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[Uno]

A tough act

BY John Preston | 11 March 2007



Forget all the tales of debauchery - Amy Winehouse swears she's really a shy, sensitive soul, who scarcely drinks, is a stickler for good manners and dreams of quitting music to become a mother. John Preston meets the Brit winner


In an old custard factory in Birmingham, Amy Winehouse is answering questions from teenagers who want to break into the music business.

With her twiglet legs and her huge beehive hairdo, she looks like a very tiny, very alert bird.

The two enormous rappers sitting on either side of her are at least four times her size. When one of them leans over to embrace her, she almost disappears into his armpit.

'What's the most important thing to remember if you want to make it?' someone asks.

Winehouse's answer is quite unexpected. 'Manners,' she says. 'You know, saying your pleases and your thank yous. Yeah, manners go a long way.'

It hasn't always been like this, of course. There have been occasions, and quite a few of them, when Winehouse has forgotten her manners altogether.

Last November she appeared noticeably the worse for wear on The Charlotte Church Show and allegedly assaulted a male fan after a concert in Norwich.

Then there was a memorable January evening at the G.A.Y. nightclub in London, when she threw up on stage in the middle of a song.

But all that is behind her, she says - especially now she has a number one album, 'Back to Black', as well as a Brit under her belt for Best Female Artist.

However, it soon becomes apparent that there are two distinct sides to Amy Winehouse.

At times she appears as hard-bitten as the way she sounds when she sings - a latter-day Sarah Vaughan with an immensely rich and expressive vocal range.

At others, with her sleeves slipping down over her hands and her hair extensions swaying across her face, she looks more like a gawky adolescent than a 23-year-old woman, her conversation peppered with endless mumbled 'dunnos', 'innits' and 'd'you-know-what-I-means?'

And whenever she sticks her jaw forward at the end of a sentence, which she does a good deal, it's all too easy to imagine ripples of petulance running across her features without hitting too many obstacles on the way.

Barely any effort, you suspect, would be required to turn her into an extremely stroppy little minx. Indeed, she seems close to the edge right now, moping round her hotel bedroom in a sultry haze, the upward ticks of eyeliner at the corners of her eyes in sharp contrast to her downturned mouth.

Maybe it's just tiredness. She's been doing concerts almost every night for more than a month now and there are another four well-nigh unbroken months of performing ahead of her.

Today she is here at the request of Hugo Urban Rules, a Hugo fragrances project to bring aspiring musicians into contact with their idols and offer the most talented ones a springboard into the business.

She's performing for them tonight (the concert will show on MTV UK on 23 March) and the open suitcase in the corner with a heap of unfolded clothes spilling out of it tells its own story about life on the road.

At the moment everyone wants to be her friend, and the strain is starting to tell.

When a girl comes up to her in the hotel lobby and says, 'Congratulations, Amy,' Winehouse turns to her in genuine puzzlement. 'What for?' 'For the Brit, of course,' says the girl. 'Oh, yeah…' she says. 'That… Thanks.'

Although she's delighted to have won her Brit, Winehouse insists that it's not going to change anything.

'It's just like the frosting on the cake as far as I'm concerned.' She gives a derisive snort. 'I mean, I don't feel validated by it, or anything.'

So she's not someone who needs the approval of others?

'No,' she says - or rather 'Naaah' in the north London drawl that comes sliding out of the side of her mouth. 'I'm very hard on myself, very self-critical, so if I think something is good, I'm pretty certain that it must be…' There's a long pause.

'On the other hand, I don't really believe in myself as much as I would like. I certainly don't have a blinding faith in my own ability. Actually, I think I'm probably one of the most idiotic people going. It's weird, because the musical side of me is completely different to the rest of me.

'When I'm on stage I appear to be really ballsy and confident. In fact, I'm quite a shy person, although I suppose my tattoos and stuff might make people think otherwise…'

Her voice tails away and her gaze drifts off to the middle distance. There's another long pause, and then she says abruptly, 'I'm sorry. I'm just not very good at doing this - talking about myself. I don't think I'm that interesting a person, to be honest.'

Yet there was a time not so long ago when Winehouse seldom shut up, happily slagging off her rivals - Katie Melua came in for a particular pasting - and accusing her record company of mishandling the release of her first album, 'Frank': 'The marketing was f-ed, the promotion was terrible, everything was a shambles,' she said at the time.

But here again she's changed. With success has come wariness. Now she knows that her every unguarded moment will be retold in gleeful detail in the tabloids.

'I think I've probably become tougher as a result of everything that's happened. I've learnt not to take things personally. For instance, I no longer get upset by what's written about me.

I just think it's funny. After all, it's not as if the person who's written the story has actually met me. A lot of the time it's like reading about someone I don't even know.'

Success has brought other pressures, too.

Having made it to the top, Winehouse has to work out how to stay there in a notoriously fickle business which is far more adept at chasing novelty than nurturing talent.

Does she worry about that?

'Dunno,' she says. 'Never think about it.'

'Really?' 'No, because if I do, I'll only scare myself. At least I feel totally in control of what I do, and so if I f- it up, it will be my own fault. Contrary to what's been written, I have a very good relationship with my record company; they've never told me to stop drinking or anything like that.'

Ah, yes, the drinking. This is widely held to be at the heart of Winehouse's difficulties, closely followed by her recent dramatic weight loss - a subject that's firmly off-limits today.

'In fact, I'm drinking much less than I was before because I'm working so hard that I don't really have the chance to go arse over tit. People come up to me so much that I can scarcely put a drink to my lips.

'In one sense I miss being able to go out and roll home without anyone taking any notice. But it's also quite a relief. I know I have this very self-destructive side to me and hard work helps keep that in check.'

That said, she sips - rather daintily - at a cup of tea.

From as far back as she can remember, Winehouse was different from other people.

'At school I was picked on quite a lot because of the way I looked. I suppose I was ostracised, but it was more as if I ostracised myself, if that makes any sense. I just didn't want to be like anyone else. I don't think I've changed that much except that now I've learnt to embrace the way I am, to feel comfortable with it.'

Brought up in Southgate, the London suburb where her father still works as a taxi driver, she started singing in earnest when she was ten, after years spent listening to her parents' jazz records.

'I used to sit at home and try to use my voice like an instrument, to make it do different things, express different emotions. But I never thought I was special. It was just something I did to amuse myself. I think what I liked about jazz so much was that it was very sweet and simple and somehow it seemed to capture the way that I felt.

'Even now when I listen to a jazz record it's how I imagine opium must feel. I just drift off into this happy trance. For as long as the record's playing, everything just seems better, painted in nicer colours.'

It seems strange to think of Winehouse sitting at home in north London swooning away to old jazz records while all her contemporaries were listening to the latest boy bands.

Did her friends think she was odd? 'Dunno,' she says again. 'Never thought about it. Maybe they did, but I can't say I took any notice.'

When she was 12 she went to the Sylvia Young Theatre School, but didn't last there long. She was kicked out a year later - partly for having a bad attitude and partly for having a nose stud.

Then, at 15, she was spotted by one of Simon Fuller's outriders while singing with a jazz big band. Within two years she was in the studio recording her first album.

'I never had to go and bang on people's doors or send demos around or anything like that. People came to me. If they hadn't have done, I would never have done any of this. I'd be working in an office somewhere - blissfully happy, I suspect.

'If all this vanished today, I honestly wouldn't mind. Being famous means nothing to me. Making music matters to me and obviously I want to carry on doing it. As for the rest, it's all just crap really, innit?'

Once again she sticks her jaw forward, then gives what even for her is an unusually sulky shrug. 'Basically, I don't care what anyone thinks.'

'You're a very angry person, aren't you?' 'Am I? I don't think so, although I do get very angry when I drink a lot. I don't know why - it just comes out. I think drinking breeds depression, which breeds drinking which breeds more depression…

'But when I don't drink I think I'm a perfectly nice girl. It's true that I've had my problems and maybe I'm not completely over them yet, but I think I'm getting there.'

All the songs on 'Back to Black' were prompted by the break-up of a relationship.

'I had this really bad split and I needed a bit of time afterwards to get myself back together - enough time to be able to start writing about it, but not so much time that I'd forgotten how I felt. I only ever seem to write songs when there's a problem I can't get through.

It's a way of working through my feelings. Writing helps me resolve my conflicts and makes me feel a lot better.'

'Does that mean you can only write well when you're miserable?'

'I hope not… That would be really horrible, wouldn't it? But all the best songs are passionate. I'm always looking to make something feel emotionally real, so that there's nothing fake about it.'

To spend any time with Amy Winehouse is to find yourself swept by wildly differing reactions. Part of you wants to throw a blanket round her shoulders and get some food down her neck, and part of you - at least if you're anything like me - has to fight a strong desire to wring it.

At this point Winehouse's boyfriend, Alex, turns up. The change in her is instantaneous.

She drapes her arms around him and immediately starts worrying about whether he's been eating enough green vegetables.

Even when he tells her - affectionately - that she looks like a Lithuanian street sweeper, she looks delighted.

It's plain that, beneath her surface stroppiness, here is someone who's both very needy and extremely eager to please.

Tomorrow she'll be in Liverpool, the next night in Manchester.

Then comes Glasgow, then Belfast, then Newcastle, then Sheffield, then London, then Australia, then America, then a new album and then finally - several months down the line - a rest.

'Sometimes I think that in a parallel universe I wouldn't be a musician at all. I'd be a mum. In fact, all my friends call me Mum because I'm so maternal.

'At the moment I don't look forward much because there doesn't seem any point, but when I do I imagine myself barefoot and pregnant somewhere. Yeah,' she says gazing at her suitcase with its erupted tangle of clothes spilling out on to the floor.


http://fashion.teleg...-tough-act.html

[ancre]

I like every little bit of Amys quotes there. Thanks for sharing.

'What's the most important thing to remember if you want to make it?' someone asks.
'Manners,' she says. 'You know, saying your pleases and your thank yous. Yeah, manners go a long way.'

When a girl comes up to her in the hotel lobby and says, 'Congratulations, Amy,' Winehouse turns to her in genuine puzzlement. 'What for?' 'For the Brit, of course,' says the girl. 'Oh, yeah…' she says. 'That… Thanks.'
'It[Grammy] is just like the frosting on the cake as far as I'm concerned.' She gives a derisive snort. 'I mean, I don't feel validated by it, or anything.'

'I'm very hard on myself, very self-critical, so if I think something is good, I'm pretty certain that it must be…On the other hand, I don't really believe in myself as much as I would like. I certainly don't have a blinding faith in my own ability. Actually, I think I'm probably one of the most idiotic people going. It's weird, because the musical side of me is completely different to the rest of me.When I'm on stage I appear to be really ballsy and confident. In fact, I'm quite a shy person, although I suppose my tattoos and stuff might make people think otherwise…'

'I'm sorry. I'm just not very good at doing this - talking about myself. I don't think I'm that interesting a person, to be honest.'

'I think I've probably become tougher as a result of everything that's happened. I've learnt not to take things personally. For instance, I no longer get upset by what's written about me.I just think it's funny. After all, it's not as if the person who's written the story has actually met me. A lot of the time it's like reading about someone I don't even know.'

'At least I feel totally in control of what I do, and so if I f- it up, it will be my own fault.'

'In fact, I'm drinking much less than I was before because I'm working so hard that I don't really have the chance to go arse over tit. People come up to me so much that I can scarcely put a drink to my lips.In one sense I miss being able to go out and roll home without anyone taking any notice. But it's also quite a relief. I know I have this very self-destructive side to me and hard work helps keep that in check.' That said, she sips - rather daintily - at a cup of tea.

'At school I was picked on quite a lot because of the way I looked. I suppose I was ostracised, but it was more as if I ostracised myself, if that makes any sense. I just didn't want to be like anyone else. I don't think I've changed that much except that now I've learnt to embrace the way I am, to feel comfortable with it.'

'I used to sit at home and try to use my voice like an instrument, to make it do different things, express different emotions. But I never thought I was special. It was just something I did to amuse myself. I think what I liked about jazz so much was that it was very sweet and simple and somehow it seemed to capture the way that I felt. Even now when I listen to a jazz record it's how I imagine opium must feel. I just drift off into this happy trance. For as long as the record's playing, everything just seems better, painted in nicer colours.'

'People came to me. If they hadn't have done, I would never have done any of this. I'd be working in an office somewhere - blissfully happy, I suspect.

'If all this vanished today, I honestly wouldn't mind. Being famous means nothing to me. Making music matters to me and obviously I want to carry on doing it. As for the rest, it's all just crap really, innit?'

'But when I don't drink I think I'm a perfectly nice girl. It's true that I've had my problems and maybe I'm not completely over them yet, but I think I'm getting there.'

'I only ever seem to write songs when there's a problem I can't get through.It's a way of working through my feelings. Writing helps me resolve my conflicts and makes me feel a lot better.' 'Does that mean you can only write well when you're miserable?'
'I hope not… That would be really horrible, wouldn't it? But all the best songs are passionate. I'm always looking to make something feel emotionally real, so that there's nothing fake about it.'

She drapes her arms around him [Blake] and immediately starts worrying about whether he's been eating enough green vegetables [ :) ]. Even when he tells her - affectionately - that she looks like a Lithuanian street sweeper [wtf??????], she looks delighted [!?].

'Sometimes I think that in a parallel universe I wouldn't be a musician at all. I'd be a mum. In fact, all my friends call me Mum because I'm so maternal. At the moment I don't look forward much because there doesn't seem any point, but when I do I imagine myself barefoot and pregnant somewhere. Yeah,'

***

Words in [] are added by me. haha, I've just learned new expression: to go arse over tit

Edited by ancre, 27 September 2013 - 11:56 AM.

[crol]

There were plans to come to Australia?! :'(