Amy, My Daughter (4 page)

4
FRANK
– GIVING A DAMN

In the autumn of 2002, EMI flew Amy out to Miami Beach to start working with the producer Salaam Remi. By coincidence, or maybe it was intentional, Tyler James was also in Miami, working on another project; Nick Shymansky made up the trio. They were put up at the fantastic art-deco Raleigh Hotel, where they had a ball for about six weeks. The Raleigh featured in the film
The Birdcage
, starring Robin Williams, which Amy loved. Although she and Tyler were in the studio all day, they also spent a lot of time sitting on the beach, Amy doing crosswords, and danced the night away at hip-hop clubs.

Because she had gone to the US to record the album, I wasn't all that involved in Amy's rehearsals and studio work, but I know she adored Salaam Remi, who co-produced
Frank
with the equally brilliant Commissioner Gordon. Salaam was already big, having produced a number of tracks for the Fugees, and Amy loved his stuff. His hip-hop and reggae influences can be clearly heard on the album. They soon became good friends and wrote a number of songs together.

In Miami Amy met Ryan Toby, who had starred in
Sister Act 2
when he was still a kid and was now in the R&B/hip-hop trio City High. He'd heard of Amy and Tyler through a friend at EMI in Miami and wanted to work with them. He had a beautiful house in the city where Amy and Tyler became regular guests. As well as working on her own songs, Amy was collaborating with Tyler. One night in Ryan's garden, they wrote the fabulous ‘Best For Me'. The track appears on Tyler's first album,
The Unlikely Lad
, where you can hear him and Amy together on vocals. Amy also wrote ‘Long Day' and ‘Procrastination' for him and allowed him to change them for his recording.

Amy sent me this Valentine's Day card from Miami, while recording tracks for
Frank
in 2003.

 

By the time Amy had returned from Miami
Frank
was almost in the can but, oddly, though she'd signed with EMI for publishing nearly a year earlier, she still hadn't signed with a record label. I kept asking anyone who'd listen to let me hear Amy's songs, and eventually 19 gave me a sampler of six tracks from
Frank.

I put the CD on, not knowing what to expect. Was it going to be jazz? Rap? Or hip-hop? The drum beat started, then Amy's voice – as if she was in the room with me. To be honest, the first few times I played that CD I couldn't have told you anything about the music. All I heard was my daughter's voice, strong and clear and powerful.

I turned to Jane. ‘This is really good – but isn't it too adult? The kids aren't going to buy it.'

Jane disagreed.

I rang Amy, and told her how much we we'd loved the sampler. ‘Your voice just blew me away,' I said.

‘Ah, thanks, Dad,' Amy replied.

Apart from the sampler, though, I still hadn't heard the songs that were on the short-list for
Frank
and Amy seemed a bit reticent about letting me listen to them. Maybe she thought lyrics like ‘the only time I hold your hand is to get the angle right'
might shock me or that I'd embarrass her. I teased her after I'd finally heard the song.

‘I want to ask you a question,' I said. ‘That song “In My Bed” when you sing—'

‘Dad! I don't want to talk about it!'

Amy came over to Jane's and my house when she was sorting out the tracks for
Frank
. She had a load of recordings on CDs and I was flicking through them when she snatched one away from me. ‘You don't want to listen to that one, Dad,' she said. ‘It's about you.'

You'd have thought she'd know better. It was a red rag to a bull and I insisted she played
‘
What Is It About Men'. When I heard her sing I immediately understood why she'd thought I wouldn't want to listen to it:

 

Understand, once he was a family man
So surely I would never, ever go through it first hand
Emulate all the shit my mother hates
I can't help but demonstrate my Freudian fate.

 

I wasn't upset, but it did make me think that perhaps my leaving Janis had had a more profound effect on Amy than I'd previously thought or Amy had demonstrated. I didn't need to ask her how she felt now because she'd laid herself bare in that song. All those times I'd seen Amy scribbling in her notebooks, she'd been writing this stuff down. The lyrics were so well observed, pertinent and, frankly, bang on. Amy was one of life's great observers. She stored her experiences and called upon them when she needed to for a lyric. The opening lines to ‘Take The Box' –

 

Your neighbours were screaming,
I don't have a key for downstairs
So I punched all the buzzers…

 

– refer to something that had happened when she was a little girl. We were trying to get into my mother's block but I'd forgotten my key. A terrible row, which we could hear from the street, was going on in one of the other flats. My mother wasn't answering her buzzer – it turned out that she wasn't in – so I pressed all of the buzzers hoping someone would open the door.

Of course the song had nothing to do with me buzzing buzzers: it was about her and Chris breaking up. But I was amazed that she could turn something so small that had happened when she was a kid into a brilliant lyric. For all I knew, she'd written it down when it had happened and, eight or ten years later, plucked it out of her notebook. She was a genius at merging ideas that had no obvious connection.

The songs on the record were good – everyone knew it. By 2003, with the record all but done, loads of labels were desperate to sign her. Of all the companies, Nick Godwyn thought Island/Universal was the right one for Amy because they had a reputation for nurturing their artists without putting them under excessive pressure to produce albums in quick succession. Darcus Beese, in A&R at Island, had been excited about Amy for some time, and when he told Nick Gatfield, Island's head, about her, he too wanted to sign her. They'd heard some tracks, they knew what they were getting into, and they were ready to make Amy a star.

Once the record deal had been done with Island/Universal, suddenly it all sunk in. I sat across from Amy, looking at my daughter, and trying to come to terms with the fact that this girl who'd been singing at every opportunity since she was two, was going to be releasing her own music. ‘Amy, you're actually going to bring out an album,' I said. ‘That's brilliant.'

For once, she seemed genuinely excited. ‘I know, Dad! Great, isn't it? Don't tell Nan till Friday. I want to surprise her.'

I promised I wouldn't, but I couldn't keep news like this from my mum and phoned her the minute Amy left.

When I think about it now, I realize I took Amy's talent for granted. At the time I actually thought, Good, looks like she's going to make a few quid out of this.

Amy's record company advance on
Frank
was £250,000, which seemed like a lot of money. But back then some artists were getting £1 million advances and being dropped by their label before they'd even brought out a record. So, although it was a fortune to us, it was a relatively small advance. She had also received a £250,000 advance from EMI for the publishing deal. Amy needed to live on that money until the advances were recouped against royalties from albums sold. Only after that had happened could she be entitled to future royalties. That seemed a long way off: how many records would she need to sell to recoup £500,000? A lot, I thought. I wanted to make sure that we looked after her money so it didn't run out too quickly.

When Amy first got the advance she was living with Janis in Whetstone, north London, with Janis's boyfriend, his two children and Alex. But as soon as Amy's advances came through she moved into a rented flat in East Finchley, north London, with her friend Juliette.

Amy understood very quickly that if her mum and I didn't exert some kind of financial control she'd go through that money like there was no tomorrow. I had no problem with her being generous to her friends – for example, she wouldn't let Juliette pay rent – but she and I knew that I needed to stop her frittering the money away. She was smart enough to understand that she needed help.

Amy and Juliette settled into the flat and enjoyed being grown-up. I would often drop by. I'd left my double-glazing business and had been driving a London black taxi for a couple of years. On my way home from work, I'd go past the end of their road and pop in to say hello, but Amy always insisted I stay, offering to cook me something.

‘Eggs on toast, Dad?' she'd ask.

I'd always say yes, but her eggs were terrible.

And we'd sing together, Juliette joining in sometimes.

It was around this time that I first suspected Amy was smoking cannabis. I used to go round to the flat and see the remnants of joints in the ashtray. I confronted her, and she admitted it. We had a big row about it and I was very upset.

‘Leave off, Dad,' she said, and in the end I had to, but I'd always been against any kind of drug-taking and it was devastating to know that Amy was smoking joints.

 

*   *   *

 

As time progressed, everyone at 19, EMI and Universal was so enthusiastic about
Frank
that I began to believe it was going to sell and that maybe, just maybe, Amy was going to become a big star. On some nights when she had a show, I'd go and stand outside the place where she was playing, like Bush Hall in Uxbridge Road, west London. Her reputation seemed to grow by the minute. I'd listen to what people were saying as they went in, and they seemed excited about seeing her.

Afterwards Amy and I would go out for dinner, to places like Joe Allen's in Covent Garden, and she would be buzzing, talking to other diners, having a laugh with the waiters. In those days she liked performing live – as a virtual unknown she felt no pressure and simply enjoyed herself; she was always happy after a show, and I loved seeing her like that.

Her voice never failed to blow audiences away, but she needed to work on her stagecraft. Sometimes she'd turn her back on the audience – as though she didn't want to face them. But when I asked if she enjoyed performing, she'd always say, ‘Dad, I love it,' so I didn't ask anything more.

In the months leading up to
Frank
's release, Amy did lots of gigs. Playing live meant auditioning a band to perform with her, and 19 introduced her to the bassist Dale Davis, who eventually became her musical director. Dale had already seen Amy singing at the 10 Room in Soho and remembers her flashing eyes – ‘They were so bright' – but he didn't know who she was until he went to that audition. Oddly enough, he didn't get the job at that point, but when her bass-player wanted more money, Dale took over.

Amy and her band played the Notting Hill Carnival in 2003. It's always a very hard gig – the crowd is demanding – but when I spoke to Dale later, he said that Amy had carried the whole thing on her own. She didn't need a band. He was knocked out by how great she was, just singing and playing guitar. She might not have been technically the greatest guitarist ‘but no one else could play like Amy and fit the singing and playing together'. Her style was loose, but her rhythm was good and the songs were so strong that it all locked together. As Dale says, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are not great guitarists: it's all soul and conviction. ‘You just do it, and throughout the years of doing it you get there.'

Still, Amy's live performances were not without their struggles. One gig I particularly remember was in Cambridge where she was supporting the pianist Jamie Cullum. Amy and Jamie hit it off and became friends, but when you're young and just starting out, it's an unenviable task to be the support act. That night people had come to see Jamie, not her – very few people in the Cambridge audience had even heard of Amy – and initially they weren't very responsive. But when they heard her sing, they started to get into it. One of the most difficult things about being the support act is knowing when to stop and, as that night showed, Amy didn't. I don't blame her because she was inexperienced. Perhaps her management should have clued her up.

Amy ended up doing about fifteen songs, which was probably eight too many. By the end, people were getting restless. I could hear them saying, ‘How much longer is she going to be?' and ‘What time does Jamie Cullum come on?' Even the people I'd heard say, ‘She's good,' were fed up and wanting to see the act they'd paid for – Jamie Cullum. Of course, being me, I ended up shouting at people to shut up and nearly had a fight with someone.

Much to the audience's relief, Amy finished the set, but instead of going backstage, she climbed down and came to stand with us. We all watched Jamie and really enjoyed his performance – Amy cheered, clapped and whistled all the way through. She was always very generous with other performers.