it.

During school holidays we had to find things for Amy to do. If I was in a meeting, Jane would take her out for lunch and Amy would always order the same thing: a prawn salad. The first time Jane took her out, when Amy was still small, she asked, ‘Would you like some chocolate for pudding?'

‘No, I have a dairy intolerance,' said Amy, proudly. She'd then wolfed down bag after bag of boiled sweets and chews – she always had a sweet tooth.

Jane used to work as a volunteer on the radio at Whipps Cross Hospital, and had her own show. Amy would go in with her to help. She was too young to go round the wards when Jane was interviewing the patients, so instead she would choose the records that were going to be played. Once Jane interviewed Amy, and I've still got the tapes of that conversation somewhere. Jane edited out her questions so that Amy was speaking directly to the listeners – her first broadcast.

One link I never lost with Amy when I left home was music. She learned to love the music I had been taught to love by my mother when I was younger. My mum had always adored jazz, and before she met my father she had dated the great jazz musician Ronnie Scott. At a gig in 1943, Ronnie introduced her to the legendary band leader Glenn Miller, who tried to nick her off Ronnie. And while my mum fell in love with Glenn Miller's music, Ronnie fell in love with her. He was devastated when she ended the relationship. He begged her not to and even proposed to her. She said no, but they remained close friends right up until he died in 1996. He wrote about my mum in his autobiography.

When she was a little girl, Amy loved hearing my mother recount her stories about Ronnie, the jazz scene and all the things they'd got up to. As she grew up she started to get into jazz in a big way; Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan were her early favourites.

Amy loved one particular story I told her about Sarah Vaughan and Ronnie Scott. Whenever Ronnie had a big name on at his club, he would always invite my mum, my auntie Lorna, my sister, me and whoever else we wanted to bring. We saw some fantastic acts there – Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and a whole host of others – but for me, the most memorable was Sarah Vaughan. She was just wonderful. We went backstage afterwards and there was a line of about six people waiting to be introduced to her. When it was Mum's turn, Ronnie said, ‘Sarah, this is Cynthia. She was my childhood sweetheart and we're still very close.'

Then it was my turn. Ronnie said, ‘This is Mitch, Cynthia's son.'

And Sarah said, ‘What do you do?'

I told her about my job in a casino and we carried on chatting for a couple of minutes about one thing and another.

Then Ronnie said, ‘Sarah, this is Matt Monro.'

And Sarah said, ‘What do you do, Matt?'

She really had no idea who he was. American singers are often very insular. A lot of them don't know what's happening outside New York or LA, let alone what's going on in the UK. I felt a bit sorry for Matt because he was, in my opinion, the greatest British male singer of all time – and he wasn't best pleased either. He walked out of the club and never spoke to Ronnie Scott again.

Amy also started watching musicals on TV – Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly films. She preferred Astaire, whom she thought more artistic than the athletic Kelly; she enjoyed
Broadway Melody of 1940
, when Astaire danced with Eleanor Powell. ‘Look at this, Dad,' she said. ‘How do they do it?' That sequence gave her a love of tap-dancing.

Amy would regularly sing to my mum, and my mum's face would light up when she did. As Amy's number-one adoring fan, who always thought Amy was going to be a star, my mum came up with the idea of sending nine-year-old Amy to the Susi Earnshaw Theatre School, in Barnet, north London, not far from where we lived. It offered part-time classes in the performing arts for five- to sixteen-year-olds. Amy used to go on Saturdays and this was where she first learned to sing and tap-dance.

Amy looked forward to those lessons and, unlike at Osidge, we never received a complaint about her behaviour from Susi Earnshaw's. Susi told us how hard Amy always worked. Amy was taught how to develop her voice, which she wanted to do as she learned more and more about the singers she listened to at home and with my mum. Amy was fascinated by the way Sarah Vaughan used her voice like an instrument and wanted to know how she could do it too.

As soon as she started at Susi Earnshaw's, Amy was going for auditions. When she was ten she went to one for the musical
Annie
; Susi sent quite a few girls for that. She told me that Amy wouldn't get the part, but it would be good for her to gain experience in auditioning – and get used to rejection.

I explained all of that to Amy but she was still happy to go along and give it a go. The big mistake I made was in telling my mum about it. For whatever reason, neither Janis nor I could take Amy to the audition and my mum was only too pleased to step in. As Amy's biggest fan, she thought this was it, that the audition was a formality – that her granddaughter was going to be the new Annie. I think she even bought a new frock for the opening night, that was how sure she was.

When I saw Amy that night, the first thing she said to me was, ‘Dad, never send Nan with me for an audition
ever again
.'

It had started on the train, my mum piling on the pressure: how to sing her song, how to talk to the director, ‘Don't do this, don't do that, look the director in the eye …' Amy had been taught all of this at Susi Earnshaw's but, of course, my mum knew better. They finally got to the theatre where, according to Amy, there were a thousand or so mums, dads and grandmothers, each of whom, like my mum, thought that their little prodigy was going to be the new Annie.

Finally it was Amy's turn to do her bit and she gave the audition pianist her music. He wouldn't play it: it was in the wrong key for the show. Amy struggled through the song in a key that was far too high for her. After just a few bars she was told to stop. The director was very nice and thanked her but told her that her voice wasn't suitable for the part. My mum lost it. She marched up to the director, screaming at him that he didn't know what he was talking about. There was a terrible row.

On the train going home my mum had a go at Amy, all the usual stuff: ‘You don't listen to me. You think you know better …' Amy couldn't have cared less about not getting the part, but my mum was so aggravated that she put herself to bed for the rest of the day. When Amy told me the story, I thought it was absolutely hysterical. My mum and Amy were like two peas in a pod, probably shouting at each other all the way home on the train.

It would have been a great scene to see.

Amy and my mum had a lively relationship but they did love each other, and my mum would sometimes let the kids get away with murder. When we visited her, Amy would often blow-wave my mum's hair while Alex sat at her feet and gave her a pedicure. Later my mum, hair all over the place, would show us what Amy had done and we'd have a good laugh.

 

*   *   *

 

In the spring of 1994, when Amy was ten, I went with her to an interview for her next school, Ashmole in Southgate. I had gone there some twenty-five years earlier and Alex was there so it was a natural choice for Amy. Incredibly, my old form master Mr Edwards was still going strong and was to be Amy's house master. He interviewed Amy and me when I took her to look round the school. We walked into his office and he recognized me immediately. In his beautiful Welsh accent, he said, ‘Oh, my God, not another Winehouse! I bet this one doesn't play football.' I had made a bit of a name for myself playing for the school, and Alex was following in my footsteps.

Amy started at Ashmole in September 1994. From the start she was disruptive. Her friend Juliette had also transferred there. They were bad enough alone, but together they were ten times worse, so it wasn't long before they were split up and put into different classes.

Alex had a guitar he'd taught himself to play, and when Amy decided to try it out he taught her too. He was very patient with her, even though they argued a lot. They could both read music, which surprised me. ‘When did you learn to do this?' I asked. They stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language. Amy soon started writing her own songs, some good, some awful. One of the good ones was called ‘I Need More Time'. She played it for me just a few months before she passed away. Believe me, it's good enough to go on one of her albums, and it's a great pity that she never recorded it.

I often collected the kids from school. In those days I had a convertible, and Amy would insist I put the top down. As we drove along, Alex in the front alongside me, she'd sing at the top of her voice. When we stopped at traffic lights she would stand up and perform. ‘Sit down, Amy!' we'd say, but people on the street laughed with her as she sang.

Once she was in a car with a friend of mine named Phil and sang ‘The Deadwood Stage' from the Doris Day film
Calamity Jane
. ‘You know,' Phil said to me, when they got back, his ears probably still ringing, ‘your daughter has a really
powerful
voice.'

Amy's wild streak went far beyond car rides. At some point, she took to riding Alex's bike, which terrified me: she was reckless whenever she was on it. She had no road sense and she raced along as fast as she could. She loved speed and came off a couple of times. It was the same story when I took her skating – didn't matter if it was ice-skating or roller-skating, she loved both. She was really fast on the rink, and the passion for it never left her. After her first album came out she told me that her ambition was to open a chain of hamburger joints with roller-skating waitresses.

She was wild, but I indulged her; I couldn't help myself. I know I over-compensated my children for the divorce, but they were growing up and needed things. I took Amy shopping to buy her some clothes, now that she was nearly a teenager and going to a new school.

‘Look, Dad,' she said excitedly, as she came out of the changing room in a pair of leopard-print jeans. ‘These are fantastic! D'you think they look nice on me?'

 

*   *   *

 

Whenever she was staying with Jane and me, Amy always kept a notebook with her to scribble down lines for songs. Halfway through a conversation, she'd suddenly say, ‘Oh, just a sec,' and disappear to note something that had just come to her. The lines looked like something from a poem and later she would use those lines in a song, alongside ones written on totally different occasions.

Amy continued to be good at maths because of the lessons she'd done with her mother. Janis would set Amy some pretty complicated problems, which she really enjoyed doing. Amy would do mathematical problems for hours on end just for fun. She was brilliant at the most complex Sudoku puzzles and could finish one in a flash.

The pity was that she wouldn't do it at school. We received notes complaining regularly about her behaviour or lack of interest. Clearly Amy was bored – she just didn't take to formal schooling. (I had been the same. I was always playing hooky but, unlike my friends, who would be out on the streets, I'd be in the local library, reading.) Amy had a terrific thirst for knowledge but hated school. She didn't want to go so she wouldn't get up in the mornings. Or, if she did go, she'd come home at lunchtime and not go back.

Though Amy had been a terrific sleeper as a baby and young child, when she got to about eleven she wouldn't go to bed: she'd be up all night reading, doing puzzles, watching television, listening to music, anything not to go to sleep. So, naturally, it was a battle every morning to get her up. Janis got fed up with it and would ring me: ‘Your daughter won't get out of bed.' I had to drive all the way from Chingford, where I was living with Jane, and drag her out.

Over time Amy got worse in the classroom. Janis and I were called to the school for meetings about her behaviour on numerous occasions. I hope the head of year didn't see me trying not to laugh as he told us, ‘Mr and Mrs Winehouse, Amy has already been sent to see me once today and, as always, I knew it was her before she got to my office …' I knew if I looked at Janis I'd crack up. ‘How did I know?' the head of year continued. ‘She was singing “Fly Me To The Moon” loudly enough for the whole school to hear.'

BOOK: Amy, My Daughter
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