Amy, My Daughter

and it would take time. Talking to the audience and showing them she was enjoying herself came later, and even when it did, I don’t think it was ever natural. To me, she always looked uncomfortable when she was doing it.

It wasn’t easy to talk to her about a performance; after maybe a couple of days I could say things about what she was and wasn’t doing, but I had to be careful. Amy wasn’t so much strong-willed as cement-willed, and she did things her way.

As the promotional gigs continued, her management started to talk about a second album. There were still some good songs that hadn’t been included on Frank. One in particular was ‘Do Me Good’. I told Amy that I thought it should go on the second album because it was fantastic, but she didn’t think so and reminded me of something she’d told me once before: ‘That was then, Dad. It’s not what I’m about now. That was written about Chris and I’m over it.’

All of Amy’s songs were about her experiences and by this time Chris was firmly in the past. With him no longer relevant to her life, that made the songs about him even less relevant.

She’d started writing a lot of new material, and there could easily have been an album between Frank and Back to Black – there were certainly enough songs. But Amy didn’t want to bring out an album unless the songs had a personal meaning to her, and the ones she’d written after Frank and before Back to Black didn’t do it for her. She resisted the pressure from 19 to head back into the studio.

Amy and I often talked about her song writing. I asked her if she could write songs the way Cole Porter or Irving Berlin did. Those guys were ‘guns for hire’ when it came to churning out great songs. Irving Berlin could get up in the morning, look out of the window and ten minutes later he’d have written ‘Isn’t This A Lovely Day?’. ‘Could you do that?’ I’d ask Amy.

‘Of course I could, Dad. But I don’t want to. All of my songs are autobiographical. They have to mean something to me.’

It was precisely because her songs were dragged up out of her soul that they were so powerful and passionate. The ones that went into Back to Black were about the deepest of emotions. And she went through hell to make it.

5 A PAIN IN SPAIN

During the summer of 2004, in the midst of her first taste of success, Amy’s regular drinking habits were worrying me – so many of her stories revolved around something happening to her while she was having a drink. Just how much, I never knew. On one occasion, she had drunk so much that she fell, banged her head and had to go to hospital. Her friend Lauren brought her from the hospital to my house in Kent and they stayed for three or four days. After they arrived, Amy went straight to sleep in her room and I called Nick Godwyn and Nick Shymansky. They came over immediately and we sat down to discuss what they were referring to as ‘Amy’s drinking problem’.

We had a sense that Amy was using alcohol to loosen up before her gigs, but the others thought it was playing a more frequent role in her life. The subject of rehab came up – the first time that anyone had mentioned it. I was against it. I thought she’d just had one too many this time, and rehab seemed an overreaction.

‘I think she’s fine,’ I told everyone, which she later turned into a line in ‘Rehab’.

As we carried on talking, though, I saw the other side – that if she dealt with the problem now, it would be gone. Lauren and the two Nicks had seen her out drinking, and they, with Jane, were in favour of trying rehab, so I shut up.

After a while, Amy came down, and we told her what we’d been discussing. As you’d expect, she said, ‘I ain’t going,’ so we all had a go at changing her mind, first the two Nicks, then Lauren, then Jane and I. Eventually Jane took Amy into the kitchen and gave her a good talking-to. I don’t know exactly what was said but Amy came out and said, ‘All right, I’ll give it a go.’

The next day she packed a bag and the Nicks took her to a rehab facility in Surrey, just outside London. We thought she was going for a week, but three hours later she was back.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Dad, all the counsellor wanted to do was talk about himself,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got time to sit there listening to that rubbish. I’ll deal with this my own way.’

The two Nicks, who had driven her home, were still trying to persuade her to go back, but she wasn’t having any of it. Amy had made her mind up and that was that.

Initially I agreed with her, since I hadn’t been totally convinced she needed to go in the first place. Later it came out that the clinic had told Amy she needed to be there for at least two months – I think that was what had made her leave. She might have stuck it for a week, but a couple of months? No chance. For Amy, being in control was vital and she wouldn’t allow someone else to take over. She’d been like that since she was very young; it had been Amy, after all, who’d put in the application to Sylvia Young, Amy who’d got the singing gig with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, and Amy who’d got the job at WENN. She’d had help, yes, but she’d done it – not Janis, not me.

Amy headed to the kitchen. ‘Who wants a drink?’ she called over her shoulder. ‘I’m making tea.’

* * *

Frank sold more than 300,000 copies in the UK when it was first released, going platinum within a matter of weeks. Based on sales, you would have thought Amy’s career was in the ascendant, but that wasn’t the case.

By the end of 2004 there wasn’t much work coming in and I was beginning to think it was all over as quickly as it had started, although Amy wasn’t worried and continued being out there and having a good time. The people around her seemed unaware that nothing was happening with her career and carried on treating her as if she was a big star. I guess if enough people tell you you’re a big star, you come to believe it.

Only my mother could bring Amy back to earth. She didn’t often have a go at her but when she did it was relentless. We were at her flat one Friday night when she told Amy, ‘Get in there. If they’re finished, get everyone’s plates, bring them into the kitchen and do the washing-up.’ Amy wasn’t happy about that, but when everyone else had left, Mum called Amy to her again: ‘Come here, you, I want to talk to you.’

‘No, Nan, no.’ Amy knew what was coming. She had said something earlier that my mum had considered out of line.

‘Never let me hear you say that again. Who do you think you are?’

It did the trick. My mother was a stabilizing influence on Amy and made sure her feet were firmly on the ground. So, it was no surprise that it hit Amy hard when her grandmother fell ill in the winter of 2004. I drove round to Amy’s, dreading the moment when I had to say, ‘Nan’s been diagnosed with lung cancer.’ When Amy opened the front door of her flat I choked out the words before we fell into each other’s arms, sobbing.

Alex moved into my mum’s flat in Barnet for a couple of months to be with her, and when he moved out Jane and I took his place. We wanted to make sure she was never on her own because there had been a mix-up with one of my mum’s prescriptions: she had inadvertently been taking ten times the correct dose of one particular drug. It had spaced her out to such an extent that we thought the cancer must have spread to her brain. Once we discovered the mistake and rectified it, she was back to normal within a couple of days.

All of the things that you would normally associate with lung cancer didn’t apply in my mum’s case. She was a bit breathless so she had an oxygen machine, but other than that she was very comfortable. During the last three months of her life she actually improved – well, outwardly she did. Then one evening in May 2006 I came home to find her on the floor. She’d had a fall. She didn’t appear too bad, but I called the paramedics just to be on the safe side. They took her to Barnet General Hospital, and while they were checking her over there, she looked at me and said, ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough.’

I asked what she meant.

‘I’ve had enough,’ she said.

I told her not to be silly, that after a good night’s sleep she’d feel better and I’d be taking her home the following day.