The name hovers over everything, but it takes a few minutes before someone pronounces it: Amy. It’s Mitch Winehouse who starts it. And for the audience at the press conference, that’s a relief. Because nobody needs to believe that so many media people would have come to the Wavehouse Studios in Fürth or would have connected via stream if the invitation had said: The Fürth big band boss Thilo Wolf has an album full of Cole Porter street hits recorded by some white-haired London sideline singer, the first sentence of which Wikipedia writes: “Mitchell Winehouse (born December 4, 1950 in London) is a former British taxi driver.” It only gets exciting with the second sentence from the internet dictionary: “He is the father of the singer Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011 …” Amy Winehouse: Superstar, drama queen, drug corpse – as this trinity she staggers through the pop world as a glamor ghost since her alcohol poisoning ten years ago.
Double pointing: Mitch Winehouse (right) and Thilo Wolf together in Fürth.
(Photo: Sascha Pöltl)
And the father? Not someone like Britney Spears’ Head of Hell. But wasn’t this Mitch the cold guy who left her in the lurch, left her to the wrong (drug) friends and to death, as the popular documentary “Amy – the Girl Behind the Name” put it in 2015? Mitch Winehouse will say “The Stupid Movie” a little later without being asked and paint a completely different, warmer picture of his family. But first he says: “My daughter loved Cole Porter. And I showed him to her.” With this he makes it clear: Without him, Mitch, no Amy as we know her, as the one who brought jazz and soul back into pop (as you know, thanks to the help of retro sound masters Mark Ronson and Gabe Roth ). Yes, he explains, he definitely had an influence on his daughter’s work. “At least I’m a better singer than your mother.” Sometimes he advised Amy, who was not a trained singer, on breathing techniques and key changes; and one of his many conversations with her about withdrawal, she quickly noted and made a world hit: “Rehab”.
Mitch Winehouse shouldn’t come across as unsympathetic. He’s honest (“I couldn’t listen to Amy’s records until two years ago because I had to cry.”), Chats easily from the stool, he jokes, and he actually sings routinely, freshly and casually like the old crooners: “Me was so good as a singer that I became a taxi driver, “is how he comments with a musician joke about his early years in London, when everyone prefers pop from them Beatles when he wanted to hear his beloved jazz songs.
“He pays most of the fee”
Thilo Wolf also came across Mitch because of Amy. Respectively through his book “My Daughter Amy”, which the musician from Fürth read while on vacation in Miami. He discovered that Mitch had recorded two big band albums himself, he listened, thought they were “brilliant”, wanted to bring the singer to Germany, wrote an email, went to his concert in Prague and: “It just worked.” Mitch Winehouse can only confirm that when asked why he agreed to Wolf: “He drove the furthest. He pays the most fee,” he joked, and became serious: Wolf was a “wonderful pianist”, his busy one Ensemble “the best swing band in Germany”, it is an “honor” to play with them. He had worked with so many musicians who did not approach the standards with such intelligence and respect, which this time “not by default” were thrown down.
Wolf, the 54-year-old jack-of-all-trades (30 albums, four musicals, his own TV show on BR for twelve years) employed five arrangers for “Swinging Cole Porter”, including himself. They have rewrote the thousands of times interpreted, partly cemented by Frank Sinatra tracks (“I Get A Kick Out Of You”) in a very smart way. Roger Cicero’s big band leader Lutz Krajenski turned “I Concentrate On You” into a bossa nova that, according to Wolf, “can also be heard on the beach in Brazil”. In any case, the 14 songs go through well and are in a great mood.
These numbers from one of the most important songwriters are important to Mitch, also because of Amy. For them, “Concentrate” was magic, he says. Amy is in the room again. So does he benefit from her name? “My name is Winehouse, I had it before Amy,” says Mitch confidently. And then he tells how important it was for him that his daughter liked his singing, that she encouraged him to do his late debut album “Rush Of Love” in 2010, helped to select the songs and was there in the studio – ” it was difficult to work with, she was joking all the time “.
But of course her name is important. He stands above the “Amy Winehouse Foundation”, which he founded two years after her death and which helps children and young people with alcohol and drug problems. All proceeds from his projects as a singer or author flow into the foundation, he promises, “including Thilo’s profit if we sell ten million CDs”. The latter was a joke again. Even if he doesn’t profit from her pecuniary, Amy is in everything.