Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [29]
Charisma she had plenty of, and she had just as much eccentricity, says Mulholland. ‘When we did the second interview, she turned up with these pink ballet shoes on. She looked like she’d stolen them off a tramp on the street. They were so worn down, they didn’t even have toes on them any more. Once more, I thought, “This person is really on her own planet.” She’s a genuine eccentric, it’s not contrived “I’m wild and crazy”. Even if she hadn’t got a record deal she would still be this insane girl who completely marches to the beat of her own drum. She was a sweetheart, even though she was quite obviously nuts.’
Even given her relative lack of fame at the time, Mulholland still found her to be enormously trusting. ‘When I met her for the first interview, it was after a concert,’ he recalls. ‘We got in the cab and she said, “Actually, I’ve really got to take the guitar and the amp back home. Would you mind coming round to mine?” So we went back to her flat, in Camden Town, and it was just really sweet. I realised I was climbing the stairs to Amy Winehouse’s home, carrying her guitar and amp. Her flat was perfectly nice, if a bit of a mess, as you might expect. How many other pop stars would invite a journalist to their home? It was just a very sweet gesture.’
In an interview with the author, respected author and cultural commentator Mark Simpson also contrasted Amy with Robbie Williams. ‘She’s the man that Robbie Williams dreams of being,’ he said. ‘Her tattoos are much better than his, and so is her wig. She’d wipe the floor with him in a pub fight. She wrote a song about not going to rehab – all his songs are about going to rehab. With his mum. It goes without saying that the voice is also much better. Even if Williams’s voice actually got around to breaking, it wouldn’t come close.’
Chris Cooke paints a similar portrait of the ‘interviewing Amy’ experience to the one Mulholland outlined: ‘Was she a bit erratic during my interview? Well, yes, a bit – side conversations with her boyfriend and an assistant being sent out with dinner requirements did make the whole thing slightly hard to follow. But, at the same time, I would have been disappointed had it turned out any other way, because that’s why we love Amy. And, while the slight yet harmless chaos made me sound like the dullest person on Earth when I tried to pull the conversation back on topic or sought a clarification or two, in amongst it all I think I managed to get the insight I wanted on the brilliant album that is Back to Black.’
She has also once fallen asleep during an interview with the hip US magazine Blender. When asked if she did drugs she told the interviewer Jody Rosen, ‘I don’t have the time.’ Asked whether she was an alcoholic or not she said, ‘I don’t know. I’m a really big drinker. I used to be there before the pub opened, banging on the door.’ She then began falling asleep, then saying, ‘Oh, God! What is wrong with me? There’s something wrong with me. I’m just really drowsy at the moment. I’m so sorry.’
Her interviewer said,
Amy has never exactly been a picture of health, but tonight she looks especially worse for wear – hunched, heavy-lidded and just frail… Now her words are slurred, her eyelids drooping. Her head wobbles into a nod. She falls asleep for a second, wakes up with a start, mutters and drops off again. The smouldering cigarette in her left hand falls to the floor.
Another journalist, Aidan Smith, of Scotland on Sunday, expanded in his feature on Amy the ‘bit of a mess’ Mulholland hinted at in Amy’s household. ‘The fence is broken, a Yellow Pages rots by the gate, and empty cans of Stella litter the garden,’ he wrote, and continued:
Wading through the jumble of shoes in the hall, I reach the living-room. It looks like a crime scene, with