AMY WINEHOUSE 1983-2011
PUBLISHED 1 MONTH AGO
In memory of Amy, former Dazed editor Callum McGeoch recalls meeting the iconic singer for one of her very first magazine interviews, back in 2003
When the promo sampler of Amy Winehouse’s debut album 'Frank' was first dropped into the Dazed office stereo in late spring 2003, expectations couldn’t have been much lower. What have we here? A teenaged north London stage school dropout managed by the man behind the Spice Girls, who cites Dinah Washington, Nina Simone and Sinatra as her influences? Yeah right.
And yet by the time opener 'Stronger than Me' had hit its stride her place in the next issue was booked. The Marlboro and cognac voice would’ve done it alone, putting all the Popstars winners then clogging up the charts to shame. But it was the cute lyric - at once old fashioned and of the moment, bolshie yet vulnerable, bitter but funny - that was most arresting. If a 19 year-old cockney Jewish princess really had created this, then we needed to meet her.
Two weeks later, in a café around the corner from the Dazed office, we did meet. Straight away the contradictions became even more starkly apparent. Here was this puckish, prodigious girl who was not just mimicking but fully inhabiting an idiom ordinarily the preserve of hard-bitten African American divas.
Her voice, so sublimely seductive in song was more broken-nosed east end street fighter in conversation. She was both cocky and nervy; itching to finally get a record out and find her audience, but clearly anxious about being judged.
Maybe there were some signs that she was just beginning to construct the tough exo-skeleton she hoped would protect her fragile, restless soul from the intrusions and examinations that her gifts would inevitably bring upon her. Of which I suppose, this interview was one of the first of many.
Mostly though she was open, funny, optimistic and never more wide-eyed than when talking about the music she loved.
Here is part of our conversation…
Dazed&Confused: How did you get discovered?
Amy Winehouse: When I first had any kind of interest, it was through my friend Tyler [James]. He was 19 and I went to school with him. He was talking to his A&R guy Nicky, and Nicky was saying ‘Oh, I heard some girl on the radio today singing Jazz, there’s something about Jazz’. Tyler said ‘Well, if you want someone who sings Jazz then my girl Amy, she’s the Jazz girl’ and that was it really. I just sent him out a little demo, which was a jazz demo, I was even writing songs at that point.
D&C: What was on that demo?
Amy Winehouse: The demo was two jazz standards but they were really cheesy, really straight backing tracks. I’m surprised he rang me. I mean, I sang them alright but they were really cheesy, really funny. It was 'Night & Day' and 'Fly Me To The Moon' or something.
D&C: Have you been singing jazz for a long time?
Amy Winehouse: Yeah, I’ve been singing jazz for maybe six years.
D&C: Because that’s what your voice is best suited for?
Amy Winehouse: It was my first love, well it wasn’t my first musical love but it was always there, it was always very present. I mean, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan. They were always there, in my house, what my parents would listen to.
D&C: Are they musicians?
Amy Winehouse: No, my mum is a pharmacist and my dad’s a cab driver, well, he will be in a couple of months, he’s doing the knowledge at the moment. I’m so proud of him; he’s been working so hard my dad. He’s messed up a couple of the appearances but he’s persevered, you know. He’s very impatient so for him to have done this and worked hard for it and then to have gone back and done things that he’s failed at, you know that’s a very admirable thing. He always had the jazz thing in the house, always, from when I was a baby and my mum liked folkier stuff like James Taylor and Carole King, and I got into them quite heavily.
D&C: So your parents had good music taste?
Amy Winehouse: Yeah and my dad was really into the Beatles, like really into the Beatles. And my dad just used to sing all the time, around the house. He still does wherever he goes, he’s wicked, and his wife’s like ‘Shut up, Mitchell!’. Everywhere he goes, everywhere – ‘Everyone knows you can sing, shut up!’ stuff like that. He is good though, but he never did anything with it but he just chose to be a double glazing sales person in London.
D&C: Where did you grow up?
Amy Winehouse: I grew up in North London, I’ve always lived in London. My dad’s from East London. My mum’s from Brooklyn but she moved to East London. This is cute actually. They lived on the same street when they were kids but they didn’t know each other. My mum knew my dad as the boy up the road who used to knick the bin lids and then they got married. So, when they were older they were like ‘I used to live on Commercial Street’ and my mum was like ‘So, did I!’ Very romantic.
D&C: So, they lived together, she went to Brooklyn and then came back?
Amy Winehouse: No my mum was born in Brooklyn but she came to England when she was really young, when she was two, really young. She’s not American at all with her manner and her speaking.
D&C: So, your parents being into jazz and folk didn’t make you want to rebel against that?
Amy Winehouse: Not really, at all, because while I had this music going on the parallel was at school I was doing very cheesy, musical theatre, very over the top. I knew I wanted to perform and the only thing I could think of to do, which was close to what I wanted to do, was I wanted to sing and I wanted to dance and I wanted to act, all at once. Musicals are the only thing you do with that kind of thing. I just realised it wasn’t for me, it took me a good two or three years of doing tap and doing ballet and singing “Where Is The Love?” and all that cheesy shit. It took me a good while to realise that I loved the songs in the musicals, the actual songs. But I preferred them when they were taken out of their context in the musical and messed around with by someone like the Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, you know.
D&C: People that would take it somewhere else?
Amy Winehouse: Yeah, take it somewhere else and interpret it their way, you know? My idols are people that took songs and made them completely theirs. Which is why Dinah Washington is one of my favourite singers because she was doing the same songs everyone was doing, you know how people would just do all the same songs at the time because there was the same catalogue of songs going round at the time. And she would do something and after she would do it people would leave it because she’d of done it so good they would just be like ‘Shit, Dinah’s done that we better leave it now”. Like, she would just make it hers, like really make it hers.
D&C: So, were you at stage school or normal school?
Amy Winehouse: I was at stage school. I went to both because I kept getting kicked out of a few schools. I went to Sylvia Young’s but I was only there for about a year, a year and a half, because I got kicked out.
D&C: Why were you kicked out?
Amy Winehouse: It really wasn’t anything. Like, I had my nose pierced and they sent me home. It’s tragic. It’s really sad.
D&C: Did you study jazz?
Amy Winehouse: No, I’ve never studied it formally.
D&C: You seem to know quite a lot about the history of it, have you read books?
Amy Winehouse: No, I mean, No. I just listen to the actual music. You know what? You know those documentaries that came out? A guy called Ken Burns?
D&C: Yeah!
Amy Winehouse: Yeah, I’ve got them on video. What was that like 2 or 3 years ago? When that came out that cemented a lot of different things for me because them videos were so good. They weren’t only the history of jazz; it was jazz relevant to social history and you got to see how the different types of jazz evolved.