Amy, My Daughter

whistled all the way through. She was always very generous with other performers.

With more gigs, and promotional events linked to the imminent release of Frank, Amy wanted to start planning ahead. As the lease on her flat in East Finchley was about to expire, Janis and I sat down with her and asked her what she wanted to do. She said she’d like to buy a place rather than keep renting, and I agreed with her. A flat would be a great investment, particularly if her singing career ever went wrong. Remember those days before the recession? You could buy a flat for ?250,000 one day and sell it the next for ?275,000 – I exaggerate a bit, but the property market was booming.

Amy loved Camden Town and we soon found a flat there that she liked in Jeffrey’s Place. It was small and needed some work, but that didn’t matter because all of her favourite places were in walking distance. This was where she wanted to be and the flat had a good feel to it. To get to it, you had to be buzzed through a locked gate, which reassured Janis and me: Amy would be quite safe there. The flat cost ?260,000. We put down ?100,000 and took out a ?160,000 mortgage, which left a good bit of money from the advances. I sat down with Amy and worked out a budget with her. All of the household bills and the mortgage would be paid out of her capital and she would have ?250 a week spending money, which she was quite happy with. If she needed something in particular she could always buy it, but that didn’t happen too often.

In those days Amy was quite sensible about money. She knew that she had a decent amount to live on and that we were looking after her interests. She also knew that if she developed lavish habits, her funds would soon run out. Although Amy was a signatory on her company’s bank account, she wanted a safeguard put in place to ensure that she couldn’t squander her money so we agreed that any cheque had to be signed by two of the signatories to the account. The signatories were Amy, Janis, our accountant and myself. It would be an effective brake, we hoped, because Amy was generous to a fault.

When it was time to put the credits together for Frank – who had done what on this song, who had written what on that song – in the spring of 2003, her generosity was evident again. Nick Godwyn, Nick Shymansky, Amy and I crowded round her kitchen table to sort it out – there had been a leak in the bathroom the night before and the lounge ceiling had fallen in. So much for the glamorous life. (Mind you, a year on, the place looked like a bomb had hit it.)

Nick Shymansky started off. ‘Right. How do you want to divide up the credits for “Stronger Than Me”?’

‘Twenty per cent to…’ Amy began, and she’d name someone and Nick would ask her why on earth she’d want to give that person 20 per cent when all they’d done was come to the studio for an hour and suggest one word change. While it was certainly important to credit people for what they had done, and ensure that they were paid accordingly, she was giving away percentages to people for almost nothing. Amy was brilliant at maths, but I swear, if she’d had her way, she would have given away more than 100 per cent on a number of songs.

* * *

On 6 October 2003, three weeks prior to the release of Frank, the lead single, ‘Stronger Than Me’, hit the shops and peaked, disappointingly, at number seventy-one in the UK charts – it turned out to be the lowest-charting single of Amy’s career. When the album came out on 20 October 2003, it sold well, eventually making it to number thirteen in the UK charts in February 2004. It was also critically acclaimed, and sales were boosted later in 2004 when it was short-listed for a Mercury Music Prize, and Amy was nominated for the BRIT Awards for Best British Female Solo Artist and Best British Urban Act.

I devoured all of the reviews, and don’t recall anything negative, although the hip-hop/jazz mix confused some at first. The Guardian wrote, ‘Sounds Afro-American: is British-Jewish. Looks sexy: won’t play up to it. Is young: sounds old. Sings sophisticated: talks rough. Musically mellow: lyrically nasty.’

I thought that Frank, which is still my favourite Amy album, was fantastic. One of the reasons I love it is because it’s about young love and innocence, and it’s funny, comical and has brilliantly observed lyrics. It wasn’t written out of the depths of despair. I still love listening to Frank and play it often. I was so proud of my little girl.

Unfortunately Amy didn’t hear things quite as I did. She had mixed feelings about the final cut and complained that the record company had included some mixes that she had told them she didn’t like. It was partly her fault: she’d missed a few of the editing sessions, in typical Amy fashion.

We were in the kitchen at her flat in Jeffrey’s Place, having a cup of tea, and the window was open. The builders working next door turned their radio up loud and one of the songs from Frank was playing.

‘Shut the window, Dad, I don’t want to hear that,’ Amy said.

It had been on my mind for a while to ask her, so I said, ‘Were you thinking about anyone in particular when you wrote “Fuck Me Pumps”?’ She shook her head. ‘There’s the line… What is it? Hang on… Let me have a look at the CD. Where is it?’

‘I don’t even know if I’ve got one, Dad.’

‘What? You haven’t got a copy of your own album?’

‘No, I’m done with it. It was all about Chris, and that’s in the past. I’ve forgotten about it, Dad. I’m writing other stuff now.’

This was news to me. I’d never seen this side of Amy, the way she could put something so deeply personal and important behind her, as if it didn’t matter any more. Nevertheless, she continued to promote Frank, and later that year she performed at some very prestigious venues: the Glastonbury Festival, the V Festival and the Montreal International Jazz Festival. No matter what, her music and her family came first. But her other priorities then were like so many other girls of her age – clothes, boys, going out with her friends, her image and style – she was, after all, a woman in her early twenties.

She may have been dismissive about Frank but things happened with the album that made her realize it was special, like when ‘Stronger Than Me’, which she’d written with Salaam Remi, won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song Musically and Lyrically. The Novellos mattered to Amy: her peers, other composers and writers voted to decide the winners. Amy went to the ceremony and rang me to tell me she’d won. I was halfway down Fulham Road, taking someone to Putney in my taxi, when she called.

‘Dad! Dad! I won an Ivor Novello!’

I was so excited but I still had to drive this chap home and finish my shift. By then it was late and I had no one to bother so I went and woke up my mum. ‘Amy’s won an Ivor Novello!’

She was as pleased as I was.

One disappointment we all shared was that Frank wasn’t initially released in America. 19 felt that Amy wasn’t ready for the States. They said that you only get one shot at breaking the States and this wasn’t the time, mostly because, in their view, her performance level wasn’t strong enough.

Frustrating though it was, they were probably right. At this time Amy was still playing guitar onstage and 19 wanted to get the guitar out of her hands: she was always looking down at it instead of engaging with the audience. Sometimes it was as if they weren’t there and she was singing and playing for her own amusement. Her voice was great, but she wasn’t delivering a performance: she needed coaching in how to give the best to her audiences. Her act needed refining before she took it to the States.

They told Amy that she had to communicate with the audience and the best way to do that was to show them she was having a good time. This, though, was what she struggled with. She loved singing and playing to family and friends, but as the gigs got bigger, so did the pressure, highlighting the fact that she wasn’t a natural performer. As Amy was outwardly so confident, no one imagined that inside she harboured a fear of being onstage, and that as she played in front of ever-increasing crowds, the fear didn’t go away. Over time it became worse. But she was so good at concealing it that even I wasn’t aware of how hard this was for her. Quite often, during a song, she’d still commit the cardinal sin of turning her back on the audience. I’d be watching and want to shout at her, ‘Speak to the audience, they love you. Just say, “Hi, how you doin’? You all havin’ a good time?”’

Amy never did figure out how to deal with stage fright. While she wasn’t physically sick, as some performers are, she sometimes needed a drink before she went on. Maybe even needed to smoke a little cannabis, but I don’t know for sure, because she wouldn’t have done that in front of me. What I certainly didn’t know and, with hindsight, perhaps I should have seen the warning sign for, was that she was starting to drink a lot more than was good for her, even then.

As a teenage girl she’d suffered from a few self-esteem issues – what teenager doesn’t? – but I really don’t believe that was at the root of her stage fright; by the time she was performing regularly her self-esteem issues had gone. But 19 were right: she wasn’t ready to go to America. Before that Amy needed to work hard on her act