Amy, My Daughter by Mitch Winehouse

make your own mind up as to the reason why. I thought back to what Tyler had told me. But I believed then that Amy would give him what for when she found out he was still taking drugs.
    Later that month Amy was back in the US for a tour to promote Back to Black . It began in Austin, Texas, at the SXSW Festival, then went on to West Hollywood, California, where she played the Roxy Theater. There were a lot of big names at that gig and they wanted to go to Amy’s dressing room to say hello. First Raye told Amy that Courtney Love was outside and wanted to meet her.
    â€˜God!’ Amy replied. ‘What does she want?’
    Next up was Bruce Willis. It was his birthday and, as Amy put it, ‘He had a bit of a wobbly head on.’
    Bruce said to Amy, ‘Hi, I’m Bruce Willis. Would you like to come to Las Vegas with me to celebrate my birthday?’
    Quick as anything, Amy said, ‘Only if I can bring my dad!’ Bruce was astounded and Amy carried on the joke, ‘Shall I call him and see if he wants to come?’ Apparently Bruce beat a hasty retreat.
    Then Ron Jeremy, the famous porn star, was led into the dressing room. He was accompanied by two women with pneumatic breasts – if you’d stuck a pin in them, Amy said, they might have exploded. Ron was wearing a pair of loose tracksuit bottoms. Amy looked down at them. ‘Been working today, Ron?’
    â€˜Funnily enough, yes,’ Ron said, playing along. They sat down for a good ten minutes and had a drink and a chat, minus the women. Amy was very sharp; her spontaneous wit never failed to make me laugh.
    Danny DeVito was at one of the other gigs and Amy kept sidling up to the bar next to him, mouthing to Raye, ‘Look, I’m taller than him.’ And she was, if not by much.
    Amy met a lot of famous people on that tour and they had all come to see her because they loved what she was doing. Some stars get swept away by the conviction that everybody wants to be their friend, but it wasn’t like that with Amy. Those people weren’t jumping on the Amy Winehouse bandwagon: they just wanted to hear her sing. I witnessed it at first hand when I joined the tour in Canada a few weeks later. I turned up after the gig and found Amy with a man she introduced to me as Michael.
    â€˜Very nice to meet you,’ I said. ‘What do you do, Michael?’
    He laughed, as Amy hissed, ‘Dad – it’s Michael Bublé.’
    He was a sweet man – I was a fan of his music – and all he wanted to talk about was how fantastic Amy had been that night.
    The following day we walked into a shopping mall and ‘Stronger Than Me’ was playing. ‘Isn’t that me, Dad?’ Amy asked. ‘Isn’t that my song?’
    â€˜Yes, and you’ve just earned twenty-eight cents,’ I joked, ‘so feel free to buy something.’
    She stopped and listened. ‘It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?’
    It was as if somebody else had written and sung the song, as if it didn’t belong to her any more. Wait a second, I thought. This is surreal. She doesn’t know her own song. But when she did listen to her own records, she always thought she could have done better – not that she could have sung better but that she could have written more powerful lyrics. ‘I should have changed that word to this word …’ she’d say.
    She was never satisfied with what she’d done.
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    In May 2007 Amy and Blake booked to go on holiday to Miami together. Before they left she called me: she wanted to know how I felt about her and Blake getting married. Since they’d got back together, they’d been virtually inseparable, aside from some of her trips to the US to promote the album. I wasn’t too thrilled about the prospect of Amy tying herself to Blake, but I thought I’d have the chance to get to know him better – and for him to