It has, no doubt, been hell being Mitch Winehouse over the past four years. For those who don't take the noisier papers, his daughter – singer Amy Winehouse – followed the success of her 2003 debut album Frank by drinking to excess, developing bulimia, refusing rehab, reuniting with Blake Fielder-Civil (the subject of her tortured second album, Back to Black), getting hooked on crack and heroin, self-harming and developing emphysema. Mitch and Amy's mother, Janis, have danced with the devil of celebrity gossip, seeking to counteract lurid headlines about the state of Amy with their own input.
Hell, then, has had strange recompenses for Mitch, who, thanks to his daughter, has become a star of sorts. This former London cabbie has a debut album out this spring and has also spearheaded two documentaries about his daughter: My Daughter Amy, which aired on C4 last month, and Saving Amy, scheduled for broadcast later this year.
While her film awaits transmission, the maker of Saving Amy – Israeli-American celebrity interviewer Daphne Barak – has transposed her materials into paperback form. In truth, this is less a seamless narrative than a series of transcripts of her interviews with the Winehouse family, a blow-by-blow account of her encounters with Amy in St Lucia last year and the diary entries Barak recorded while filming.
Barak is a prolific networker – at least, that's the polite term. She appears to be cosy with the Clintons, has done Mugabe and Mandela, and was tight with Benazir Bhutto. She knows little about London cabbies, however, and does not contextualise Amy's self-destructive behaviour in the jazz tradition. Even more damningly, she fails to interview anyone of Amy's generation – her brother Alex, or her best friend Juliette, to name two – who might shed better light on Amy's demons than, say, Jane Winehouse, Mitch's current wife.
Barak's access is impressive, though. She has a ringside seat throughout 2008-9, when legal troubles compounded Amy's health problems. Barak's modus operandi is to befriend her subjects. She takes Mitch to dinner with friends, where the other guests – all "top lawyers" – lend a hand when a crisis unfolds. Blake Fielder-Civil – Amy's then husband – has absconded from rehab and turns up at the hospital where Amy is being treated. Barak is there for Mitch, too. "I tell him: 'Mitch, collect yourself. Be calm.' And he follows my advice."
Everyone eventually decamps to St Lucia to keep tabs on Amy when the singer is dispatched there to try to record some new music. There is one gruesome picture of Barak with her arm around Amy, giving the camera a toothy smile while Amy and an unidentified woman are absorbed in something else.
This chronology is laced together by Barak's own impressions of the business of saving Amy. She dwells on Mitch's divorce from Janis as a possible root cause of Amy's acting out and accurately locates Mitch in an impossible position between three women – his daughter, a black hole into which his time and emotions are poured, Jane, who cannot compete, and the forsaken Janis.
Janis, who has MS, emerges as a stoic, if ambivalent, figure. While Mitch is an interventionist helicopter parent, charging to his daughter's rescue with every fresh calamity, Janis holds back, concluding that her addicted daughter has to want to give up drugs and drink.
Perhaps the most trenchant insight of all comes in St Lucia. There is a tussle over a dress that Amy wants to borrow from Daphne. As the fallout clears, Winehouse admits she is terrified she won't be able to live up to people's expectations as a performer. The one fresh conclusion you can draw from this flawed but illuminating book is that, as well as all her other problems, Winehouse fille is suffering from the mother of all writer's blocks.
