Amy Winehouse by Chas Newkey-Burden Read Free Book Online

‘His music is a slick mix of funky rhythms and cool-as-ice vocals. He was also praised by NME, Time Out and Face .’
    Amy described herself and James as ‘mates who shag… My Nan thinks he looks like Leonardo DiCaprio but he’s much better-looking.’
    They took it in turns to do the washing-up. ‘If I’ve been in all day, I’ll have his dinner ready when he comes home. I do everything for him, but we have our own lives. I’m a very sexual person but sex is a minor thing in our relationship – we’ve got so much more than that. And we let each other see other people. Tyler might stay away for a couple of days with a girl. We don’t just sit around and cuddle like your average couple: we give each other space.’ However, James was soon to give Amy something far more significant than space.
    A spell at the BRIT Performing Arts & Technology School in Croydon followed for Amy. The school, which has been compared to New York High School for the Performing Arts – the subject of 1980s film Fame – is funded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, but independent of the local education authority’s control. Since 1992 it has received sponsorship from the BRIT Trust, the body behind the BRIT Awards, where Amy was to achieve recognition further down the line. It has a fantastic academic record: in 2006 for instance, 93 per cent of its pupils gained five or more ‘A’ to ‘C’ grades in GCSEs.
    (Incidentally, the first fully selective arts academy is now being built in Birmingham. Based on the BRIT School, the Birmingham institution in the city’s Eastside will train students in music, theatre, painting and other arts. The school, which will teach up to 950 pupils aged fourteen to nineteen, is one of three academies planned in the city.)
    Among those who have studied at the BRIT are the Kooks, Katie Melua, Floetry, Dane Bowers, the Feeling, the Noisettes, Imogen Heap and Leona Lewis. One teacher observed that the BRIT school is for ‘the non-type. The school fits round their personality, rather than asking them to fit their personality round the school.’ Another adds that many of their pupils might have had negative experiences in their past, due to their creativity – ‘like bullying or being the only boy dancer in a south London comprehensive – before they came here’.
    It has been said that the best way to find the school is ‘to take a train from London Bridge, disembark at Selhurst and followthe teen wearing bright-yellow drainpipe jeans, a leather motorcycle jacket and bird’s-nest hairstyle’. There’s a lot of truth to it. When Amy first arrived at the school she found two main buildings: an oblong pavilion and redbrick building, which was built in 1907. There are at any given time 850 pupils studying at the school, all of whom enrol at the age of fourteen or sixteen. As a state-funded creative school, it is very popular and only one in three applicants is successful, as Amy was.
    One teacher remembers Amy as being ‘exciting, but nerve-racking . She was an artist from the age of sixteen, and she wasn’t exactly suited to being institutionalised.’ Nick Williams, the principal, agrees: ‘You would have had to be mad not to realise that Amy was a very, very talented young woman and that she had what it took to be extremely successful. Katie Melua and Amy Winehouse are two very different people – the one thing they have in common is that there isn’t anyone who is exactly like them. They’re not factory-farmed. What we do is attract people into the school who are creative – that means things will happen.
    ‘We acknowledge that when kids leave here and find their way their experiences might be harsher, edgier or more difficult. We see no purpose in treating young people in a competitive way. Lots of bands don’t want to talk about coming from the BRIT School, and the reason is obvious: if you’re in a band, you don’t want people to feel that, somehow, someone