Amy, My Daughter by Mitch Winehouse Read Free Book Online Page A

thanks, Dad,’ Amy replied.
    Apart from the sampler, though, I still hadn’t heard the songs that were on the short-list for Frank and Amy seemed a bit reticent about letting me listen to them. Maybe she thought lyrics like ‘the only time I hold your hand is to get the angle right’might shock me or that I’d embarrass her. I teased her after I’d finally heard the song.
    â€˜I want to ask you a question,’ I said. ‘That song “In My Bed” when you sing—’
    â€˜Dad! I don’t want to talk about it!’
    Amy came over to Jane’s and my house when she was sorting out the tracks for Frank . She had a load of recordings on CDs and I was flicking through them when she snatched one away from me. ‘You don’t want to listen to that one, Dad,’ she said. ‘It’s about you.’
    You’d have thought she’d know better. It was a red rag to a bull and I insisted she played ‘ What Is It About Men’. When I heard her sing I immediately understood why she’d thought I wouldn’t want to listen to it:
    Â 
    Understand, once he was a family man
So surely I would never, ever go through it first hand
Emulate all the shit my mother hates
I can’t help but demonstrate my Freudian fate.
    Â 
    I wasn’t upset, but it did make me think that perhaps my leaving Janis had had a more profound effect on Amy than I’d previously thought or Amy had demonstrated. I didn’t need to ask her how she felt now because she’d laid herself bare in that song. All those times I’d seen Amy scribbling in her notebooks, she’d been writing this stuff down. The lyrics were so well observed, pertinent and, frankly, bang on. Amy was one of life’s great observers. She stored her experiences and called upon them when she needed to for a lyric. The opening lines to ‘Take The Box’ –
    Â 
    Your neighbours were screaming,
I don’t have a key for downstairs
So I punched all the buzzers…
    Â 
    â€“ refer to something that had happened when she was a little girl. We were trying to get into my mother’s block but I’d forgotten my key. A terrible row, which we could hear from the street, was going on in one of the other flats. My mother wasn’t answering her buzzer – it turned out that she wasn’t in – so I pressed all of the buzzers hoping someone would open the door.
    Of course the song had nothing to do with me buzzing buzzers: it was about her and Chris breaking up. But I was amazed that she could turn something so small that had happened when she was a kid into a brilliant lyric. For all I knew, she’d written it down when it had happened and, eight or ten years later, plucked it out of her notebook. She was a genius at merging ideas that had no obvious connection.
    The songs on the record were good – everyone knew it. By 2003, with the record all but done, loads of labels were desperate to sign her. Of all the companies, Nick Godwyn thought Island/Universal was the right one for Amy because they had a reputation for nurturing their artists without putting them under excessive pressure to produce albums in quick succession. Darcus Beese, in A&R at Island, had been excited about Amy for some time, and when he told Nick Gatfield, Island’s head, about her, he too wanted to sign her. They’d heard some tracks, they knew what they were getting into, and they were ready to make Amy a star.
    Once the record deal had been done with Island/Universal, suddenly it all sunk in. I sat across from Amy, looking at my daughter, and trying to come to terms with the fact that this girl who’d been singing at every opportunity since she was two, was going to be releasing her own music. ‘Amy, you’re actually going to bring out an album,’ I said. ‘That’s brilliant.’
    For once, she seemed genuinely excited. ‘I know, Dad! Great, isn’t it?