Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [10]
Amy recalls, ‘There was jazz but hip-hop was running through me, too. When I was nine or ten, me and my friends all loved En Vogue.’ However it was at the age of thirteen that one of Amy’s key musical moments occurred. One day she heard ‘Leader of the Pack’, by the Shangri-Las and fell in love with the girl band’s sound. More than anything, this moment pushed her towards a career in music herself. One of America’s leading girl groups of the 1960s, the Shangri-Las performed songs that were concerned with lost love and other teenage dramas. As well as ‘Leader of the Pack’, their other well-known songs include ‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’ (later covered by rockers Aerosmith), ‘Out in the Streets’ (covered by Blondie), and the war romance classic ‘Long Live Our Love’.
As well as the sounds of jazz music filling the house, visitors were always coming and going and it was a happy household for Amy initially. Her schooldays were filled with fun, and it was at the age of four that Amy first met her friend Juliette Ashby at Osidge Primary School. The school’s website nowadays has a mini-manifesto on its homepage. Among its policies are ‘We recognise that children are individuals and have different needs.’ Well, Amy and Juliette were definitely individuals from the start. They would egg each other on to do naughty things. ‘We were a bit nutty,’ recalls Ashby, ‘and we were always in trouble.’ They would therefore often find themselves at the school reception desk, where pupils were sent if they had misbehaved. One day, as they stood at the desk, they told a male pupil that if he didn’t pull his pants down that they would no longer remain friends with him. The schoolboy duly obliged and Ashby recalls that incident as the one that made them truly bond. The friendship remains strong to this day but there were difficult moments back in the school days. Ashby claims she once made Amy a friendship brooch but that her friend ungratefully threw it in a sandpit.
‘She’s an idiot – I never did that,’ counters Amy. ‘She was the one with the upper hand. Juliette always had strawberry shoelaces in her bag, and you knew you were flavour of the day if she offered you one.’ Ashby admits that their friendship has at times been tested. ‘Like when she acts like a dickhead and I have to pick her up, which is more or less all the time.’
Even so, Ashby utterly trusts her friend. ‘We both know that we’d rescue each other from a burning building if we had to. We’ve got that understanding. You can rely on your friends to be there when your family have totally washed their hands of you.’
One of their favourite tricks involved one of the pair running from the classroom in floods of tears, whereupon the other would say that they’d have to go out and comfort her. ‘And then we’d just sit in a room somewhere, laughing for the rest of the lesson,’ says Ashby. Little surprise, then, that teachers would try to split the pair up. Indeed, once they progressed to secondary school, even the girls’ mothers pleaded with the school to not let their girls sit together. Consequently, they hardly saw each other between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. ‘I was a proper little shit,’ admits Amy. ‘I used to bunk off school and get my boyfriend round. My mum used to come home from work at lunchtime and we’d be lying around in dressing gowns!
‘I was cute up to the age of about five but then I got naughty. I was very naughty. Very, very, very naughty. When everyone else went out for first play we went through all their lunchboxes and ate all their crisps. And, when they came in from play, half of their lunches would be missing. I grew out of it by the time I was about nine, though.’
When Janis wrote an open letter to her daughter through the pages of the News of the World in 2007, she spoke of Amy’s childhood:
Even when you were only a rosy-cheeked five-year-old singing into a hairbrush in front of the mirror, you had a will as stubborn as a mule. Do you remember? We couldn’t ever