Amy, My Daughter

‘You carry on, Dad,’ and I sang a few more.

After that, Amy was back and, to everyone’s delight, said to Dale, ‘Right, let’s start with “Valerie”,’ and she carried on where she’d left off, mixing laughter with her brilliant music. When she performed ‘Rehab’, she singled me out from the audience as she sang right at me, ‘My daddy says I’m fine.’ I cracked up, along with everybody else. We all had a wonderful time, watching and listening to her that night. It felt more like a party than a gig, and Amy was definitely back to her best.

Later, in her dressing room, her caring side showed once again. ‘How’s your glandular fever?’ she said to my friend Paul’s daughter.

She hadn’t seen Katie for about a year – I couldn’t believe she’d remembered. I’d seen Katie many times, but had totally forgotten she’d been ill.

* * *

Amy stayed dry for another five days, and I was feeling very positive about her Eastern European tour. But on 17 June, the day before she was due to fly to Serbia, I knew something was wrong the minute I arrived in Camden Square. ‘I don’t want to do the tour, Dad,’ she said, after a short time.

I was surprised. It had been planned since the start of 2011 and it was definitely something that Amy had wanted to do. Raye and I had had our reservations about it but had kept faith with Amy’s desire to play to her fans in Eastern Europe.

She had been saying for ages how bored she was and my response had been, ‘Get out there and do what you do best – make music. Do a tour or go back into the studio.’

And for the last few months, when Amy hadn’t been drinking, she had got very involved with the arrangements. She always played an integral part in establishing the look of her live gigs, getting heavily involved with her band’s clothes, the production, the lights, just about everything. Right from Back to Black she had had a very clear idea of how she wanted her three backing singers to look onstage. Because she was so into fifties/sixties style she’d once made Raye go into the costume department at the BBC to hire three baby blue dinner suits for them. She named the trio the Nights Before and, at her final gigs, decided she wanted them to wear peach-coloured suits.

But now she was saying she wanted to cancel the tour. I couldn’t understand what had changed and she couldn’t explain it to me. All I could get out of her was that she didn’t want to do it – and whether it was to do with stage fright, or the fear that she’d return to drinking, I never could get out of her.

By the next day Amy had changed her mind again and wanted to do the tour. I was still apprehensive that she might back out or start drinking, but I spoke to her before she got on the plane and she sounded fine. Raye agreed to give me a running commentary, so over the next forty-eight hours I got constant calls and texts: ‘She’s in the hotel room’, ‘She’s in the car’, ‘She’s at the venue’, ‘She’s on the stage…’

Then, at two forty-five a.m. on 19 June, Raye phoned to say that the gig had been a complete shambles.

Amy had been in a funny mood in the car on the way there. She wasn’t drunk, but she had been agitated in her hotel room and wanted a drink; so Raye had allowed her one glass of wine to calm her down. Amy would often ask people to give her drinks once she was on stage. But that didn’t happen in Belgrade: she was drunk before she got onstage. Neither Raye nor Tyler, who were both with her that day, have any idea how she’d got drunk but she must have smuggled some alcohol into the gig, or got someone to do it for her.

So, that night in Belgrade Amy went onstage drunk, and it showed. Her performance was disastrous and much of the audience were booing. She couldn’t remember what city she was in, or the lyrics of her songs, or even the names of her band members. Throughout, Raye was trying to pull her off the stage, but she wouldn’t leave. She stayed for ninety minutes. Her gigs normally lasted seventy-five. It was the worst ever.

They left the gig and went straight to the airport. All the way, Amy was demanding a drink in the car, but Raye wouldn’t let her have one. On the plane she asked Raye if it was the worst gig she had ever done.

‘Yep,’ Raye replied. ‘It’s right up there with Birmingham.’ He told her off for letting everybody down. But Amy didn’t like what she was hearing, and argued back, then went off and sulked at the back of the plane.

The next gig was in Istanbul, and when they arrived Amy apologized to everyone.

‘This stops here,’ Raye said. ‘You can’t go out and work like this. It’s ridiculous. If you don’t want to do these gigs, then we don’t do them. But these are a nice run of shows. We’re going to places that we haven’t been to before, playing in front of people that haven’t seen you before, people that really want to see you. You went onstage and done that. Why? What was the problem?’

Amy gave him the Amy shrug. She said she didn’t know the answer.

Raye cancelled all the remaining gigs.

I wondered why she couldn’t say anything to anyone, including me, about this. Did she feel she was letting everyone down if she told me that quitting drinking was harder than she’d thought, even after everything we’d been through together? Did she still want to try and deal with everything on her own? Did she not know that whatever she needed from me I’d have given her?

Amy knew she didn’t have to do those gigs if she didn’t want to: Raye had told her so over and over again. But Amy loved being with her band and she had really wanted to do that tour. And Raye had thought that going ahead with it might help get her creative juices flowing again. Amy often said that she was bored singing the same old songs. ‘Write some new ones, then,’ we’d replied.

I’m not sure that it was actually boredom, though. I think it was only the Back to Black songs that she didn’t want to sing. ‘Wake Up Alone’, ‘Unholy War’ and ‘Back to Black’ seemed to be the hardest for her. They reminded her of Blake, and a time in her life that, understandably, she wanted to forget. Raye thought singing those songs triggered memories of the drug spiral she had been in and that that was one reason why she would drink so much before she performed.

I don’t know if that was the case or not, but Raye had worked closely with Amy’s musical director, Dale Davis, to make sure the Back to Black songs were interspersed with covers and songs from Frank. They didn’t want to have a build-up of songs that reminded Amy of that hellish time. Dale would present the set list to her and, as she trusted him implicitly, she never queried it. This seemed to be working, so we know the songs weren’t to blame for Amy’s behaviour that night in Belgrade.

Everything was fine with Reg, so we know it wasn’t that. And Blake was a thing of the past. So, what had caused this lapse? We only found out later that Amy had suffered from the worst case of stage fright she had ever had.

At the time I despaired, thinking Amy was going back to drinking regularly. We had no understanding of what was going on. ‘My daughter needs help and we are all helpless,’ I wrote that night.

But I was absolutely wrong. Amy didn’t drink again until a couple of days before she passed away.

20 ‘GIVE ME A CUDDLE, DAD’

Over the next few days I had a lot of tweets blaming me for Amy’s performance in Belgrade. ‘How could you let her go on like that?’ her fans asked. ‘You should have known this would happen.’

No one knew what Amy had been through during the preceding months. No one knew she hadn’t touched a drop for weeks before the Belgrade gig. Neither did they know how much her music was helping her at this time. A lot of people blamed me, and a lot of people blamed Amy’s management, but I knew that Raye wasn’t to blame. Amy had definitely wanted to do the tour and the comments were incredibly hurtful.

On 20 June, two days after the Belgrade gig, Reg flew to Istanbul to meet Amy. Once he was there, she seemed a lot better: she was calmer and able to think rationally about the future again. She didn’t want to do any more live work until she got her stage fright under control, and she decided she’d rather spend her time working in her home studio, with her next album still some way off. I knew that Back to Black had come about when she’d felt she had a coherent whole, based on the girl-group sound she loved. I don’t think she ever found the same guiding inspiration to bring together the ideas she had for a new album.

On 22 June Amy came home. She looked much better, but I was being careful what I said to her and it was Amy who brought up the Belgrade gig. She told me how disappointed she’d been with herself once she’d sobered