Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [28]
‘She was hugely revealing, incredibly honest, fantastic company. She made what could have been a very difficult situation into a very easy one. I was just very grateful to her for that. We sat down in this restaurant in Camden Town and proceeded to get incredibly drunk on sangria. Despite her reputation, I was definitely outdrinking her two to one.’
A journalist who interviewed Amy in Canada remembers a similar atmosphere. When Amy attempted to stretch out across the seating in the restaurant, a waiter expressed his distaste, prompting Amy to moan loudly, ‘You ever just want to go to McDonald’s?’
She was once also rather frank to a journalist during an interview, often and ostentatiously yawning from the offset. ‘Sorry, but it doesn’t come naturally, talking about myself,’ she said, following another yawn. ‘I don’t see what’s important about it. No offence to you, but I could be at my nan’s house right now. Or I could be waiting at home for the plumber to come and fix the washing machine.’
Even a telephone interviewer was not spared a moment of Amy drama. ‘Sorry, I’ve just been having a wee,’ said the then brazen twenty-year-old. Yes, Amy Winehouse was on the loo. ‘I’m sorry. I do it all the time. Whenever I go to the toilet I take the phone with me.’
Then she asked her telephone interrogator, ‘Have you had sex to my album? Do you know anyone who has? I’d love to know who has,’ she said. ‘That’s the test of a wicked album. Ask all your friends if they’ve ever had sex to my album. That would be cool. It would mean people can totally be themselves with my music.’
Garry Mulholland expands on this theme. ‘She came over to me as completely gauche, someone who just didn’t care,’ he says. ‘She will say exactly what’s on her mind. If it offends you or someone else, tough. At one point she was being so revealing about this guy she’d been out with, who was the subject of the songs on the first album. She started to say his name and talk about him in a lot of detail. I actually stopped the interview and said, “You know what? I really think you should stop because I could print his name and all these details. You’d really regret it, so I’m actually suggesting you stop.”
‘So I actually had to rein her in, whereas it’s normally the other way round. With Amy I had to stop her because it didn’t seem fair to this guy. She’s similar to Pete Doherty: she doesn’t have a self-censoring button. If I’d asked her the exact length and dimensions of her ex-boyfriend’s penis, she would have told me. It was extraordinary.’
Mulholland has interviewed an entire galaxy of musical stars during his career, so where does Amy fit in to his experiences? ‘She was the most honest interviewee I’ve ever sat down with,’ he says, ‘and it didn’t seem to be contrived shock tactics. She wasn’t bitchy, it was just as if she was sitting talking to her best friend about sex.’
He insists that her honesty and openness is on a different level from that displayed by certain other artists, such as Robbie Williams. ‘Robbie always comes across as someone who’s constantly begging the public for sympathy. There’s no self-pity in Amy’s revelations. Her take on it is, “This happened and that happened and now I get to write great songs about it.” When she’s talking about things like sex, there’s that “London girl” thing: a girl who can’t resist blabbing about sex to everyone. But there’s a tomboy element to it: she neither solicits your sympathy nor flirts with you. She never plays an “I’m a girl” game. She’s bullish, forthright and assertive.’
Although back in 2004, Amy was far from the celebrity she is today, Mulholland recalls that she already had that elusive quality: the X factor. ‘She got up and went to