Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [14]
So it was that Amy was removed from the school. She says that she ‘cried every night’ after she left. ‘The thing about stage school is that it prepares you as a person,’ she has said since. ‘It’s excellent for building character.’ So impressed was Young with her former student that she stayed in touch with her.
‘When I left Sylvia Young, I hated school so much that I didn’t want to go at all. That was horrid. I was gutted when I left, because there are some really dedicated people there, and Sylvia herself is brilliant. I pierced my nose when I was thirteen. They didn’t like that. I brought my guitar to school every day because I was a guitarist and they’d tell me I couldn’t. I was like, “Well, look, I’m a singer, a musician, not an academic…” But that’s what made me a better person, it showed me that you can’t really be taught stuff: you have to go out there and find out for yourself.
She then attended the Mount School in Mill Hill. Established in May 1925, the Mount has as its motto ‘To be, rather than to seem to be’. When it was last inspected, the report found that it had a friendly, family atmosphere, with a caring and supportive ethos. Amy, though, was bored out of her wits there.
‘There was nothing to do at that school but run the teachers,’ she says, referring to the absence of the opposite gender to taunt and tease. ‘I got a D in music because my teacher wouldn’t submit my course work because I used to be so nasty.’
Cannabis was a great comfort to her at this point, as was music of course. Her favourite around this time included Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Clifford Brown and Sarah Vaughan. ‘To hear subtle music like that, like a trio could give more to me than a big band, that’s when I learned about less is more,’ she said. ‘I started loving jazz and getting so much from it. There was nothing out there for me [musically]. Everything I liked, to this day, that was new was spoken word, rappers. To me that’s the new jazz. I’m talking about progressive rap, not stuff like P Diddy. Mos Def, Nas, Busta Rhymes – those are the Miles [Davis] to me now.’
Even at this point, Amy’s relatives were already doing their best to drum up support for her musical career. Iconic writer Julie Burchill is, as we’ve seen, an enthusiastic admirer of Amy nowadays. However, in an interview with the author, Burchill reveals that she was first made aware of Amy years before she became famous. While Burchill was making a television programme about her father’s death from asbestosis, she crossed paths with Amy’s aunt, Debra Milne, who is a consultant histopathologist in Sunderland. Milne examined Burchill’s father’s autopsy for the programme and is featured talking to her on camera.
‘When the cameras stopped rolling,’ remembers Burchill, ‘she asked me, “Do you still write about music?” I said, “Not really,” and Debra added, “Because I wondered if you’d like to see my niece next week. She’s really great though she’s only sixteen. Her name is Amy Winehouse. Years later, suddenly Amy was everywhere I looked. Names are the one thing I always remember, and also because it was a Jewish name and so pretty it stuck in my mind particularly.’
Around the same time, Amy had her first, fleeting, brush with fame when she appeared on the BBC comedy sketch programme The Fast Show. Created by university pals Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse, The Fast Show was a hit throughout for the 1990s with its characters such as Ted and Ralph, and the Suits You duo. Another memorable character was Competitive Dad, and it was in one of his sketches that Amy appeared. Dressed as a fairy in a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Amy acts with other children onstage until an exasperated Competitive Dad heckles and goes up on stage himself. In 2007, Paul Whitehouse revealed that the young girl on the stage was Amy. ‘We didn’t know she was going to be famous at the time,’ he said. ‘We only found