Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [16]
It has been said that the best way to find the school is ‘to take a train from London Bridge, disembark at Selhurst and follow the 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 allowed you to do that. I’m really sanguine about people who leave the school and say, “I did this, it’s nothing to do with where I went to school.”’
As for Amy, the advantage of the BRIT school was that there were hardly any boys. ‘I was like, “Where’s the men? What is going on?” So I used to lock myself away from the time of fifteen and just do music, because I hated the school. Every lunchtime, every break, I’d be up in the music room playing a guitar or piano.’
As well as her hours in the music room, it was this time that Amy first fell in love with getting tattoos. ‘I just wanted a Betty Boop on my bum,’ she chuckled. ‘I just like tattoos. My parents pretty much realised that I would do whatever I wanted, and that was it, really.’
Of her experiences of two stage schools, Amy is as forthright as one would expect. ‘I’m always happy to blow up any misconceptions that people have about stage school ’cos everyone thinks it’s really nasty there, but it’s not,’ she says of the star-maker factory. ‘I went to the BRIT School as well and that was shit. But Sylvia Young set me up to be a strong person,’ she decides. So it’s not all boobs out, bums in? ‘No, it is like that, but…’
Amy might be dismissive of the BRIT School but many associated with it are hugely proud of her involvement. BBC 6 Music DJ Natasha Desborough said, ‘The likes of the Kooks and Amy Winehouse have put Croydon on the map because of the success of the BRIT School. Even though they’re not originally from Croydon, they’ve been nurtured here, which should make everyone proud – I certainly am.’
However, Amy was ready to make her first big splash.
Chapter Three
SIMON SAYS
By this stage, Amy was singing regularly with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. While performing with the orchestra, she was spotted by some very well-connected people. One of the people they were associated with was a certain Simon Fuller.
Fuller has been described in many different ways, some of them hysterically complimentary, some of them wildly derogatory. Born on 17 May 1960, Fuller has become perhaps the most important figure in the entertainment business. He has also been named by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. ‘My business is creating fame and celebrity, and I’m one of the best in the world. I know it to the finest detail.’ Not half! He started off working at Chrysalis, in publishing and