Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [31]
‘It really was the last great hairdo we’ve seen in thirty years,’ adds Jackie Summers of Modern Salon magazine.
Meanwhile, UK Vogue’s fashion features writer Sarah Harris says, ‘It is about fashion, owning a style, individuality and confidence, as well as success and talent. Not just with clothes but beauty, too. Amy Winehouse’s hair has become as much a signature as her clothes.’ Not just her signature, but an enduring mystery, too. ‘Amy won’t even tell her stylist, who also happens to be her best friend, what she does to get her hair like that,’ says a friend. Amy’s obsessed with her hair and only does it herself – it’s been a huge secret.
Celebrity hairdresser Alex Foden, who designs and makes Amy’s £150 hairpieces, cracks some of the mystery: ‘Amy originally created the look herself but on a much smaller scale. But since I started working with her the beehive has simply got bigger and bigger – the bigger the better. Although she backcombed her own hair in the beginning, now we use furballs made from part synthetic, part real hair. These are stuffed inside hairnets and Amy’s own hair is placed over the top of them and held in place with hairpins.
‘It takes about forty minutes to fit a new hairpiece but only about five minutes to pin it up every morning once it’s been made. The beehive is particularly big in the capital but is taking off everywhere as Amy becomes more popular. She is getting through one hairpiece a week at the moment so they are fairly high-maintenance, but as long as you do not sleep in one or go to the gym wearing one they can last a lot longer. As well as being very versatile, a taller, thinner beehive can alter the appearance of a person’s natural body shape, adding height and making the face and body look leaner.’
It has very much caught on, too. ‘Amy Winehouse has a lot to answer for!’ laughs Lorraine Ellis, manager at the Hair Spa in Thornton Hall Hotel in Thornton Hough. ‘But big hair is a really key trend this season and that means everything from the beehive look with a high crown, like Amy’s, to a 1980s wavy style that Coleen’s [McLoughlin, Wayne Rooney’s fiancée] been seen with of late. That’s a great look because you can wear it in the day and keep it quite soft using heated rollers, and then use Velcro rollers and tongs to glam it up a bit for night.’
The period between Frank and Back to Black is shrouded in mystery. Amy says, ‘I started drinking and I fell in love.’
And she wrote a great album.
Back to Black has a dark name and a dark background. ‘I was very hurt by something but I managed to make something good out of a bad situation,’ says Amy. ‘I think when I wrote Back to Black I was left in a situation where I wasn’t working, and when I split up with this fellow I didn’t have anything to go back to. I guess when you pick up the pieces from a relationship you go back to what you know and try to throw yourself into something. And I had nothing – I wasn’t working. So I was just playing pool every day, getting drunk.’
While playing pool, Amy was filling the jukebox of her local pub with coins and the music she heard inspired her to write new songs. Shirley Bassey and the Angels were among the acts she was listening to but, as ever, the Shangri-Las were an inspiration. ‘I know there are people in the world who have worse problems than falling in love and having it blow up in your face,’ she said of the problems she was encountering with her boyfriend Blake at this time. ‘But I didn’t want to just wake up drinking, and crying, and listening to the Shangri-Las, and go to sleep, and wake up drinking, and listening to the Shangri-Las. So I turned it into songs, and that’s how I got through it.
‘I think all the stuff I was listening to, like a lot of doo-wop, a lot of sixties soul, Motown, girl groups, I tend to be influenced by whatever I’m listening to, so I think, I guess it