 This is the David Feldman Radio Network. Amy Winehouse was a British singer-songwriter best known for her raucous mix of jazz and rhythm and blues. In 2008, her album Back to Black won five Grammys, making her one of the most celebrated female singers in modern musical history. Four years ago, Amy died at the age of 27 from alcohol poisoning. Asif Kapadia is the director of Amy, a new documentary about Amy Winehouse. This critically acclaimed movie features never-before-seen footage of Amy as a young girl as well as never-before-heard recordings. Asif joins us via Skype in San Francisco. Pretty cool. Yeah. Hello, David. Hi there. You make your home in London. I do, yeah. Did you know Amy Winehouse before you directed this documentary? I did not know her. I never met her. I never managed to see her live. But she was a local girl. That's kind of one of my connections to the material is that I lived around Camden. I lived there for about 10 years and she was like kind of the girl down the road who did really well. And then when it turned dark, it was this weird story was going on again, half a mile down the road. And it never quite made sense why she was still performing or why she was in public in such a bad way and why nobody was kind of holding the paparazzi away. You know, there was just lots of questions, I suppose, as a local person from the good times and then from the bad times. That was one of the real reasons why I felt I wanted to get into this movie. I have children not as old as Amy, but who are approaching their 20s. And you have to let go and they have to find their own way. How culpable is her father? Well, it's really, I mean, the film is a very complicated story. It's it's about an artist. It's about a young girl. It's about love. It is about family. It's about friendship. It's about a girl who had issues from a very young age. Many of them to do with self esteem and to do with kind of probably not feeling kind of comfortable within herself. She was unusual, but she had fun. She was funny. She was very intelligent. She was really witty and sharp. And, you know, her ways of dealing with issues was to write, to write poetry, to write, to write things down. And that those poems became songs and those songs she then would pick up a guitar and she was an amazing guitarist and she would sing. And it was all cool. I got off on a negative question and immediately going to her father. And that is kind of unfair. I apologize. Tell me earlier, I mentioned that she won five Grammys for Back to Black. How great was she? Let's really see if she is. Yeah, she's famous in the US, OK, because she only made two albums, right? She she she her first album came out in the UK. It didn't even get released here in the US. So her album, Frank, is a very jazzy album and, you know, it's very unusual and kind of the kind of music that she was into. No kid of 15, 16 was listening to Phelonius Monk and Sarah Vaughan and kind of this sort of stuff. And that's doubt. Those were her references. Ray Charles. So she's this North London Jew. And does her father get credit? Well, it's it's far more complex. It's far more complex. And then it just being about her and her dad, you see, her grandmother was a big presence in her life. And her grandmother went out with Ronnie Scott. Ronnie Scott's like one of my sevens jazz clubs in the world in London and the guy who who started up that jazz club, her grandmother used to hang out with and go out with. So she's grown up with jazz. She's grown up with music. She's grown up with musicians from her mother's side. Her father sings, yes, but it's not just about the dad. I mean, that's a really kind of important kind of thing that when you see the film, you'll see that it's much more complex and some of the stuff one may read will make it seem it's just about him and it isn't. And the clue is in the title. The film's about Amy because she was this amazing force. And so much of it about the film was just to show you who she really was. You know, there's this perception of she was this messed up girl with addictions and problems and couldn't kind of string a sentence together. And what we've done with the film is kind of go back and films made an entire lot of archive material. I did a film previously called Senna, which was done in a similar way. So you see the real person at the age of 14 and and it opens with a scene of her singing Happy Birthday. You know, everyone in the world knows the words to Happy Birthday. When Amy sings it, believe me, she's different to everyone else. You know, so you hear her from an age of 14 when she's a young kid that she's already got something. She's got this way of singing. She's got this way of phrasing and timing. That is just different to everyone else. So she had this talent. Her first album, she did at 16, 17, 18. Back to Black came out at 19, 20, 21. She created that by the age of 21. She'd done these two amazing albums with those albums. People like Tony Bennett thought she was the real deal. You know, the Rolling Stones wanted to perform with her. Prince thought she was great and sang with her. You know, if you're into hip hop, there were people like Questlove and people like Most Death and Yassine Bado. These guys all respected her. So she did all this by 22. Then by the last five years of her life really are about the kind of spiraling down. And that's the bit she became famous for here, particularly of that kind of downward spiral of not being in a good way and being famous and being hounded by paparazzi. And that's really where the story turns. And so the film's really about showing you who she really was and how maybe not everyone is cut out for fame. Maybe not everyone wants to be a megastar, but actually they still want to create. They still want to make art, but they don't want all that crap that comes with it. And she wasn't really prepared or, you know, having the right team around her maybe at times to protect her from all of that. A lot of rhythm and blues singers died, poor and unknown. How much of fame played a role in her demise? You're saying you seem to be saying it played a huge role, but it seems to me. The issues already there, the issues that are from childhood, those issues of insecurities and worrying about how you look and worrying about whether people really care about you or they care about what you become. You know, those issues were there. This kind of idea of self-medicating was there from a very young age. She had bulimia from a very young age. Alcohol was an issue from a very young age. There were prescription drugs from a young age. You know, depression, all of these things were there. But she was kind of in control of them while, you know, she was able to do her thing and have a way to... The release was the writing and the singing. She, all of her songs are very personal and about all of the issues that she was trying to manage. And that's what the film is almost like an old-fashioned musical, where you have moments of her life and you're going along with her and you're hanging out with her and you understand something pivotal in her life experience. And then she stands up and sings about that moment and then you get the song. So these songs, quite a lot of them, like Rehab or, you know, You Know I'm No Good or Love is a Losing Game, are very famous songs. But what we do is unravel where they came from and who they're about and what had actually happened. And so she was kind of managing it all. Megafame came along and the media multiplied by, you know, a million percent and that's when it all got at hand. Certain people were suddenly in her team. A certain relationship leads to not only the creation of Back to Black, but also is a big part of the kind of downfall of her as a character because that leads deeper and deeper into these addictions. So what is it about fame? Is it that you become a performer because you want love and you feel good while you're performing? But then when you're offstage, you want real love, but you can't trust anybody now because anybody you meet. Everyone's on a payroll. You know, everybody you meet, right. Yeah, you know, everyone are they there because of you? Are they there because you're paying for everything? And that was what she and she struggled with that. I think that's one of the things. Definitely, that that was an issue for her. That was definitely one of the complexities of her life. What about her? So I started the interview asking you about her father. Were there any men in her life who loved her for who she was? And how do you separate the image of Amy Winehouse as a brilliant singer-songwriter from the real Amy Winehouse? I mean, isn't that who she is in order to love Amy Winehouse? You'd have to love her voice and her music. I think, yeah, but she, you know, that it's it's a it's a good question. The film is almost in two hearts. There's the first half, which is before mega fame and there's a second half. And the first half, there are a lot of people around Amy friends, her first manager, you know, people are around her, her grandmother. There's lots of people there who really, really loved her. And then and then what happens is later on, as as she makes this record and becomes super successful, then there are still people around her that that love her, that care about her. But there's definitely a change in her that's a change in her thought process. And I think a lot of people started making decisions because so this window of of fame is a very short thing from going from somebody that people have heard of to suddenly becoming one of the most famous people around it in the movie. It's like, you know, maybe half an hour in reality, maybe it was 18 months. But when you look at someone's career, like Tony Bennett or someone, that's not a long time. But with the wrong person, everything happens too quickly. People start making decisions that maybe are not best for her. And I think that whole thing of say, well, just do one more show, one more concert. This will be good for you. Do this, do this and rather than take a break, get away, get well. Yeah, time out. You know, your career should be 50 years long. Not two years long on, you know, and if you're performing the same record five years in, you know, the typical kind of promotional activity on an album. I'm told it's 18 months. So five years after she's still singing the songs from back to black. That's not necessarily a great thing, particularly if the songs are so personal and so painful for her to sing because they're about the person that she was mad in love with that left her. Was she seeing a psychiatrist? Was she I don't think she ever did. I think that's one of the things I don't think she ever did. Was anybody able to point her in the direction of rehab? Well, again, this is what the kind of whole films about. Yeah, there were moments when people tried and the song rehab is actually about the incident when her first manager tried to take her. And what you realize is what we do in the film is we put the lyrics of the songs on the screen as she's singing them. So you literally because you can hear the song thousands of times. You don't actually know what she's singing because you get carried away by the music and the voice. If you study the lyrics, you understand that that that song is almost verbatim. It's like a documentary of what happened. How much of her creative process was fueled by self loathing and how much of it was fueled by alcohol? Her creative process, the people I've spoken to, that's when she's not drinking. That's when she's not on anything. Her creative process came out of, you know, I think the people I've spoken to, you know, that is kind of it's a myth. This idea that you need to do drugs in order to create it's the absolute opposite. She she was clean and sober when she created. That's when she did her best work. Is it correct in assuming that people do drugs and drink so they don't create because they want to turn off those juices? I'm very nervous about in any way pretending to be any authority on anyone else or any anyone actually anyone's lives. But with Amy, yeah, it was self-medicating. It was doing something to stop feeling, to to deal with depression, to deal with these kind of confusions about what's going on around her or her insecurities or because she was being the more she got attacked, the more she would drink, you know, or to be in a certain relationship with someone who maybe that person has their own reasons for wanting to get her hooked on some really heavy drugs. And her feeling is this person really understands me. And the only way I'm going to understand them is by doing what they do. And I'll do everything that you do in order to be at your level. And that's kind of what happened. It was a very, you know, it was a very heavy relationship. You know, the rock and roll way of doing it is kind of a Sid and Nancy relationship. But actually, you've got two messed up kids who have grown up and whose way of dealing with stuff is to kind of shut down and be doing this stuff together. And it was, you know, she went from zero. She had a very addictive personality. So when she was a teenager, she just if she went out to buy flowers, she'd come back with a house full of flowers. Right. She bought CDs. She'd buy 200 CDs. She bought shoes. She'd buy 50 pairs of shoes. She does drugs. She's going to go from zero to maximum. And so that's just something that's in her. There was nobody when she was young telling her to stop giving her boundaries. That's what it really all goes back to. So the people that you've mentioned were not necessarily there to be the strong parent when she was growing up. And that's the big some of the revelations of the movie are she herself tells you people, nobody was there telling her to stop. Nobody was around when she was young. Maybe they turned up when she was famous and rich. Was she born with a God given voice? She she, like I said, we've got footage of her when she's singing. And she's like eight, nine, 10, 12, and she's got the voice. Yeah. And how much studying did she do to huge, huge amount, but personal, you know, she didn't she didn't go off. She went to various schools. She went to kind of places that kind of teach you. But I don't think they taught her anything. She never finished any school. She was either kicked out or left. So she had it in her. She studied in her room. She listened to these records. It's amazing. Kind of she was an encyclopedia on jazz. She knew everything. And it's kind of old fashioned way of learning of looking at a record and studying who played the saxophone on it. And, you know, who did the percussion and where was it recorded? That old fashion thing that I did when I had LPs, I looked at every single person on the track listing and understand where was it recorded and who did this? Oh, he played on that record. That's what kind of knowledge and experience she had. And her singing, she herself says she learned to sing by listening to Thelonious Monk, to listen into soloists. She's not trying to copy singers. She's listening to musicians playing kind of she's listened to soloists who are playing the piano or playing kind of another instrument. And that's how she learned about singing. That's kind of how Sinatra learned these are her heroes. People like Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughn, you know, these were the people that she listened to. And she's like I said, she was like a 15 year old Jewish girl from North London, but that was the music. And I think that came out of her grandmother that came out of her mom's side of the family, there were musicians in there. Her dad sings a bit, you know, there were people, those music was in the home for sure. Yeah, I'm circling back to the negative aspect of her, you know, her death. And that is if you're born with this great voice, would she have been as great? Had she not been born with the mental illness? Well, there's another thing which we really highlight in the Mavia case. People, the voice is the one that everyone talks about. What we highlight really is the writing. And I think the songwriting is actually I think the most amazing thing about her. And that's really what stands out is that she didn't have a team of writers behind her, everything she wrote, she wrote herself and it was all personal. And she could sing and she could do it live. And whenever she recorded her albums, it was at one take wonders. She did two at most, you know, and every time every time she performed as different, there's no editing of what she did. And the film features a lot of live performances. So for me, when I listen to the records, they feel quite overproduced now. So I basically in the film, you see her hanging out. She's doing her makeup in the restroom. She's traveling by taxi. She's chatting to her friends, picks up a guitar, walks up on stage, starts to sing and blows you away. So it's not just the voice, actually, because, you know, sometimes you kind of go, well, you know, how much production has gone into that? It's the whole attitude. It's the whole experience in things and being able to express it through her writing and then being able to sing it and do it live. I mean, it really is the whole package. Now, I don't think, you know, her friends have said to me, she was unusual. She had some sort of she was slightly out of kilter with everyone around her. You know, when they were all playing hide and go seek in a house when they were eight, they couldn't find Amy. And she'd been a room sitting there in a corner reading Schindler's list. Well, she was just on a different level, intelligence wise to people. And sometimes people who suffer and who have depression or who have problems with the world. It's not because they're dumb, it's because they're really sharp and they think too much. They can't shut down what they're thinking about or what they're feeling. And so they're particularly sensitive, maybe, to things that are going around them. And people like myself, I can I just fall asleep. I'm not like that. And I think that's that's where people differ. And I don't mean to jest about it. You know, there's there's issues of mental illness in my family. And, you know, I've seen people very close to me who have these issues where they worry to think about things. And I think there was an element of that in her. She had a way to express it, not everyone has a way to express it. And her album Back to Black, the most famous album, is all comes out of a really bad relationship, a nervous breakdown, which led her to drinking, which led her to a real low point. And one of the issues that comes out of the film is really what's more important? Is it more important that person's still around or the art form that they created when they were really down? The stereotype with Jews is that they don't drink, that they don't have drug problems. Really? Why would that be? Well, it's a few people in the movie business. Yes, yeah, a few people in the music business who do. So it's not as I would not say that's necessarily the case. Right. But there is this traditional stereotype, at least in America, that Jewish men make the best husbands because they don't drink. Again, we're talking about stereotypes that. Yeah. And then my rabbi said, well, actually, that's not true. A lot of alcoholism starts at Bar Mitzvahs, where the the boys and girls start drinking for the first time at Bar Mitzvahs. How much of a role did Judaism play in her life? Was she bought Mitzvah? Did she belong to a temple? Was there any spiritual quest on her part? I don't think she was particularly religious. Her family are all Jewish, all of her friends are. But it's it's a kind of different. It's a North London Jewish thing, which is a bit more laid back, I think. And and so, you know, I think members of family would meet on a on a on a weekend and they'd sit down together and eat and all the traditions were there. Her manager, Nick, her first manager, Nick, was with his Jewish and her second manager, Ray's Jewish. I mean, everyone, you know, the label head, Lucian Granges, everyone in that community is Jewish. But from what I've heard and what I've seen, Amy herself was not particularly religious. It wasn't something that was that important to her. I think it was it was her music was her thing. Her religion was her record collection. I think did she grow up middle class, upper middle class, middle class? I'd say I'd say it was it was a she's not actually from Camden. Camden is a particularly kind of interesting place, which, you know, in the 60s would have been maybe Carnaby Street in the 70s, might have been Notting Hill. Well, around the kind of 80s, 90s, Camden was the place that was edgy. And a lot of drugs on the scene. There was a lot of wannabes, models, musicians, artists and students and everyone was kind of hanging out there. And she wanted to be part of that scene. What did her father do? What did her father do for a living? I think originally he was a double glazing salesman, and then he became a cab driver, you know. But but she had, you know, they lived in a wealthy part of town. They were they were not they were not from a housing estate or, you know, kind of a kind of rough part of town at all. They were they were fairly middle class, which is one of the reason why most of the people you meet in the film at the beginning, you know, they lived in semi-detached houses in London, slightly on the edge, north London, slightly on the edge of kind of London, not in Soho, not in Westminster, anywhere like that. And what did her mother do for a living? Her mother trained as a pharmacist. She she did a kind of open university degree and trained as a pharmacist. But her mum also suffered from MS and sort of was particularly well when Amy was becoming famous. And so kind of has a slightly different kind of attitude. She's quite shy and not particularly outspoken. And so I think when things started kind of blowing up and becoming you know, you've got bigger, it appears that she kind of shut down a bit more and more. Are the mother and father still alive? They're alive. They're not together. They broke up a while ago. While before before after Amy took off, you really need to see it. It's a key part. I know. It's a very key part of film. There's there's a whole layer in the story when you realize that when Amy was young, her father was having an affair with someone else for a long part of her childhood. So even though he was there was still technically married, he was with someone else. And that was for the like the first nine years of Amy's life. Yeah, they say that when a marriage breaks up, it's like a death in the family for the kids, especially when they're young. You know, even though she was in her 20s, it's almost safe to call her a child performer. I think, you know, she has all of the kind of tendencies of a child star. All of this kind of idea of someone who's got his talent and who is looked up upon by children and adults has been different. But actually and overtly on the outside, looks like they're really mature and grown up because she was having these very intense relationships at a very young age. Like I said, her first album, she said right at 16, and she's having a relationship with someone who's seven years older than her. And it's like the lyrics are pretty heavy. They're pretty serious things that she's talking about. Is that legal? She's a kid. Is that legal? In Europe, it is, yeah. But, you know, well, it's not whether it's legal or not is an issue. The issue is, was there anybody around saying no? But she was not cool. She was 16, going out with a 23 year old. Seems like it, yeah. And there's a pretty intense relationship, and that's what she's writing about. So it's all kind of grown up at a very young age. You say it's that mixed with a drinking, mixed with not going to school. Yeah, it's all of these kind of breaking rules and pushing boundaries and pushing boundaries, which some would say, you know, a lot of times kids do that, children do that in order to see, to test the parent, when are you going to stop me? When are you going to say that's enough? If you don't, I keep going, I keep going. And if you take that idea, you follow it through her adulthood. That's, I would say, from the outside. That's kind of what was going on still. You said it's legal for a 16 year old to go out with a 23 year old. I think the age of consent is 16 in in the UK. It's much younger in Europe, you know, it can be 14. So you can have a relationship with someone when you're 16, because you can get married. The paparazzi. Is there any way to rein in the paparazzi? Great Britain and the United Kingdom. I from what I understand, it's far worse in London than it is here in America. I don't know. I was in New York the other day and I saw something going on with a member of one direction, walking down the street didn't look very nice from where I was. So I think it was particularly bad at that point in time. What happened was Amy happened to be the musician who was becoming famous at the point when there was a newspaper war going on. And when newspapers went from physical copies to digital websites. So it's not just once a day or once a week, the papers coming out. But they want to keep uploading photos and information to keep you clicking. So that whole idea of kind of Internet and websites and phone hacking was going on. And then you've got YouTube and you've got Facebook where people are posting videos. She, you know, she did a bad performance. Everyone saw it because it was online and everyone commented on it and shared it. So it's all to do with like a quirk of fate. She was the unlucky one to have the song called rehab while she was having a breakdown in public while the Internet kicked off. Asif Kapadia, he's the director of Amy. It's a new documentary about Amy Winehouse. I think the hardest thing to tell somebody her age is you have to stop. You only think you're famous because you're going out in public dressed the way people know you. But you can actually wear a wig, change your name and go be a human being. I was amazed when I go to the farmer's market in Los Angeles and I'm walking around and I know that there are superstars in my midst. But I just don't recognize them because they're either I don't know who they are because there's been such a fragmentation of our culture or they're just wearing a baseball cap. Fame, you can be famous and still be avoided if you really are working it properly. Yeah, I'm a proud Londoner and I and I, you know, I'm proud that she was this girl, local girl. But I felt for a long time that one of the things that she needed to do was to get away from Camden and get away from London and, you know, travel. There's so much more in the world than London and music and fame. And she'd worked hard enough to go and experience, you know, you don't have to come to LA, go to India, go and see what else is out there. There's so much more out there. And I always felt I wish you'd done that. But I think, I think, you know, over time and if you are in that kind of lifestyle, she had quite a lot of seizures. And I think that does affect your thinking. That does affect the way you are. And you're not quite the same person after you've had six, seven seizures, which some of them would be turned overdoses. You know, that starts to affect you. And what happened was, I think, for a period she had people around here. Eventually, I think that really, really cared about. But, you know, you become a bit of a recluse who wasn't doing much. And then, you know, by then the papers have kind of moved on to someone else, I guess. But the psychological damage may well have already been done. Did she like any of the fame? Did she have fun with any of it? It's a real contradiction, you know, like it's really hard to sort of just say it's one thing or another. You've got someone, you know, who's an absolute show-off, you know, someone who obviously loves attention and who loves the idea of like people knowing who she is. But on the other hand, if someone praised her, she'd be really rude to them because she wasn't used to kind of people giving her positive comments or wasn't comfortable with it. And that all comes back to this idea of how you're built and how you how are you constructed in order to deal with when people tell you, you're amazing, you're great. And rather than saying, thanks, you know, she would almost lash out. Because that was not something she maybe didn't want to hear it from that person, she wanted to hear it from somewhere else. Or she wasn't able to enjoy it. Right. You know, there's a few moments in a film. Some of the highest points in her career, you learn things in the film, which, you know, for her, it's boring. Right. It's boring when you're alone. It's boring if your husband's in jail at that point. It's boring. And one particularly sad moment is when someone says, you know, this is amazing. This is everything that you've been dreaming about. It's the greatest moment in your life. Isn't it? And she says it's really boring without drugs. How long did it take you to make this movie? This film took about three years to put together. What are your favorite songs of hers? You spent three years listening to Amy Winehouse. What do you find yourself listening to over and over again? There's a piece. There's only a small moment in the film where she's writing a song and I managed to find someone from all of the research that I did. I found this 20 minute piece of music of Amy writing a piece of writing a song with her guitar, working out the song, working out the lyrics. And there's a tiny moment of that, which is one of my favorite things that I listen to when I'm working. And it's just her fiddling around on a guitar, playing with the sounds and trying to come up with come up with a song, actually creating something. In terms of Finnish songs, there's a performance of a Donny Hathaway song. We're Still Friends, which is not one of Amy's, but it's beautiful. It's amazing. And it comes at a very pivotal moment in the story. So no one really has heard this song before. And when we screened the film around the world, that was the one that a lot of people said, how can I get hold of that? Where do I, you know, where can I get a copy of this song? So We're Still Friends by Donny Hathaway is is a beautiful vocal performance that she gives. But of her own songs, I'm a big fan of tears drawing their own. And then Love is a Losing Game is in the film as well, which is again, it's almost like an acapella. There's one guy with a guitar there and she sings it again at one of the lowest points of her life. And really, that song Love is a Losing Game almost sums up her life. You know, that could have been a title of the movie. Do we know if any new albums will be coming out? I don't know if there's any new albums. But what what has happened is because of the kind of popularity of the film around the world, a lot of people and because all of the performances in the film that we found and that we used, they serve a narrative purpose, but they're also they're all live and their versions of of songs which no one's sort of heard before, particularly from her first album, Frank. So actually, what's happened because of the kind of demand that a kind of soundtrack album is out, which coincides with the songs which we featured in the film. So those those versions, including the Donny Hathaway song are on it. Amy is really getting great reviews and people love it. How are you dealing with the new fame? I've been around a while, you know, it's one of those things when you kind of make films for 20 years and people go, oh, is this your first film? You know, I've been around a long time. So, you know, I'm it's all good fun. You know, I've had films that people have liked and I've had films people haven't liked and you learn to just take the rough with a smooth and and and when it's good, enjoy it. You know, I'm so you're savoring every moment of this. There isn't there isn't anything. How about having a talk to David Feldman? I mean, this is obviously the high point. This is it. I I'm I'm stopping now. There's nothing. It isn't I'll never I'll never wash my headphones for my iPad ever again. Asif Kapadia is the director of Amy. Go see it in theaters near you. Buy it on Amazon. It's at film festivals everywhere. Thank you so much and congratulations. Thank you. Great talking to you. Great talking to you. This is the David Feldman Radio Network.