Read Amy, My Daughter for Free Online Page A

course, was what he got.
    Amy sent her tape to him in a bag covered in stickers of hearts and stars. Initially Nick thought that Amy had just taped someone else’s old record because the voice didn’t sound like that of a sixteen-year-old. But as the production was so poor he soon realized that she couldn’t have done any such thing. (She had in fact recorded it with her music teacher at Sylvia Young’s.) Nick got Amy’s number from Tyler but when he called she wasn’t the slightest bit impressed. He kept calling her, and finally she agreed to meet him when she was due to rehearse in a pub just off Hanger Lane, in west London.
    It was nine o’clock on a Sunday morning – Amy could get up early when she really wanted to (at this time she was working at weekends, selling fetish wear at a stall in Camden market, north London). As Nick approached the pub he could hear the sound of a ‘big band’ – not what you expect to hear floating out of a pub at that hour on a Sunday morning. He walked in and was stunned by what he saw: a band of sixty-to-seventy-year-old men and a kid of sixteen or seventeen, with an extraordinary voice. Straight away Nick struck up a rapport with Amy. She was smoking Marlboro Reds, when most kids of her age smoked Lights, which he says told him Amy always had to go one step further than anyone else.
    As Nick was talking to her in the pub car park, a car reversed and Amy screamed that it had driven over her foot. Nick was concerned and sympathetic, checking that she was all right. In fact, the car hadn’t driven over Amy’s foot and she had staged the whole thing to find out how he would react. It was the choking game all over again – she never outgrew that sort of thing. I’ve no idea what in Amy’s mind the test was intended to achieve, but after that Amy and Nick really hit it off and he remained a close friend for the rest of her life.
    Nick introduced Amy to his boss at Brilliant!, Nick Godwyn, who told her they wanted her to sign a contract. He invited Janis, Amy and me out for dinner, Amy wearing a bobble hat and cargos, with her hair in pigtails. She seemed to take it in her stride, but I could barely sit still.
    Nick told us how talented he thought Amy was as a writer, as well as a singer. I knew how good she was as a singer, but it was great hearing an industry professional say it. I’d known she was writing songs, but I’d had no idea if she was any good because I’d never heard any of them. Afterwards, on the way back to Janis’s to drop her and Amy off, I tried to be realistic about the deal – a lot of the time these things come to nothing – and said to Amy, ‘I’d like to hear some of your songs, darling.’
    I wasn’t sure she was even listening to me.
    â€˜Okay, Dad.’
    I didn’t get to hear any of them though – at least, not yet.
    As Amy was only seventeen she was unable to sign a legal contract, so Janis and I agreed to. With Amy, we formed a company to represent her. Amy owned 100 per cent of it, but it was second nature to her to ask us to be involved in her career. As a family, we’d always stuck together. When I’d run my double-glazing business, my stepfather had worked for me, driving round London collecting the customer satisfaction forms we needed to see every day in head office. When he died my mum took over.
    By now Amy had a day job. She was learning to write showbiz stories at WENN (World Entertainment News Network), an online media news agency. Juliette had got her the job – her father, Jonathan Ashby, was the company’s founder and one of its owners. It was at WENN that Amy met Chris Taylor, a journalist working there. They started going out and quickly became inseparable. I noticed a change in her as soon as they got together: she had a bounce in her step and was clearly very happy. But it was obvious who was the boss in the relationship