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[Bogart]

Interview from 17th April, 2004. A few days before the Glasgow Cottiers gig, Amy was interviewed by this Scottish newsagency at her home. She's relaxed and talks about her vision on relationships while Tyler James is at the kitchen.

Jazz cocktails at the Winehouse

THE fence is broken, a Yellow Pages rots by the gate, and empty cans of Stella litter the garden. Wading through the jumble of shoes in the hall, I reach the living-room. It looks like a crime scene, with mess everywhere: CDs and videos... discarded clothes - pants! - and half-drunk cups of coffee... a pair of giant comedy sunglasses and a cushion embroidered with a crude likeness of Patrick Swayze. I ignore the football in the corner; only a woman could live here.

"Sit anywhere you want," says Amy Winehouse, disappearing into the kitchen. What’s the choice? The sofa is heavily stained and there isn’t a flat surface that is not covered in clutter and, well, the cushion, the Swayze mug, it just doesn’t seem right. This is chez Amy, and in her defence, she’s rarely around. "I haven’t got time to just be me any more," she sighs, after failing to locate any more coffee. She perches on top of Patrick. "F***, I’m not, you know, living my life."


The reasons for this are simple. Since the release of her debut album, Frank, everyone has wanted a piece of Winehouse. The cocktail of jazz and hip hop was intriguing in itself. Then there was the songs’ subject matter: flirty, dirty stuff about jealousy and betrayal, ladettes and wearers of "F*** me pumps". The mostly male music press dutifully detailed the Jewish Princess pout and the Jessica Rabbit wiggle and wondered how much Winehouse, then still in her teens, was writing direct from the heart. Headlines such as "I believe in casual sex" were a PR’s dream.


In person, she’s petite. You’re expecting 6ft-plus, even without her pumps, and cartoon curves. And of course the voice - just-got-out-of-bed, or more likely, never-went - also makes you think black and the wrong side of 40. It’s brought Winehouse, now 20, comparisons with Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan, all of them gratefully received. But when she talks about her short life and career to date, the voice is pure North London-knoworramean?


In keeping with the chaos of her flat, she scatters vowels everywhere. As she lets her wool dress fall off her shoulder then leans a bare arm against a radiator, I ask if Camden is her manor and she says no, she’s from "firther noorth". I ask when she started singing and she says: "I’ve always sang, my dad sang, I thought everyone sang and that my mum was just unlucky. All my best friends, like Tyler and Juliette, are singwriters and songers. F***, you knoworramean, doncha?


"But as a little kid I was too shy to sing and my brother was the one standing on a chair in his school uniform and doing his Frank Sinatra." She points to a faded colour snap on the wall. "That’s him holding my Cabbage Patch Doll to ransom. Then eventually, when I was about nine, I did it. ‘Sing!’ my nana would shout. ‘And smile!’ But I still needed to hold a fan to my face for ‘Eternal Flame’: ‘Close your eyes, give me your hand...’" Well, she’s not shy any more.


Winehouse sports a diamond stud in her cheek, although it’s the one in her nose that got her chucked out of the Sylvia Young Theatre School, the fame academy for so many pop babes and soap stunnas. "When I was younger I wanted to be in musicals. That’s something I could never do now but all those songs from the shows, those pure, simple, beautiful songs, I loved them. And from there I got into jazz."


Winehouse can be loosely categorised alongside the likes of Norah Jones, Jamie Cullum and Joss Stone, all of them performers in a genre much older than their tender years. Rather than inheriting the preferences of big brothers or sisters, they seem to have dived straight into their parents’ record collections.


She claims to be completely ignorant of pop. "I don’t really hear it. It doesn’t register, it goes past me." (Apart, that is, from old Bangles hits.) Contemporaries at Sylvia Young’s included members of Busted and Jon Lee, late of S Club 7. "I wasn’t gregarious. There were lots of totally insufferable kids there who’d come into class and announce, ‘My mummy’s coming to pick me up for an audition at three o’clock’. I was a little weirdo, I suppose, in that young, random way, but I wasn’t a loner. Friends would go, ‘Come and be weird with us!’"


So jazz - dead man’s music, no? "Well, it is old music. It’s also excluding music. At jazz gigs, everyone’s got their eyes closed or they’re studying the soloist really intently. If you don’t like hip hop, you can still go to a hip hop gig and get off on the girls dancing with each other, everyone waving their drinks in the air and passing joints around - it’s a nice vibe. I’m trying to mix up the styles which is why I don’t sing standards. I’m taking old music and trying to make something new. Maybe I’ll sing covers when I’m older, but I’m young and I want to write songs about my life now."


She’s certainly doing that. On ‘Stronger Than Me’ she berates her passive boyfriend, calls him a ladyboy and mockingly inquires: "Are you gay?" This is not Tyler James, her beau, a "songer/singwriter", who’s currently busying himself in the kitchen - but an ex, and possibly the same one featured in ‘I Heard Love Is Blind’ where Winehouse explains away a one-night stand on the basis that the other man looked like him ("Just not as tall but I couldn’t tell/ It was dark and I was lying down").


A tangled web and no mistake. "That’s life, innit? And that’s the sort of thing a man would say... ‘I slept with this girl, she was blonde like you and she had this bit at the front of her hair like you, but baby it didn’t mean anything.’ Ha ha. So there was a bit of role-reversal going on there.


"The gay thing was me just wanting some affection. It’s not like I need to be the centre of attention all the time. But if my man comes round and turns on the TV, unless it’s football I’m like, ‘Are you even attracted to me?’"


She upset the gay press with that one and has also given good - rude - quote about Dido, Posh Spice and Pop Idol svengali Simon Fuller, who’s ultimately her boss ("He’s like a Ken doll, he’s practically shining").


Winehouse can contradict herself, but that is understandable - she’s young and is still working it all out. Sometimes, many times in fact, the personification of young, urban, streetwise, sassy, Samantha from Sex and the City-lovin’ womanhood, she will then say things like: "It’s important to me that my man feels like a man and I’ll always try to make him feel like a king - does that mean I’m old-fashioned?"


Today, perhaps. But tomorrow, who knows? The impetuosity of youth will take Winehouse on a few more tottering twists and turns. On Wednesday she makes her Scottish debut, with Tyler James - touted as the British Justin Timberlake, no less - as warm-up act.


However long it lasts for him, life in tow with Winehouse shouldn’t be dull. He might even get a song out of it, because she’s bound to.

http://www.scotsman....house-1-1392665