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‘WENN’ SHE FELL IN LOVE
As it turned out, it was a good thing that Sylvia Young stayed in touch with Amy after she left the school, because it was Sylvia who inadvertently sent Amy’s career in a whole new direction.
Towards the end of 1999, when Amy was sixteen, Sylvia called Bill Ashton, the founder, MD and life president of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO), to try to arrange an audition for Amy. Bill told Sylvia that they didn’t audition. ‘Just send her along,’ he said. ‘She can join in if she wants to.’
So Amy went along, and after a few weeks, she was asked to sing with the orchestra. One Sunday morning a month or so later, they asked Amy to sing four songs with the orchestra that night because one of their singers couldn’t make it. She didn’t know the songs very well but that didn’t faze her – water off a duck’s back for Amy. One quick rehearsal and she’d nailed them all.
Amy sang with the NYJO for a while, and did one of her first real recordings with them. They put together a CD and Amy sang on it. When Jane and I heard it, I nearly fainted – I couldn’t believe how fantastic she sounded. My favourite song on that CD has always been ‘The Nearness Of You’. I’ve heard Sinatra sing it, I’ve heard Ella Fitzgerald sing it, I’ve heard Sarah Vaughan sing it, I’ve heard Billie Holiday sing it, I’ve heard Dinah Washington sing it and I’ve heard Tony Bennett sing it. But I have never heard it sung the way Amy sang it. It was and remains beautiful.
There was no doubt that the NYJO and Amy’s other performances pushed her voice further, but it was a friend of Amy’s, Tyler James, who really set the ball rolling for her. Amy and Tyler had met at Sylvia Young’s and they remained best friends to the end of Amy’s life. At Sylvia Young’s, Amy was in the academic year below Tyler, so when they were doing academic work they were in different classes. But on the singing and dancing days they were in the same class, as Amy had been promoted a year, so they rehearsed and did auditions together. They met when their singing teacher, Ray Lamb, asked four students to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ on a tape he was making for his grandma’s birthday. Tyler was knocked out when he heard this little girl singing ‘like some jazz queen’. His voice hadn’t broken and he was singing like a young Michael Jackson. Tyler says he recognized the type of person Amy was as soon as he spotted her nose-ring and heard that she’d pierced it herself, using a piece of ice to numb the pain.
They grew closer after Amy had left Sylvia Young, when Tyler would meet up regularly with her, Juliette and their other girlfriends. Tyler and Amy talked a lot about the downs that most teenagers have. Every Friday night they would speak on the phone and every conversation ended with Amy singing to him or him to her. They were incredibly close, but Tyler and Amy weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, more like brother and sister; he was one of the few boys Amy ever brought along to my mum’s Friday-night dinners.
After leaving Sylvia Young’s, Tyler had become a soul singer, and while Amy was singing with the NYJO, Tyler was singing in pubs, clubs and bars. He’d started working with a guy named Nick Shymansky, who was with a PR agency called Brilliant!. Tyler was Nick’s first artist, and he was soon hounding Amy for a tape of her singing that he could give to Nick. Eventually Amy gave him a tape of jazz standards she had sung with the NYJO. Tyler was blown away by it, and encouraged her to record a few more tracks before he sent the tape to Nick.
Now Tyler had been talking about Amy to Nick for months, but Nick, who was only a couple of years older than Tyler and used to hearing exaggerated talk about singers, wasn’t expecting anything life-changing. But that, of course, was what he got.
Amy sent her tape to him in a bag covered in stickers of hearts and stars. Initially Nick thought that Amy had just taped someone else’s old record because the voice didn’t sound like that of a sixteen-year-old. But as the production was so poor he soon realized that she couldn’t have done any such thing. (She had in fact recorded it with her music teacher at Sylvia Young’s.) Nick got Amy’s number from Tyler but when he called she wasn’t the slightest bit impressed. He kept calling her, and finally she agreed to meet him when she was due to rehearse in a pub just off Hanger Lane, in west London.
It was nine o’clock on a Sunday morning – Amy could get up early when she really wanted to (at this time she was working at weekends, selling fetish wear at a stall in Camden market, north London). As Nick approached the pub he could hear the sound of a ‘big band’ – not what you expect to hear floating out of a pub at that hour on a Sunday morning. He walked in and was stunned by what he saw: a band of sixty-to-seventy-year-old men and a kid of sixteen or seventeen, with an extraordinary voice. Straight away Nick struck up a rapport with Amy. She was smoking Marlboro Reds, when most kids of her age smoked Lights, which he says told him Amy always had to go one step further than anyone else.
As Nick was talking to her in the pub car park, a car reversed and Amy screamed that it had driven over her foot. Nick was concerned and sympathetic, checking that she was all right. In fact, the car hadn’t driven over Amy’s foot and she had staged the whole thing to find out how he would react. It was the choking game all over again – she never outgrew that sort of thing. I’ve no idea what in Amy’s mind the test was intended to achieve, but after that Amy and Nick really hit it off and he remained a close friend for the rest of her life.
Nick introduced Amy to his boss at Brilliant!, Nick Godwyn, who told her they wanted her to sign a contract. He invited Janis, Amy and me out for dinner, Amy wearing a bobble hat and cargos, with her hair in pigtails. She seemed to take it in her stride, but I could barely sit still.
Nick told us how talented he thought Amy was as a writer, as well as a singer. I knew how good she was as a singer, but it was great hearing an industry professional say it. I’d known she was writing songs, but I’d had no idea if she was any good because I’d never heard any of them. Afterwards, on the way back to Janis’s to drop her and Amy off, I tried to be realistic about the deal – a lot of the time these things come to nothing – and said to Amy, ‘I’d like to hear some of your songs, darling.’
I wasn’t sure she was even listening to me.
‘Okay, Dad.’
I didn’t get to hear any of them though – at least, not yet.
As Amy was only seventeen she was unable to sign a legal contract, so Janis and I agreed to. With Amy, we formed a company to represent her. Amy owned 100 per cent of it, but it was second nature to her to ask us to be involved in her career. As a family, we’d always stuck together. When I’d run my double-glazing business, my stepfather had worked for me, driving round London collecting the customer satisfaction forms we needed to see every day in head office. When he died my mum took over.
By now Amy had a day job. She was learning to write showbiz stories at WENN (World Entertainment News Network), an online media news agency. Juliette had got her the job – her father, Jonathan Ashby, was the company’s founder and one of its owners. It was at WENN that Amy met Chris Taylor, a journalist working there. They started going out and quickly became inseparable. I noticed a change in her as soon as they got together: she had a bounce in her step and was clearly very happy. But it was obvious who was the boss in the relationship – Amy. That’s probably why it didn’t work out. Amy liked strong men and Chris, while a lovely guy, didn’t fall into that category.
The relationship lasted about nine months, it was her first serious relationship, and when it finished, Amy was miserable – but painful though the break-up was, her relationship with Chris had motivated her creatively, and ultimately formed the basis of the lyrics for her first album,
Excited as Amy was about her management contract, music-business reality soon intruded: only a few months later Brilliant! closed down. While usually this is a bad sign for an artist, Amy wasn’t lost in the shuffle. Simon Fuller, founder of 19 Management, who managed the Spice Girls among others, bought part of Brilliant!, including Nick Shymansky and Nick Godwyn.
As before, with Amy still under eighteen, Janis and I signed the management contract with 19 on Amy’s behalf. To my surprise, 19 were going to pay Amy ?250 a week. Naturally this was recoupable against future earnings but it gave her the opportunity to concentrate on her music without having to worry about money. It was a pretty standard management contract, by which 19 would take 20 per cent of Amy’s earnings. Well, I thought, it looks like she’s going to be bringing out an album – which was great. But, I wondered, who the hell’s going to buy it? I still didn’t know what her own music sounded like. I’d nagged, but she still hadn’t played me anything she’d
