Amy Winehouse singing at Bar Solo in 2006

On the 10th anniversary of her death, father Mitch recalls how Amy Winehouse went from family sing-songs to filling arenas. By Dan Carrier

With a decade passed, the pain of looking back is softened by the memories of times shared with his daughter.

Today (Friday) will be a tough day for all who loved the singer Amy Winehouse – the tenth anniversary of her untimely death – and not least for her father Mitch.

Unsurprisingly, Amy had a childhood full of song – stemming from a family with a rich musical legacy.

“I grew up in the East End. Nobody had TVs, but both my grandparents had pianos and my uncle played the accordion,” he recalls.

It meant when Mitch and Amy’s mum Janis married, they created a similar atmosphere.

Mitch Winehouse returns to Camden Town this week

“Our house was always full of people. My mum Cynthia was very social and Amy was dedicated to her,” he says.

“Looking back, when I was a child, the same sort of age Amy was when they looked after her, they were still young women. They were hairdressers in a salon on Commercial Street and when it was quiet they’d put on the radio and dance to Bill Haley and Elvis. They never changed.”

Post-war London was rocking with different sounds, from the big bands and trad jazz and then on to skiffle, rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Amy’s grandmother Cynthia soaked it up and passed it down.

“My mum’s boyfriend was Ronnie Scott for as time,” recalls Mitch.

“There were rumours after Amy became known that my Mum was a jazz singer – she wasn’t, she had a terrible voice. She and Ronnie would go to the Oxford and St George Youth Club and listen to bands, so we had this influence in our family.

“It was a wonderful, and when we made our home together, we did the same for Amy and her brother Alex. That was the environment she grew up in.”

Mitch saw first hand the joy music brings to people, from those old family sing songs in days gone past to watching his own daughter perform for thousands of people. It means he is also all too aware of the issues over inequality of access to music tuition.

“Amy grew up during a time when there weren’t music lessons at school. When the government make cuts, the first thing to go is the music and the arts. They do not realise that if they take that out of peoples lives, everything else suffers,” he says.

Amy’s thirst for the performing arts led her to seek tuition elsewhere.

“She asked if she could go to a weekend stage school and through that she got some bits and pieces, performing and acting,” recalls Mitch.

“She was singing all the time, but it all really started when she joined Sylvia Young’s Theatre School.”

What really pushed her into a world of music was, perhaps surprisingly, her academic ability. Amy was reading by the age of three, and doing advanced maths with her mother by ten.

Mitch said she found school “boring”, as she didn’t feel pushed enough in lessons. It meant music came as a release – and then she heard about the famous Sylvia Young’s.

“She was 11, and her teachers told me she was disruptive, but not so much in a bad way – they all loved her,” said Mitch.

“She came to us and said she wanted to go to Sylvia Young’s, so we said if you behave yourself for the next six months, we’ll think about it. It cost a lot of money and so it was going to be hard.”

But Amy’s parents did not need to find the huge fees required. “Amy applied herself and got a scholarship – which is almost impossible there,” says Mitch – and her early teens saw her obvious talent become more apparent.

“She was not overly confident, and there were times when things got on top of her and she felt she was not capable or clever enough – but none of that was true, and those feelings were all self-inflicted,” he adds.

“She said if she didn’t become a singer, she wanted to be a roller-skating waitress.”

Her time at Sylvia Young’s saw her become lead vocalist for the National Youth Jazz Orchestra.

“By the age of 16, she knew she wanted to be in music but she did not think her voice was very good,” says Mitch.

“She mainly wanted to write songs. Singing was not pre-eminent in her mind, it was about writing and composing. But she then went for an audition at Universal and she sung All My Loving, accompanying herself on the guitar. They all fell off their chairs.”

Listening to her catalogue of music, Mitch recalls the gigs that stood out, and the moments of magic he saw.

“Tony Bennett once said to me there are five of the greatest female singers: Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Amy, and that’s in no particular order. If her music came out today, you wouldn’t say it was old fashioned. It is timeless. Beautiful music is beautiful music, no matter when it was written or performed.”

Yet behind the unmistakable make-up and beehive, Amy could hide her nerves.

“Amy was very shy,” her father says. “I never had any problem getting up and singing, but believe it or not, she found it hard. I remember once I was singing at my best friend’s sister’s wedding. By then, Amy was famous, and she was there.

“They said to her, after I’d finished, give us a song, Amy. They asked her to do a number and she was visibly nervous. She was okay singing in front of 10,000 strangers, but when it was family and friends, she got the nerves badly.”

Her success came at a time when she offered something fresh to other British female vocalists.

“She was different. She was outspoken, she looked fabulous. She was Cockney. People warmed to her,” says Mitch.

“She did not sing like others who were popular at the time, people like Dido or Martine McCutcheon. They were quite bland in comparison. She came along and she sang in a different way. People remember where they were when they first heard her.

“And that’s something.”