Amy, My Daughter (23 page)

18
‘I'LL CRY IF I WANT TO'

At the start of 2010 I was completely preoccupied by Amy's relationship with Blake – the trouble he brought, the drama he caused and the undeniable possibility that he would be in Amy's life for ever. The drama with Blake and Amy was continuing and all-consuming. I was so caught up in the day-to-day events, I couldn't see further than the end of my nose. ‘I live in hope it will one day be over,' I wrote in my diary, for the umpteenth time, on 1 January. I realize now I didn't even have an inkling then as to what was around the corner. I hadn't even begun to contemplate what the outcome would be for us all when Amy finally managed to quit her addiction to Blake.

The new year began with good news, though: Amy called me on New Year's Day to wish me a happy new year and told me she hadn't had a single drink on New Year's Eve, even though she was celebrating with friends. The Librium she had just been prescribed was making her tired, but she seemed resolved to stay sober. ‘Keep at it,' I told her. Surely it was worth feeling tired if it meant she didn't drink.

‘Dad, I'm fed up at Hadley Wood,' she said. ‘I don't wanna be here any more. It's boring. I want to be back in Camden – that's where I'm happy.'

‘I understand, Amy, I'm working on it,' I told her. ‘What about if I get you a suite at a hotel in the West End for now? The Langham do you?'

She'd always liked traditional West End hotels and the prospect cheered her up immediately. She didn't ask why I hadn't made any progress on finding her a new home, which I was glad about. I'd been deliberately taking my time because I wanted to keep her away from Camden for a bit longer, just until she was strong enough to resist temptation. I'd also been busy at AA meetings, talking to people about their experience of recovering from alcohol addiction, and I'd seen the rest of the family regularly to discuss how we could continue best to help Amy.

The situation with Blake seemed ominously reminiscent of how the previous year had ended – regular run-ins between them that would result in Amy claiming she wanted to work things out with him and could clean him up. There were headlines in the tabloids that she and Blake were going to remarry, that they were back on drugs. She kept going to Sheffield to see him, even though she always returned in a bad mood.

I had no idea where these reunions were heading, but she was seeing him a lot. With this in mind, I devised a new Blake strategy: I would arrange to meet him to see if we could resolve our differences.

I didn't want to, believe me, but, much more to the point, I didn't want to lose Amy. My pals were worried that I was exhausting myself dealing with her and her cycle of addictions – Blake, drugs, alcohol – but I reassured them that the only time I felt weary was when Amy and I were apart. When I was around Amy, I had the energy and drive to face all of her demons with her. Amy was pleased when I told her that I wanted to see Blake and said she would talk to him and arrange it. It never happened.

Shortly after this Amy had a big row with Blake on the phone; she said it was because he had had another girl with him when they spoke. She was depressed and clearly hungover, and later that day she decided she was going to Sheffield to see him. That troubled me: would Amy stay strong, or would she succumb to whatever it was in him that drew her?

I was woken at four the following morning by the phone.

‘Is that Mitch?' the voice asked. ‘You don't know me, but my name's Danny. I'm ringing cos someone's got to tell you. Amy's overdosed.'

I was half asleep and at first the words barely registered. Then the worst rushed into my head: had Blake given her more drugs, had she drunk too much, or had she had another seizure? I uttered the words no father ever wants to say: ‘Is she dead?'

‘No,' he answered. ‘She's in the Royal Oak Hospital in Paddington.'

None of this made any sense: Andrew had called me earlier to confirm he and Amy were on their way to Sheffield. How could she be in a hospital in London? There isn't a Royal Oak Hospital in Paddington. As I started to wake up I realized that this call from Danny was probably a nasty prank: he obviously didn't know Amy was in Sheffield.

I was disgusted and shocked, but before I could try to gather my thoughts I called Amy's phone. There was no answer so I called Andrew, woke him up and told him to get Amy to call me straight away. Within a few minutes she was on the line, assuring me she was all right, nothing had happened and the call was bogus.

After that, I couldn't go back to bed so I went and sat downstairs and stared out of the window. I couldn't understand what would lead someone to make a call like that. What kind of person would do such a thing? The constant abuse in the press was bad enough, and I'd had my fill of anonymous texts and shit like that. Now this. As I sat there, I felt worse and worse till suddenly – and unusually for me – I lurched to my feet and had to rush to the bathroom, where I threw up.

A few hours later Amy called to tell me again that she was okay, and to check that I was too.

One night when she was drunk she told me, out of the blue, that Blake was back on heroin big-time: she had watched him do it when she was up in Sheffield. She must have sensed my anxiety because, unprompted, she added, ‘Dad, you know I'll never take class-A drugs again.' I did know that. My biggest concern right now was that she stopped drinking.

In February Amy went to Jamaica to spend some time working with Salaam Remi in the recording studio. It was still early days for her in her writing for a third album; she was a fierce self-critic so it would take her a lot longer to come up with the songs for this album than it had for the first two. She tried out and discarded idea after idea. It gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't be long before Amy was away from Blake for good. At times like this, when she was working, he seemed to be the furthest thing from her mind.

While Amy was away I found a new house for her in Camden Square. She was keen to get back into Camden Town – this felt like Amy's true home in London and I'd found the perfect place: a lovely early-nineteenth-century house in its own grounds. It needed substantial work, as it was currently divided into six flats, so we were going to have to gut it. It had amazing potential for all of the things Amy wanted: a gym, a recording studio, lots of bedrooms and a lovely garden. Without even seeing it she told me to buy it.

When she came back from Jamaica, I took her there for the first time. She absolutely loved it and began making plans for its interior renovation. The bad news was that the work would take a long time and the lease on the Hadley Wood house was about to expire: she needed somewhere else to live, and quick. She still owned the flat in Jeffrey's Place, but she didn't want to go there, as it brought back bad memories. So, at the beginning of March, knowing that Amy wanted to be close to the centre of London, I found her a very nice flat to rent in Bryanston Square in the West End.

Along with her sessions with Salaam Remi, she had also started working with Mark Ronson again in London. In mid-March, Jane and I took her to lunch at Reubens restaurant, where we all ate ourselves silly. I was so pleased she was back working on what she did best, and it was fabulous for us to be talking about that instead of dancing around her problems. Amy said that the song ideas for the new album were progressing further than they had in Jamaica, although there were no completed tracks. In typical Amy fashion, she wouldn't talk to me much about her music because the work wasn't complete.

‘You're going to have to wait, Dad,' she said. ‘But I can tell you I've been working on the sixties-girl-group sound with Mark. I still like that. And a few other things. And in Jamaica I got into reggae again, so me and Salaam did a bit of stuff with that too.'

A day or so later Amy insisted I went on a spending spree with her in Selfridges.

She hadn't had a drink for three days, and revealed that she wanted to go on an intensive driving course – God help us, I thought. When we'd finished shopping, I did something a bit cheeky. I knew she wouldn't wear half the things she'd bought – we'd been down this road before – so, without her knowing, I took a lot back. Previously Amy would never have noticed the missing clothes, but she phoned me straight away.

‘Dad, did I leave a Selfridges bag in your cab yesterday?' she asked. ‘I've got stuff missing.' I pleaded ignorance but I think she knew what I'd done because she made me take her back to Selfridges to buy exactly the same things again. I was pleased she'd noticed that the clothes were missing.

At the end of March Amy started recording a track for the Quincy Jones seventy-fifth birthday celebration album
Q: Soul Bossa Nostra
. Amy had first met Quincy at the Nelson Mandela gig and they had stayed in touch. Over the following three days Amy recorded ‘It's My Party', a track I knew well, which had originally been a big hit for Lesley Gore in 1963. Quincy had produced the original and he is credited for discovering Lesley Gore. It was a great honour that he had asked Amy to record the song. On the final day of the recording, I met Amy at Love 4 Music recording studios in Islington, north London.

Music had started to play a bigger role in Amy's life again, but she was not without her setbacks. A few days before this, she had started drinking seriously again. Raye and I tried to talk to her about it, but she wouldn't listen and only wanted to talk about Blake and the fact that he was on methadone. But when I turned up at Love 4 Music I was taken by surprise: Amy was ready to talk about her problems. She told me she was going to get her act together and wanted to book into the London Clinic to get the alcohol out of her system; just as importantly, she told me she was through with Blake. She thought it would be easier to break up with him face to face so she was going up to Sheffield the next day with Neville, one of the security boys.

Neville drove Amy up to Sheffield, but instead of coming back the same day, she stayed in Sheffield overnight. I worried and thought I'd have to go up there to collect her myself. In the end Amy returned the following day and told me it was over with Blake. But my initial delight disappeared when I heard how badly he had taken it: he was really upset and had resorted to drugs while Amy was with him, although she had tried to persuade him not to. The one positive was that I was sure Amy hadn't taken anything.

Straight away I arranged for her to be admitted to the London Clinic to deal with her alcoholism. Everything seemed to be going so well – but a week later she left the clinic, went to a local pub and got drunk. This was the problem: until she admitted she was an alcoholic she would carry on fooling herself that she could deal with it alone. She'd been drinking for so long now it was second nature to her. She returned to the clinic at three o'clock in the morning, singing and shouting. Once again, she was using it as a hotel. It was a different problem, but we were falling back into the same cycle.

Of course it wasn't over. A few days later Blake turned up in London, Amy dropped all her other plans and got drunk again. I wanted so much to stop her, but I knew from the expert advice I'd received that the only person who could stop Amy drinking was Amy. So I never ordered her to stop, just told her what the outcome might be if she didn't, and was as supportive as I could be in helping her to give up, picking up the pieces each time she lapsed.

‘This is only going to end up one way, and it won't be good,' I told Amy. She was meant to have returned to the London Clinic, but she said she didn't want to be there any more.

The next day Amy fell over in her flat because she was drunk, badly bruising her eye and cheek. When I went to see her at about seven o'clock, she was going on about how she must be with Blake but couldn't because he wouldn't give up drugs, and that she wanted to persuade him to get help with his addiction. I told her she was wasting her time and should think about getting help for her alcoholism, rather than worrying about Blake. But I felt my words were futile: whatever I said to her she'd ignore it if it wasn't what she wanted to do at the time. I just had to find, somehow, the strength to face it day after day.

After a few days, I managed to convince Amy to go back into the London Clinic. The plan was that she'd spend four or five days sobering up before going to the Caribbean for a holiday, but after a couple of days she decided she didn't want to go away: she wanted to concentrate on getting Blake clean. She felt safe at the Clinic, she told me. It was like a haven to her, the only place where she could be helped. She wanted to stay.

The following day I was doing a gig at the Hay Hill Gallery in Mayfair and Dr Glynne had agreed that Amy could leave the hospital to attend. It was a great evening, and Amy and I did an impromptu duet – it felt really special, me and my daughter onstage together, doing what we both loved, and the audience loved it. At the end of our last song, I looked across at Amy and saw tears on her cheeks. ‘What's the matter?' I asked.

‘Oh, Dad, I love it when you sing,' she said, laughing at herself. ‘It makes me so happy I cry.'

Amy returned to the London Clinic, but a few nights later she went to a party with her friend Violetta and got drunk. For reasons that are unclear, Amy and Violetta stayed at the Jeffrey's Place flat that night, and the following day the security guys called me to say that Blake was there. By the time I arrived, he had gone, probably scared of what I might say to him. But Amy was drunk and tearful over Blake arriving out of the blue. She'd had no idea that he was in London but somehow or other he had managed to track her down.

I was dismayed that Blake had been there, but it seemed his actions stemmed from desperation. Perhaps if Amy could keep him at a distance for long enough, he'd finally move on.

Amy had returned to the London Clinic, and when I went to visit her there I heard some really encouraging news. She told me that one afternoon a few weeks previously she had met a guy who was gorgeous and she'd really liked him. They had arranged to go out on a date the following week. Not wanting to make a big deal of it, I didn't ask too many questions, but she told me his name was Reg.