Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [13]
The misdemeanours included not wearing her school uniform in the correct manner, chewing gum during class and wearing a silver nose ring. Young asked Amy to remove it which she did – only to replace it an hour later. ‘We found a way of coexisting,’ Amy’s teacher remembers. ‘She would break the rules; I would tell her off; and she would acknowledge it. She could be disruptive in class, too, but this was largely because she didn’t concentrate.’
Amy was also not overfriendly with her fellow pupils. ‘I wasn’t gregarious,’ she shrugs. There were lots of totally insufferable kids there who’d come into class and announce, “My mummy’s coming to pick me up for an audition at three o’clock.” I was a little weirdo, I suppose, in that young, random way, but I wasn’t a loner. Friends would go, “Come and be weird with us!”’
Amy was, however, in Young’s own words ‘wonderfully clever’. She particularly enjoyed English lessons. She was, accordingly, moved one year ahead of her age group. ‘In class she would write extraordinary notes to her friends. These were not mere jottings. Amy was prolific. Every millimetre of the page was crammed with her writing, which seemed to flow off the paper with her energy.’ These notes would frequently include swearwords and sometimes lyrics, too.
Amy says now, ‘I was at stage school for a year and a half but all I did was sing songs with other people. You can’t be taught how to sing. After I left school I wanted to earn a living and I got lucky when a friend of a friend came to see me at a jazz gig and helped me get a break.’
One of her fellow pupils was Matt Willis, who went on to find fame with the pop band Busted and then as the king of the jungle on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!. ‘We all loved Matt at school and, yeah, I fancied him. I still do, he’s a lovely boy.’ Busted’s label mates and friends McFly are led by singer/songwriter Tom Fletcher, who remembers Amy from Sylvia Young, too. ‘I think she was asked to leave, which is the polite way of saying she was expelled,’ he says. ‘She was always in trouble, as far as I remember. I didn’t really know her but I saw her at school every day. She liked to speak her mind. I don’t remember ever hearing her sing.’
As we’ll see, the expulsion rumour was a misunderstanding.
Gem Allen, a fellow pupil, says there were few signs of Amy’s future wild ways back at Sylvia Young Theatre School. ‘I wouldn’t have predicted she would go as wild as this. Some pictures of her now are heartbreaking. I just think, “She’s my old schoolfriend, I hope she’s OK.” I hope Amy’s sorting herself out but it is shocking to see things such as when she pulled out of the MTV awards. I couldn’t believe it because that had always been her dream.
‘Amy was a character at school. She was a wild girl but it was different from the trouble she’s in now. She would call herself a witch. She used to joke she could put spells on people. One time she lay on the floor in the history class and started crawling along towards Billie, saying, “Wilhelmina” – her nickname for Billie – “I’m coming to get you” in a witchy voice.’
Naughty as Amy could be at times, reports that she was expelled from the school are dismissed as a ‘myth’ by Young. She claims that, without her knowledge, another teacher rang Amy’s mother and told her she would fail her GCSEs unless she was removed from the school. Young was livid. ‘I was very unhappy to discover this, and the teacher who made the call left us shortly afterwards,’ she snaps. ‘I told Amy’s mother that she wasn’t the type of child who naturally enjoys a school environment but that she would be happier with us and the vocational side of her studies than in an all-girl academic school.’
Janis remembers, ‘The principal phoned up and asked me to come in and see him. He said, “I think you should take her away.” He didn’t want children who weren’t going to get good grades and Amy wasn’t going to. She was very bright but she was always messing around. The same day, I had to take the family cat Katie to the vet. I dropped off the cat,