Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [8]
‘I’m not religious at all. I think faith is something that gives you strength. I believe in fate and I believe that things happen for a reason but I don’t think that there’s a high power, necessarily. I believe in karma very much, though. There are so many rude people around and they’re the people that don’t have any real friends. And relationships with people – with your mum, your nan, your dog – are what you get the most happiness in life from. Apart from shoes and bags.’
Family girl Amy was brought up in a neat, detached home by her parents Mitchell and Janis. Mitchell Winehouse, known as Mitch, was a taxi driver and amateur singer. He was a big fan of artists such as Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra and the sounds of these men’s music filled the house as Amy grew up. ‘My dad’s great,’ says Amy. ‘He’s like the karaoke Sinatra. He has a CD in his cab of all the backing tracks. He could be a lounge act, he’s that good.’
Mitch’s mother, too, had links with music. She had once dated the legendary musician and jazz club owner Ronnie Scott. However, the relationship hit an impenetrable Catch 22. ‘She wouldn’t have sex with him until they married, and he wanted to marry her but wouldn’t unless they had sex before ’cos he didn’t know whether he would enjoy himself. So he went off.’
Mitchell, in defending his daughter, once said, ‘My daughter isn’t drug-crazed. Even when I was a young man I dabbled – what young person hasn’t?’ He adds, ‘What Amy writes is true to life, and sometimes it’s painful. “What Is It About Men?” was fair enough. She didn’t lie about it – she wrote, “All the shit my mother went through.” It was true. I did put her mother through a lot of shit. But I was only unfaithful to her once.’
However, she is keen to stress that she received lots of love and affection from her father. ‘When I was little, if I walked into a room where my dad was, I’d get kissed and cuddled by him. He was the same with my mum when they were still together. Because he was so like that, she was less so.’ She has also said that she is ‘a lot like my dad. We’re both the sort of characters who believe it’s important to get stuff done and to be honest with people.’
Mitchell remembers singing along with Amy when she was a child. He would begin singing a song – Frank Sinatra’s ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’, for instance – and then leave occasional lines out, allowing Amy to fill the gaps. ‘Mitchell and Amy were close,’ remembers her mother Janis. ‘Her father would sing Sinatra to her and, because he always sang, she was always singing, even in school. Her teachers had to tell her to stop doing it in lessons.’ Janis, who took an Open University science degree before studying at the London School of Pharmacy, also had musical connections: her brothers were professional jazz musicians. The couple had moved from a cramped two-bedroom flat to a thirties semi to a pretty three-bedroom Victorian terrace in Southgate.
There they had their first child, Alex, and then, four years later, Amy. ‘Amy was a beautiful child – always busy, always curious,’ remembers Janis. Scare stories about Amy’s chaotic lifestyle now regularly fill the newspapers and as a child she had two memorable brushes with disaster: as a toddler she nearly choked on Cellophane while sitting in her pram, and she once went missing in the local park. One of Amy’s early memories is having a crush on the children’s television presenter Philip Schofield. She used to urge her mother to leave her father and marry Schofield instead.
Amy also enjoyed being with her grandmother, who introduced Amy and her brother to grooming. ‘God rest her soul, she pretty much trained me and my brother. He’d give her a pedicure and I’d do her nails and her hair,’ said Amy. On hearing this, her husband Blake joked, ‘It might be quite emasculating for a young boy of eight to be pedicuring his grandmother.’
Her nan was clearly a big influence on Amy. When asked about her phobias, she said, ‘I don’t think I’m scared of anything. I’m not scared of snakes or spiders or anything. But I am scared of my