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  Amy was a loud, excitable and energetic addition to the Susi Earnshaw School, a skinny little girl with masses of dark hair, who turned cartwheels in the hall, and ran rings round her mother as Janis tried to have a conversation with other parents at going-home time – she was ‘really hyperactive’, says Melissa Gillespie, one of Amy’s contemporaries. Amy proved an enthusiastic but indifferent dancer, a good, loud singer, and an impressive child actress, outstanding in a school production of Little Shop of Horrors. ‘[Her] comic timing was spot on,’ recalls Earnshaw. Amy was a good enough actress to earn a walk-on part in a 1994 English National Opera production of Massenet’s Don Quixote.

  In Amy, My Daughter, Mitch writes that he discussed Amy’s emerging theatrical ambitions with Susi Earnshaw, but Earnshaw and Amy’s contemporaries at the school have no memory of meeting him during the three years she attended. ‘I never saw her dad,’ says former pupil Julia Vanellis.

  ‘He never came to the show[s],’ agrees Susi Earnshaw, in a round-table discussion with former pupils and staff for this book. ‘Her mum was always there … I never saw her dad, ever.’

  Mitch’s absence during this period of Amy’s life contrasts with the way in which he became ubiquitous after Amy began her professional career. Amy’s school friend Lauren Franklin says: ‘Let me tell you Mitch wasn’t around until his daughter became famous … But she loved him. That’s her dad – absolutely – her dad is her dad. She wanted to make him happy. But, believe me, he was not there … there wasn’t a father figure around.’

  If Mitch Winehouse was absent, he was ably represented by his ebullient mother, Cynthia, who encouraged Amy in her show-business ambitions to the extent that she might be described as a pushy stage grandmother, berating one director who failed to cast Amy in Annie. The family gathered at Cynthia’s flat for dinner on Friday nights, and Cynthia helped Janis bring up the children. Amy saw herself reflected in her forceful grandmother, paying attention to what Cynthia told her, while she tended to ignore or defy other adults. Their closeness mirrored that of Kurt Cobain and his paternal grandmother.

  Despite Cynthia’s help, the responsibility for bringing up the children rested largely with Janis, who struggled to cope. Ever since she’d had her first child she had suffered with headaches, tiredness and other symptoms that led her doctor to diagnose post-natal depression for which he prescribed anti-depressants. Janis later discovered that multiple sclerosis was sapping her energy. To outsiders she could seem ineffectual. ‘I love Janis, but she’s a very weak person. She always has been. She’s never been able to stand up [to Amy],’ says Lauren Franklin. ‘I remember [her saying],“Oh, Amy, don’t say that.” And Amy was going, “Ah, I hate you, you fucking bitch!”… This was, like, when we were very young. She was just very weak, bless her.’

  Lauren saw a deterioration in her friend’s behaviour after her parents’ separation. ‘Unfortunately, when Mitch had the affair [Amy] changed … It’s a massive part of any kid’s life when your parents get divorced. And it wasn’t that suddenly she turned to music, or started writing. It was nothing like that. She actually became really naughty.’

  The naughtiness became apparent when Amy transferred to Ashmole Secondary School, the same school her brother and father had attended. Lauren, who attended a different, Jewish school, noticed that Amy adopted a new way of speaking after she enrolled at Ashmole. As a child Amy had been ‘so well-spoken’. Now she spoke as if she had been brought up on an inner-London estate, even though her school was in the same lower-middle-class suburban area. Amy maintained this faux-working-class accent for the rest of her life, broadening it until she sounded like a veritable Cockney. ‘None of us speak like that,’ says Lauren. It was an attempt to project a worldly image. As a budding writer, Amy also surely found interest in the richly colloquial language of the inner city.

  Amy became disruptive in class and started to truant from school, often sloping off home halfway through the day. Like so many indulgent parents, Mitch ascribes his daughter’s misbehaviour to being ‘bored’. That may be partly true but, as noted in reference to Kurt Cobain, it is also true that disturbed children truant. Happy children attend school. Amy got into the habit of staying up late, which made it difficult to wake her for school in the morning, causing Janis to telephone Mitch in despair. ‘Your daughter won’t get out of bed.’ Amy was more and more in conflict with her parents and teachers and, just as Mitch felt guilty about leaving home, his daughter felt guilty about her misbehaviour, which seems to have stemmed from his having left home. When Mitch celebrated his 45th birthday in December 1995, Amy sent him a card signed ‘Your favourite walking car crash of a daughter’. Although the card is jokey, it indicates that she was already developing a negative self-image.

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  Amy’s musical tastes were shaped partly by the records her parents and brother listened to. The recordings of Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra were played constantly when Dad was around, and Mitch would also sing these songs, while Janis liked Carole King. All these artists influenced Amy, as did the mainstream pop acts of the day. Amy and her friend Juliette discovered hip-hop, and formed a singing duo in emulation of the American act Salt-N-Pepa. Meanwhile, Alex Winehouse was learning to play guitar and listening to Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington. Although Alex sometimes seemed impatient with Amy, in the way of older siblings, Amy read the books her brother liked, took up the guitar as he had, and listened to the records he played, which was also Dad’s music, songs associated with happy times before her parents had split. Pop, rap and jazz all came together in Amy’s mind, helping to form the unique crossover artist she became, and she began to have ambitions as a singer.

  Mitch writes that Amy applied to drama school of her own volition, without telling her parents. But Susi Earnshaw remembers a preliminary conversation with Janis, who asked her whether Amy was talented enough to benefit from full-time drama school. ‘She [Janis] didn’t know herself.’ Earnshaw assured Janis that Amy had the talent, and suggested she try for a scholarship to the Sylvia Young Theatre School.

  In her application to Sylvia Young, Amy wrote: ‘All my life I have been loud, to the point of being told to shut up,’ adding that she believed she had inherited her voice from her father, but while Dad was ‘content to sing loudly in his office and sell windows’ she was determined to develop her talent into a career. The most telling passage of her application is where Amy confesses, ‘mostly I have this dream to be very famous … It’s a lifelong ambition.’ Fame is a common but dangerous ambition among the young, which is almost bound to end in heartache. There is poignancy in Amy singing ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ at her audition before the eponymous Sylvia Young. There would be few sunny days ahead. She won a half-scholarship to the school, enrolling on 14 April 1997, five months before she turned fourteen.

  At the time the Sylvia Young Theatre School was in a former church building behind Marylebone railway station in north London. Pupils wore regular school uniform for the days they studied academic subjects, Monday through Wednesday. On Thursday and Friday, they changed into less formal attire for dance, drama and singing, which was when the school burst into life as a veritable Fame Academy. Amy loved it. Bumping into her friend Melissa Gillespie at their local swimming pool, Amy exclaimed: ‘Melissa! I’m at Sylvia Young’s, and I’m going to be famous!’ As she spoke, Amy watched herself in the changing-room mirror as if to see whether her transformation had begun.

  Amy impressed everybody at Sylvia Young. ‘Academically, she was a complete brainiac, almost geekified – she knew everything,’ says fellow pupil and friend Ricardo Canadinhas. ‘[She] was amazing at maths [and a] really great character – she was hilarious.’ Staff, too, discerned good qualities. ‘I think she had a tremendous brain,’ says Sylvia Young. ‘Her English teacher, Mr McIntyre, thought she’d be a writer – a novelist.’ Amy was a bookworm who read classic and literary modern fiction. Catch-22 was a favourite. She also enjoyed graphic nove
ls such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a book about the Holocaust. And she wrote, jottings about herself and autobiographical song lyrics.

  On the downside, Amy got bored easily, and bucked against discipline. Sylvia Young told her repeatedly to remove her earrings, which were not allowed. ‘And she would very nicely take them out, and apologise, and then she’d forget and put them back in again.’ Although Young has no memory of this, Amy’s friends recall that a bigger issue was the metal stud Amy started to wear in her upper lip. Amy pierced herself, which shocked her friends but which Amy dismissed as no big deal, and over the next few years she acquired several more piercings. It was part of the process of reinventing herself. It was also the start of a worrying habit of hurting herself.

  Amy’s acting talent won her a small part in the BBC comedy series The Fast Show in 1997, but singing was more important. The strength of her voice came home to her theatre school friends at Christmas when the children sang carols in Marylebone station. Amy sang ‘Once In Royal David’s City’ so powerfully that the whole station seemed to stop to listen. ‘I remember looking around and everyone was in tears listening to this [fourteen-]year-old girl,’ says Ricardo Canadinhas. ‘Where did that come from?’

  As puberty took hold, Amy started to smoke and drink with her theatre-school chums, especially when they got together for weekend sleepovers. Her figure had started to develop, and she could pass for eighteen, as could fellow pupil Amie Schroeter. ‘So we’d always go in and get the booze, take it back to the house [for the party] … We all drank.’ At this stage the teenagers chose sweetened low-alcohol drinks, and Amy’s drinking didn’t seem problematic. ‘She used to drink like the rest of us would,’ says Amie. ‘It wasn’t a prominent feature.’

  Weekend sleepovers provided opportunities for sexual encounters. One of Amy’s first tumbles was with Ricardo Canadinhas, who later became a drag artist on the gay club scene. ‘We were quite a naughty year when it came to things like that. I was possibly the worst,’ says Ricardo, who says he had a fling with Amy when they were about fourteen. ‘She had already been with someone by this stage.’ Another theatre-school boyfriend was Kenneth Gordon, who used the stage name Tyler James, though it is unclear when exactly they became lovers. Like Amy, Tyler’s family was from the East End where one of his older relatives had been a member of the Kray gang. Tyler became a lifelong friend.

  Outside school Amy explored her city, gravitating to Camden Town, only eight stops south of Whetstone on the Northern Line but a different world from the suburbs. Stepping out of the tube station Amy stood at the hub of a bustling inner-city area, the radiating roads lined with shops and stalls selling vintage clothes, skull T-shirts, diamanté belt buckles, leather jackets, distressed jeans, Converse sneakers, fast food, mobile phones, second-hand records, comic books and everything else that attracts the young. There were funky pubs, like the Good Mixer, a hang-out for generations of rock musicians, as well as cool places to hear live music, like the Jazz Café, and, tucked away in basements and garrets, there were tattoo parlours, which typically also do body piercings. Amy got a Saturday job in one such parlour, and acquired her first tattoo at fifteen, the cartoon character Betty Boop on her back. Her mother was horrified, but nothing Janis could do would get the ink out. ‘My parents pretty much realised [at that stage] that I would do whatever I wanted.’ Over the next few years Amy acquired a dozen or so tattoos, early ones including an Egyptian ankh between her shoulders, a fern on her left forearm and a lightning bolt on her right arm. A middle-class suburban girl was turning herself into somebody who appeared streetwise. ‘She was the Rebel Jew. That’s what she called herself, when she had the piercings [and the tattoos],’ laughs Ricardo Canadinhas.

  Camden is also a place to score drugs and Amy started to smoke cannabis around the age of fifteen, which set her apart from some of her suburban girlfriends. ‘I just wasn’t like that at all … I was more of a good girl,’ says Lauren Franklin. ‘There was always something different about her in regards to her intelligence and [behaviour]. When I say naughty, if you told Amy, “No”, she’d do it, whether [it be] smoking [or] drinking … She was fearless.’ Amy could also be melodramatic, starting arguments for no better reason than that she enjoyed drama. ‘She was always very difficult to be friends with … She was very outspoken, [and she] didn’t really care.’

  Although Amy enjoyed stage school, she neglected her academic studies to the point at which her head teacher warned Janis Winehouse that Amy might not pass her exams if she stayed at the school. ‘The head teacher [was] not happy with her attitude in the academic classes, and nor were most of the teachers happy,’ says Sylvia Young. ‘He gave the mum the impression that she would be asked to leave. He hadn’t passed that by me at all, and I had no idea that had been said, until I got a note from the mum saying that she was going to be leaving, at which time I spoke to the mother and said, “Look, why? It’s not a good idea … Although she may not have been totally happy here, I’m sure she’ll be happier here, in this environment, than in any other.” She wouldn’t be happy in any school.’ Nevertheless, Amy transferred to a private secondary school in Barnet, the Mount, where she completed her GCSEs.

  Janis was now dating a financial adviser with two teenage children. The families moved into a townhouse at Guildown Avenue, Woodside Park, a short walk from where Janis, Alex and Amy had been living. The garage was converted into a rehearsal space for Amy, whose behaviour continued to deteriorate. ‘I was a shit. I did whatever I wanted. I used to bunk off school, get my boyfriend round. My mum used to come home from work and I’d be lying around the house with my boyfriend in dressing-gowns.’ Amy still managed to pass six GCSEs at grades B and C.

  Although Amy had now left Sylvia Young’s school, Young mentioned her to Bill Ashton, founder of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, which had been a training ground for numerous professional musicians. He invited Amy to sing for him.

  ‘Hello, my name is Amy Winehouse,’ Amy introduced herself in her swaggering faux-Cockney accent. ‘That’s a Jewish name.’

  Amy’s singing voice was impressive. ‘She was absolutely spot-on. She was a very, very good natural singer,’ says Bill Ashton, who asked Amy to sing at a pub gig in June 2000. ‘She chose to sing a song called “Who’s Blue?” [and] she sang it perfectly.’ The following month he asked her to fill in at short notice on another gig. She learned the songs on the way to the venue, and gave another fine performance. ‘She was a 35-year-old singer in a sixteen-year-old’s body,’ says Ashton who, in common with others at this stage in Amy’s life, doesn’t recall seeing or speaking to Mitch Winehouse. ‘I don’t think I ever met the father.’ All his dealings were with Amy’s mother. ‘I talked to her mum on the phone. I said, “Is there anything you’d like me to do for Amy, Mrs Winehouse?” She said, “Yes. Can you stop her smoking so much?”’ That was impossible. Amy was smoking for England. ‘She didn’t really care about herself. She did not treat her body as a temple,’ observes Ashton. ‘She was self-destructive.’

  Amy’s next move was to apply to the BRIT School in Croydon, founded with the backing of the British recording industry along the lines of the New York School of the Performing Arts to educate children who aspired to careers in show business. On her October 1999 application Amy listed Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra (‘the greatest performer of his age’) as her musical influences. In the section in which she had to write about her parents she described her father as ‘part-owner of double glazing company.’ Hereby hangs a tale.

  In recent years Mitch Winehouse had become ‘part-owner’ of two double-glazing companies, though not successfully. In the late 1990s he became a director and company secretary of Formplace Ltd, which changed its name to Warmglaze Ltd in 1998. The company didn’t trade over the following two years and Mitch resigned as director and company secretary in July 2000, the same month that his second wife took over those roles. She resigned four months later and the company was dissolved in 2002. By this ti
me Mitch was involved in another double-glazing company, which got into serious difficulties.

  Weatherglaze plc (‘where quality costs less’) was a large and growing double-glazing company with a turnover of £15 million ($23 million) in 1997.* It nevertheless went bust in February 1998 with liabilities of £3.7 million ($5.8 million). The business was then bought by City Savings & Loans Ltd, which traded under the name Weatherglaze. Mitch became a director of City Savings & Loans in March 1998. He was also sales director. He had two fellow directors, one of whom had also been a director of the ill-fated Weatherglaze. History repeated itself when City Savings & Loans Ltd went bust in 1999 with liabilities of £3.6 million ($5.7 million). The list of creditors ran to twelve pages, including glass manufacturers, hire-purchase, telephone and office-supply companies, newspaper publishers, borough councils and the taxman. The biggest debt was £1.2 million ($1.9 million) owed to the Inland Revenue. ‘That figure was for payroll taxes and does not include the liability for VAT [Value Added Tax], which totalled £647,594 [$1 million],’ says David Stephenson, a senior manager with the accountants who conducted the liquidation. He explains what went wrong with Mitch’s company: ‘The report of the directors in office at the date of liquidation cited the causes of failure as mismanagement by [a former director], under-declarations of VAT of as much as £500,000 [$795,000] and loss of turnover following the acquisition of the business from the liquidators of the previous company, Weatherglaze plc.’ The former director blamed had resigned prior to liquidation. Mitch was one of two directors still in place and, as it turned out, he and his fellow director were also held responsible for the collapse of the company.