Chas Newkey-Burden - Amy Winehouse

C ONTENTS

Id like to thank all those who granted me time for interviews, including Julie Burchill, Garry Mulholland, Paolo Hewitt, Mark Simpson and Zeddy Lawrence.

Thanks to Stuart Robertson and John Blake for the deal. To Andy Armitage for copy-editing, Amy McCulloch for easing the book to paperback and to Diana Colbert and Rosie Ries for always being brilliant.

Thanks to David J Brown for his Ahhhs and Katie Glass for her tip-offs. I am always grateful to my friends who encourage and inspire me, including Lucian Randall and the wonderful Frankie Genchi of fleckingrecords.co.uk.

Finally, thanks to Chris for everything.

The author blogs at www.newkey-burden.com

I t was when Amy Winehouse learned that during a meeting of the United Nations she had been held responsible for African poverty that she knew she had heard it all. For so long, this talented singer had been an obsession for the tabloid press and had learned to live with their relentless glare. However, when Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, singled her out, saying she glamorised drug use and was thus causing another disaster in Africa, she must have wondered if the world had gone mad.

The report came at a busy time in Amys life a period of activity that was in turn weird, wonderful and woeful. The media, of course, were there to document every moment of it. She called her audience monkey c**ts during a shambolic performance in Birmingham, and, that same evening, a crossdressing stalker was ejected from the venue, despite his pained insistence he could look after her while her husband was incarcerated. Most reporters and fans had little good to say about the show; it was left somewhat bizarrely to Andrew Lloyd Weber and David Frost to defend her, insisting as they did that the performance had many merits. To add to the surreal atmosphere, Lloyd Webber went on to write an open letter to Amy in the pages of Hello ! magazine.

Not that the musical maestros support meant the media were about to turn the temperature down on Amy. One newspaper claimed some burnt foil was thrown from her tour bus and another asked, Is it impolite to ask if youve been to powder your nose, Amy? after she was photographed with a white circle inside her nostril. By the time a video clip of a recent concert surfaced on the Internet showing her retrieve something from her beehive and move it towards her nose, nobody seemed interested in admitting that, studied properly, the footage seemed to show her doing nothing more sinister than wiping her nose with a tissue.

Soon, she was causing raised eyebrows in the air. Our famous little friend is smoking in the toilet,meowed a sour air hostess during Amys flight to Scotland. Naturally, raised voices were heard as the singer jostled her way through the airport. News that her tour manager had quit did little to calm matters and before long her family were showing their increasing concern. Her brother Alex surfaced on television, telling the GMTV viewers that Amy was fine and then, after she returned to the capital, her parents called an ambulance to her home in the early hours after she had disappeared. A sick rumour shot across the Internet that the twenty-four-year-old had died of a drug overdose.

However, Amy was alive and receiving help and plaudits from all manner of people. Cheryl Cole of Girls Aloud spoke of Amys talent; Duran Durans Simon Le Bon said he wanted to give her a good feed and admitted he was worried about her breasts. (Wild boy!) Then, rockers Queens of the Stone Age paid tribute to her live on stage. Her notoriety was becoming truly global. No wonder she was voted the Most Buzzed About Star by a leading American entertainment magazine.

Back on stage, Amy was dedicating songs to her imprisoned husband Blake. I can only phone him before or after EastEnders , she told her audience during an insightful mood. Away from the shows, she signed up for yoga lessons and chuckled when she learned that controversial Big Brother star Jade Goody and her fella had done a photoshoot dressed up as Amy and Blake. It didnt look half as ridiculous as one might have thought. Finally, the media reported with some shock the tumultuous news that Amy had got a taxi home after a concert in Brighton. It was really strange, said a shaken eyewitness. Hold the front page!

From being blamed for poverty in Africa to her shock-horror south-coast taxi stunner, via burnt foil, Simon Le Bon and so much more, it had been a busy week in the land of Amy.

S he told us she was trouble, but we know that shes so good. Amy Winehouse is one of the most talented, honest and newsworthy artists ever to emerge from the UK music scene. She has sold millions of records, won numerous awards and won critical respect from all ages, tastes and fanbases. Her songwriting skills and rich, soulful voice make her stand head and shoulders above the competition. However, in recent years Amy has become known less for her beautiful voice and wonderful songs than for her hedonistic, controversial lifestyle.

In one of her songs, Amy sings of dying a hundred times. She has certainly had more than her fair share of lives already. At just twenty-four years of age, the dynamic diva had won more musical awards, sparked more tabloid headlines and written more memorable, classic songs than most artists could hope to in a lifetime. Yes, her profile and success have often come at a price but, while that has sometimes been uncomfortable for her, for those who choose to read a book about her life story it is a happier prospect, promising as it does a story full of drama and incident.

Amys musical image defies stereotyping or pigeonholing. Her music, which was in the early days steeped firmly in the jazz tradition, has become an increasingly multifaceted affair, taking in funk, soul, R&B and hip-hop among many other genres. Just as her music defies pigeonholing, so does her wider image. In any given week, Amy can be plastered over the front page of a tabloid newspaper for her latest rumoured indiscretion, photographed in a celebrity weekly leaving a bar, have her music discussed in music weeklies and also be chewed over as a cultural icon in the pages of broadsheet newspapers and during highbrow chattery on posh radio stations. She is, all-round, a glorious mass of contradictions. As renowned music critic Garry Mulholland put it, Amy Sounds Afro-American: is British-Jewish. Looks sexy: wont play up to it. Is young: sounds old. Sings sophisticated: talks rough. Musically mellow: lyrically nasty.

Her producer, Mark Ronson, expands on Amys multifaceted nature. Ive had the luxury of working with someone like Amy Winehouse, whos such an iconic figure and makes it sound modern, he says. Anyone else might have made it sound like some sort of retro pastiche. His assessment is, unsurprisingly, spot on. Her sound may be rooted firmly in traditional jazz and soul from deep back in the twentieth century, but the subjects of her songs have distinctly twenty-first-century themes: footballers wives, rehab, Beastie Boys T-shirts. As for Amy, she has described herself as everything from being very maternal to an ugly dickhead drunk.

Then there is contradiction of her stage performances. First there is the supreme confidence: witness the proud, almost sneering expression she pulls during the opening a capella line of Me and Mr Jones. Yet she can also appear enchantingly vulnerable and uncomfortable on stage, forever readjusting her dress and of course often taking to the stage after more than a few drinks, surely a sign of nerves as well as any wider issues.

LA Weekly , writing up a concert she gave on the Sunset Strip, wrote,

What was especially interesting about the performance was the way Winehouse handled her nerves besides frequent sips taken from a cup at the edge of the stage. She stared down at the stage a lot, then looked up with a sneer or curled lip that evoked gum-popping, eyeball-rolling femmes from Ronettes to B-girls, gangsters molls to biker chicks. But there were also fleeting moments when she clearly checked out of her own performance: Her eyes would simply go blank, and shed retreat behind them. Still, that voice the sound of mysteriously missing teeth, Spanish Harlem stoops in summer and declarations of undying love never wavered, and was never less than amazing.