Amy, My Daughter

laugh, was from an online blog. It described Amy’s look as ‘Ronnie Spector meets the Bride of Frankenstein’.

In February Amy was back in the UK, recording the video for ‘Back to Black’, when she got some exciting news. It was bitterly cold and Amy had forgotten to bring her coat, so during the breaks in filming she was freezing in her trailer. Halfway through the day she called Jane, asking her to bring down a coat for her. As I was out in the cab, I took it to her.

When I arrived she squealed, ‘Dad! I’m number one in Norway!’

‘That’s great,’ I said, although I did wonder why she was so keen on making it big in the Norwegian market. She had to explain that to be number one outside the more obvious, if bigger, markets of the US and UK meant she really was on her way to international stardom.

Shortly before the release of the album in the US, I was at the Turkish baths at Porchester Hall, Notting Hill – I used to go there most Wednesday afternoons and there’d usually be a whole crowd of my pals there, having something to eat and playing cards. Above the baths there’s a fantastic hall where they put on music events, corporate dinners and weddings. Amy was due to do a concert there for The BBC Sessions on the Thursday, but I didn’t know she’d be rehearsing there that afternoon. But she was and, boy, could you hear it! There was the constant muffled thump, thump, thump of the bass and Amy’s incredible voice over the top. ‘Keep your daughter quiet,’ one of my pals joked. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’ They were all ribbing me so I went upstairs to see Amy.

She was as surprised and delighted to see me as I was to see her. She came over straight away and gave me a big hug. Blake was with her and came over as well. He was very friendly, but he looked agitated and on edge. He said he was okay when I asked, but then he disappeared. When he returned, he was a different person – full of life and energy. You can make your own mind up as to the reason why. I thought back to what Tyler had told me. But I believed then that Amy would give him what for when she found out he was still taking drugs.

Later that month Amy was back in the US for a tour to promote Back to Black. It began in Austin, Texas, at the SXSW Festival, then went on to West Hollywood, California, where she played the Roxy Theater. There were a lot of big names at that gig and they wanted to go to Amy’s dressing room to say hello. First Raye told Amy that Courtney Love was outside and wanted to meet her.

‘God!’ Amy replied. ‘What does she want?’

Next up was Bruce Willis. It was his birthday and, as Amy put it, ‘He had a bit of a wobbly head on.’

Bruce said to Amy, ‘Hi, I’m Bruce Willis. Would you like to come to Las Vegas with me to celebrate my birthday?’

Quick as anything, Amy said, ‘Only if I can bring my dad!’ Bruce was astounded and Amy carried on the joke, ‘Shall I call him and see if he wants to come?’ Apparently Bruce beat a hasty retreat.

Then Ron Jeremy, the famous porn star, was led into the dressing room. He was accompanied by two women with pneumatic breasts – if you’d stuck a pin in them, Amy said, they might have exploded. Ron was wearing a pair of loose tracksuit bottoms. Amy looked down at them. ‘Been working today, Ron?’

‘Funnily enough, yes,’ Ron said, playing along. They sat down for a good ten minutes and had a drink and a chat, minus the women. Amy was very sharp; her spontaneous wit never failed to make me laugh.

Danny DeVito was at one of the other gigs and Amy kept sidling up to the bar next to him, mouthing to Raye, ‘Look, I’m taller than him.’ And she was, if not by much.

Amy met a lot of famous people on that tour and they had all come to see her because they loved what she was doing. Some stars get swept away by the conviction that everybody wants to be their friend, but it wasn’t like that with Amy. Those people weren’t jumping on the Amy Winehouse bandwagon: they just wanted to hear her sing. I witnessed it at first hand when I joined the tour in Canada a few weeks later. I turned up after the gig and found Amy with a man she introduced to me as Michael.

‘Very nice to meet you,’ I said. ‘What do you do, Michael?’

He laughed, as Amy hissed, ‘Dad – it’s Michael Buble.’

He was a sweet man – I was a fan of his music – and all he wanted to talk about was how fantastic Amy had been that night.

The following day we walked into a shopping mall and ‘Stronger Than Me’ was playing. ‘Isn’t that me, Dad?’ Amy asked. ‘Isn’t that my song?’

‘Yes, and you’ve just earned twenty-eight cents,’ I joked, ‘so feel free to buy something.’

She stopped and listened. ‘It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?’

It was as if somebody else had written and sung the song, as if it didn’t belong to her any more. Wait a second, I thought. This is surreal. She doesn’t know her own song. But when she did listen to her own records, she always thought she could have done better – not that she could have sung better but that she could have written more powerful lyrics. ‘I should have changed that word to this word…’ she’d say.

She was never satisfied with what she’d done.

* * *

In May 2007 Amy and Blake booked to go on holiday to Miami together. Before they left she called me: she wanted to know how I felt about her and Blake getting married. Since they’d got back together, they’d been virtually inseparable, aside from some of her trips to the US to promote the album. I wasn’t too thrilled about the prospect of Amy tying herself to Blake, but I thought I’d have the chance to get to know him better – and for him to get to know the family before they eventually tied the knot.

‘I won’t stand in your way,’ I told her. ‘You’re both adults. It’s for you and Blake to decide.’

The issue of his drug use occurred to me, but I pushed it aside. I was pretty sure by now that Amy’s stance on class-A drugs would have rubbed off on Blake: if he hadn’t stopped on his own, she would have made him. If I was wrong, I thought, there would be enough time before they got married for me to do something about it.

I wondered then if she planned to marry sooner than we thought. I reminded her what had happened when Janis and I had got married, how upset Janis was that her mother didn’t come to our wedding – she had recently left Janis’s father and run off with another man. Janis still got upset about that and I didn’t want her to miss our daughter’s wedding. She deserved to be there. And me? Well, of course I wanted to be at my little girl’s wedding – but to Blake? I wasn’t sure.

I told Amy that if they were thinking of getting married while they were in Miami I would fly Janis out so she could be part of it. Amy promised me that Janis and I would both be at the wedding. It seemed to me that Blake couldn’t have cared less if his mother was at his wedding or not, and I think he was partially to blame that neither Janis nor I was there when they were married in Miami on 18 May 2007.

Just after the ceremony Amy called me, all excited. ‘Dad, we’ve just got married!’

I was stunned into silence.

‘Aren’t you going to congratulate us?’ she carried on, seemingly oblivious to how I felt.

I couldn’t bring myself to say the words to her. In fact, I couldn’t say anything to her – I pretended I couldn’t hear her properly and hung up. I was beside myself with sadness for Janis, and really angry with Amy. After that she called me back several times, but I didn’t pick up.

Eventually I phoned her. ‘Amy, you know what?’ I said. ‘Your mum should have been there. Never mind me. Your mum should have been there.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I know that, Dad, but we thought it was the right thing to do at the time…’

‘What do you mean we thought it was the right thing to do? What’s it got to do with Blake about your mother being at your wedding?’ I didn’t object to Amy marrying him: she’d told me she loved him and that he loved her. But I took great exception to them preventing Janis from being at the wedding. What business was it of Blake’s? They’d been married five minutes and he’d already put my back up.

The call ended badly, but I resigned myself to what had happened and made sure that it wouldn’t cause a rift between us, even though I was seething about the snub to Janis. I suggested throwing a wedding party later in the year, but although Amy was up for it, it never happened.

8 ATTACK AND THE ‘PAPS’

Over the next few months I didn’t see much of Amy and Blake – which was not surprising: they were newly