Sounds of London: Music that defines the capital

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Southgate girl: Amy Winehouse is the daughter of a cockney cab driver

Native feeling: Lily Allen shops in Rough Trade, Notting Hill

Figurehead: Pete Doherty surfs the crowd in Trafalgar Square

Homeboy: David Bowie plays Beckenham, '69

The great revelation of recent British pop has been Amy Winehouse. The daughter of a cockney cab driver, she is the classic London deal, writing of the city she sees.

I met her in the winter of 2005, during the last weeks she could move about the capital unrecognised.

Sitting in a Camden Town tapas bar, she was a young star-in-waiting with a debut CD (Frank) that everyone loved. But Amy did not look as happy as one might expect.

Only when our small talk turned to London did her mood magically brighten. “Oh, I love this city! I love it. Wherever I go in the world, to land back in London is the best feeling. I get to see so many amazing places when I'm working, and I think, I could live here. But then I go, yeah, but I wouldn't be in London ...”

Frank was her diary of a torrid adolescence — she was just 19 when it was recorded — sung with all the funky poise of a jazz veteran and the glottal stops of a mouthy schoolgirl on the Piccadilly line. It was a fine piece of modern British R&B.

For all its retro US stylings, Frank could not have been made anywhere but in London in the 21st century. When I said that, she beamed.

“That is the best compliment you could pay to me. The city is really important to me. I've always been a really independent girl. From the age of 13 or so, I've always found my own way in the city and there's nothing I like more than to find another part that I didn't already know. It really fascinates me.”

Winehouse was raised in the north London suburb of Southgate. Her mother, who is from Brooklyn, and her East End father separated when Amy was nine. Winehouse came into pop after a spell as a singer with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra.

But she was already a showbiz kid, whose turbulent education had taken in a few stage schools.

One of these was the Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone; it's almost the Eton of the Pop Idol generation, having educated sundry Spice Girls, All Saints and members of S Club 7.

Winehouse, however, got expelled. “Well,” she ponders, “that is not a shit school, the Sylvia Young. They've got a reputation because they are the best. It's not a pop star factory; they channel your creativity and you learn to use it.

“That's what I did. For every precocious kid there were kids who really worked. They sent you out to work. Stage school is a job. You learn how to get the fuck on with it. I learned a lot of important things.”

But you didn't get along with it...

“No. But I've never been to a school that I came away happily from.”

Frank was a storyteller's album. There were graphic accounts of her sexual infatuations and star-crossed romances. But if she could seem self-absorbed, she was also observant.

A track called Fuck Me Pumps was a merciless portrait of women who prowl the clubs of London on their primal hunt for alpha males, like the girl whose dream is to become a footballer's wife (in a certain light she could pass for a hip-hop Jane Austen).

Then came her Back to Black album (2006) with its extraordinary opener Rehab, which was only too revealing of a fraught existence. Her music had grown wonderfully and her popularity rocketed.

But the corollary, in the new London of insatiable celebrity media and spiralling opportunities for self-indulgence, was more than Winehouse looked able to manage.

She has rarely spent a single day out of the headlines since then, and seldom has the news been edifying.

Back in the Camden tapas restaurant, before all this happened, her steely resolve seemed to be winning.

If Winehouse looks Amazonian in some photographs, she is quite petite in person. Yet she has a cold stare that you guess she can deploy to deadly effect.

In 2005 I found her very bright, though not in a systematic way, as if she had learned so much so quickly that the patterns had not yet come together in her head.

She was a forthright young woman and her manner was direct. By our interview's end, however, she appeared preoccupied by private anxieties. “You learn as you go along”, she sighed, to no one in particular.

It's true she was a nervous interviewee, but tense and self-critical rather than hostile. I'm glad we met before the smoking ban came into force, for much of her conversational drama was signalled by urgent searches in her bag, the pause for a nicotine hit, the fierce exhalations afterward.

If you had to give up either singing or song writing, I asked her, which would it be? She picked up her fork and impaled a meatball.

“I'd cut my throat out. Singing is singing. If I couldn't sing a song and express it, I'd be fucked.

“I've always sung. I always assumed that everyone could sing; that that's what they do when they're happy or sad. And when I was growing up and having the pain and suffering that teenagers do, I could sing like a little bird. I can't sing like that no more. I'm too complacent. They gave me too much free shit.”

She sighed even more deeply and stared at the table. What do you mean they gave you too much free shit?

“They put it all on a plate. I feel like I've got nothing to work for sometimes, even though I've got lots to work for.”

But of course you have, surely? She lights another cigarette. “Yeah. Anyway ... Amy, chill the fuck out, I'm sorry.”

Do you feel pressurised by all the weight of expectation around you?

“A little bit. But that's myself. No one could be a harsher critic than myself. I am feeling that pressure. There are days when I wish I could just take a break from my own head.”

We talk about the London music business. She blows out hard, hot cigarette smoke. She suddenly seems 65 years old. “There's nothing real in it, nothing real. Which really drains me. But you know what? It's gotta be done.”

She gave me a tired, trouper's smile and walked back out into Parkway, where that big old-fashioned pet shop advertised its parrots, monkeys and other exotic but imprisoned creatures.

Extract and selections from Paul Du Noyer's In the City: A Celebration of London Music, published by Virgin Books on 15 July.

Postcode pop stars

Lily Allen

Humour, wordplay and a feeling for her native city are the key to her songs, delivered in the everyday speech of a young Londoner, not quite posh and not quite street.

At her best she has a touch of Kirsty MacColl, especially in her female way with a withering dismissal (Friday Night, Knock Em Out).

She can also do Ian Dury oompah (Alfie) and streetwise calypso (LDN) and clinches it all with a number rhyming “Kate Moss” with “weight loss”.

Pete Doherty

BY 2002, the tall, poetic Doherty was the decadent figurehead of a druggy Whitechapel rock scene.

The Libertines could easily be seen as inheritors of a distinctly English tradition, from the Beatles to the punkier edge of Britpop, with a romantically Dickensian taste for London town, so deep that they bestowed their hip approval on dear old Chas and Dave.

Dizzee Rascal

Like Burlington Bertie, Dizzee Rascal comes from Bow. So does his fellow grime star Wiley.

Two performers from the same neighbourhoods that gave us Vera Lynn and the Small Faces, they were the first to represent this East End movement.

The names of grime acts present another picturesque litany: Crazy Titch, Lady Sovereign, Scratchy, Tinchy Stryder.

One could imagine them on a yellowing playbill outside Wilton's Music Hall.

David Bowie

He moved to a bigger pad in Beckenham, a rambling Victorian pile in Southend Road named Haddon Hall.

Here he lived with his new American wife Angie ... The newlyweds went up west at nights, to a nightclub in Kensington High Street called the Sombrero.

Angie believes its largely gay, fashion-world clientele provided David with his first real community.

These people were rehearsing the 1970s aesthetic, its glamour and decadence, before anyone else. They were all the young dudes.

They were Bowie's next few records, what the west London mods had been to Pete Townshend.

The Clash

The Westway has been called, by JG Ballard, “a stone dream that will never awake”.

He saw in this elevated road a fragmentary vision of the futuristic London that we failed to build.

But its promise of speed and freedom is apparent only to the motorists.

To the Clash it became a symbol of oppression, of urban dread, riot and confrontation.

London Calling: 15 capital classics

The African Messengers
Highlife Piccadilly (1958)
Invigorating instance of the immigrant sounds that were, post-war, seeping into the wider city's consciousness.

David Bowie
The London Boys (1966)
Bow Bell sounds a mournful note across the London rooftops, and life for the runaway mod is far from sweet — a fine little Soho melodrama.

The Kinks
Waterloo Sunset (1967)
Perverse not to nominate this song — but it's worth investigating the lesser- known Berkeley Mews, Denmark Street, Shangri La et al...

The Faces
Debris (1971)
East Ender Ronnie Lane locates his saddest love song by the Blitz-era rubble that hosts the Sunday morning market.

Ralph McTell
The Streets of London (1974)
Began as The Streets of Paris but was later switched.

The Jam
In the City (1977)
All the pent-up sense of possibility that London can present to the energetic newcomer, compressed into two minutes twenty seconds.

Squeeze
Up the Junction (1979)
An evergreen contender for All-Time London Favourite — but then who needs to choose?

Smiley Culture
Cockney Translation (1984)
A service to Rastafarian travellers in the East End: Smiley lists linguistic differences that “Terry, Arthur and Del-Boy” may have with “Winston, Lloyd and Leroy”.

Pet Shop Boys
West End Girls (1985)
Tennant and Lowe return obsessively to themes of London — this was the first and most famous example.

Elvis Costello
London's Brilliant Parade (1994)
A fuller portrait of his hometown — both emotionally and geographically — than the better-known (I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea.

Nick Cave
Brompton Oratory (1997)
Erotic obsession meets religious majesty in the beautiful interior of a Kensington church.

Dizzee Rascal
Stand Up Tall (2004)
A defiant Eastside brag by a compulsive celebrant of the city's harshest streets.

Adele
Hometown Glory (2007)
The soul-inflected singer-songwriter ponders her London, concluding that it's the people she's met who are the wonders of her world.

Blak Twang
Champagne Lifestyle (2008)
Sardonic observations on West End clubbing from an Arsenal-loving Sex Pistols fan who has given hip hop a convincing London accent.

Saint Etienne
London Belongs to Me (2008)
From under a willow tree at Regent's Park, from Camden Town via Parkway, a shimmering recollection of one romantic day.

 

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