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Stage and at V in August. September had seen her sing at the prestigious Mercury Music Prize awards in London for which she had herself received a nomination, along with other rising stars such as Franz Ferdinand, The Streets, Belle and Sebastian and Snow Patrol. It was good company to be amongst, even though she lost to Franz Ferdinand.
    Amy had also gone on two UK tours and she was now showing the world that she was an artist – and a woman – to be reckoned with. But now Island Records was asking: what next?
    Amy had begun to think about her second album, but what could she write about? What would inspire her? She wrote about the world as she experienced it after all? Her life, her friends, her loves, her disappointments. What would be next?
    She apparently found her answer at her local pub in Camden, the Hawley Arms, where she often played pool and listened to a lot of ’50s and ’60s music on the jukebox. There, in early 2005, she met a man who, quite literally, would change her life, Blake Fielder-Civil.
    Blake was Amy’s ideal type – ‘at least five nine, with dark hair, dark eyes and loads of tattoos.’
    Their relationship was turbulent from the offset and continued to be so for the intense six months that it lasted until Blake went back to his girlfriend. Amy later commented that she shouldn’t have got involved with him in the first place as Blake was involved with someone else ‘too close to home.’

    Mitch and Janis both talk to me about Amy’s relationship with Blake when they first met.
    ‘Well, she wasn’t dating him. They didn’t date,’ Janis denies.
    ‘No,’ Mitch comments. ‘He was seeing somebody else. What happened was that he [Blake] started to see Amy for the first time on a casual basis just after Frank came out. But, of course, after six months, the interest [in the album] started waning a little bit, so it seemed that Blake’s interest in Amy started to wane a bit … He wasseeing another girl … And, I saw him with Amy. We went out for a walk and he was in a pub across the road … I saw him in there and they were kissing and cuddling … there were hundreds of people in there.
    ‘I said, “Amy, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t show affection, but he’s somebody else’s boyfriend anyway and you really don’t want to be doing that in a room ….” I was quite sensitive about things like that. And she said, “Dad, you’re right.” So, we left and you know, that was really the first time that I saw him and he didn’t turn up again until Back To Black was No. 1.”’
    ‘She wrote a lot of those songs [about] him,’ Janis comments.
    ‘The second album?’ I ask.
    ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she confirms.
    ‘That’s why,’ Mitch interjects, ‘I don’t like to listen to it ….’

    Under pressure from her record company to get into a studio and record her second album, and heartbroken over Blake, Amy began to spiral out of control. Summing up that time, she said, ‘My ex went back to his girlfriend and I went back to drinking and dark times.’
    Island Records suggested that she needed to cut down on her drinking and Amy’s friends and family began to worry about her boozing and also the amount of weight she was losing.

    I ask Janis about that time during one of our discussions. I ask her when she first realized that her daughter was in trouble.
    ‘… She was losing weight,’ Janis murmurs. ‘… She really was. And … what Amy always does is deny … I would say, “Amy, why are you losing weight?” … I’d been informed that Amy was bringing up her food.’
    ‘She was bulimic?’ I ask.
    ‘Bulimic, yes … I can remember Amy saying to me that she’[d] got a great diet … “Well, you get the food and you chew it and get the taste of it; then you swallow the taste and spit it [the food] out.” And she even told Mitch that. “Look, Dad, there’s a really good diet…”’
    I’m very surprised to hear this story from Janis. I would imagine