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that hearing these kind of comments from your daughter would be a mother’s worst nightmare. I find it strange that Janis wasn’t more alarmed by Amy’s issues with her weight and her relationship with food.
    Janis continues, ‘… I believe the time we really knew she was throwing up was when she performed at a friend’s wedding and she was eating very well, but she was taking herself to the toilet and bringing it up. … It was heard … It all seemed to get out of control.’
    Certainly, some British papers also picked up on Amy’s changed appearance, commenting on the amount of time Amy was spending in the gym – and also on her alleged image issues since the release of Frank.
    When I ask Mitch about Amy’s weight loss, he says, ‘She had that [bulimia] for some time, but certainly I would say from the time of the first album [ Frank ] … 2004 and 2005. She lost a lot of weight, which thankfully she has put backon. She is like her Mum. Her Mum is slim and I am not ….’
    Mitch adds that he told Amy many times that she needed to do something about the bulimia, ‘And she did. … She sought counselling … My understanding of [that] is they are teaching people how to eat again. How to keep the food down. We all know that it is not about food at all. It is generally about self-image. It is about how people are feeling about themselves.’
    ‘… She clearly found difficulties in dealing with her success. There is no question about it and I think the bulimia was merely the first stage of what would become a serious problem.’
    I comment that bulimia and anorexia often stop the sufferer from menstruating. In many cases the sufferers don’t want to be treated as women; they want to be treated like little kids. Did he see Amy experiencing any of that?
    ‘I am not a doctor or a psychiatrist,’ he says. ‘But I would say that would be fairly accurate. She has found it difficult doing what she has done for so many reasons and maybe deep inside her mind, she would prefer it to be as it was. A lot less complicated when she was 14 years old …’

    In the end, Amy went to see an addiction counsellor. She told the Sun in 2006 that she’d asked Mitch if she ‘needed’ to go to rehab and he told her ‘No’, but to give it a try. Amy followed her Dad’s advice, but only stayed long enough to explain to the counsellor that she drank because she’d been in love and ‘fucked up the relationship’ before walking out.She believed if she couldn’t help herself, she couldn’t be helped at all.
    Drawing on her experiences, Amy wrote one of the songs with which she would become most associated, and also the one that would catapult her from being a ‘new jazz’ artist to a mainstream, internationally known and respected musician. It was ‘Rehab’. This track eventually appeared on Back To Black.
    With several songs already written, most drawing on her relationship with Blake, it seemed likely to Island and Raye Cosbert at the Camden-based Metropolis Music, who now managed Amy, that she might finally be ready to get into a studio and start recording again. Salaam Remi, who had worked on Frank, was on board and Island’s Darcus Beese decided to mix things up a bit and get a new co-producer involved. He introduced Amy to the much talked-about and eclectic DJ and producer Mark Ronson.
    Although Amy had initial reservations about working with Ronson, in fact, the couple had a lot in common – both were born in London (although Ronson subsequently moved to the States, where he was brought up), both are Jewish, and both have a great affinity to, and respect for, black music. The latter, in particular, shows through strongly on Back To Black.
    According to Ronson, Amy played him a whole load of ‘really cool’ music that she loved from the ’50s and ’60s, including the Shangri-Las, Tony Bennett and the Cadillacs. Inspired, Ronson sent her away and started messing around with a tambourine and a piano, creating