Having seen The Amy Winehouse Band at Big Feastival this summer, I was delighted to learn they’re touring this autumn with some dates in easy reach of my home patch. Speaking with their musical director and long-time friend of Amy, the bass player Dale Davies, I wasn’t expecting to discover a further link to the region, but it turns out “I went to school in Oxfordshire. I was supposed to be born in Oxfordshire but there was an ambulance strike, so I ended up being born in Berkshire”. So Big Feastival was something of a homecoming? “I think it suited the band: great music, lovely people”.
For anyone who has yet to see Amy Winehouse’s original band (who have been performing together since 2016), if you’re a fan of her music, the show is a must-see. It’s also incredibly moving. Dale is such a warm and engaging person, and when we spoke over Zoom I felt able to confess that during their performance there were moments when I was welling up. “When Mitch saw the show two or three years ago, he cried as well”, he reassures me.
What made you decide to start performing together again?
I was reluctant to start off with. It's only when the Amy documentary came out in 2015 that I thought, ‘Okay, so I won't need to answer loads of questions’, and people kept telling me ‘if anyone's going to do it, you've got to do it’.
For the first couple of weeks something wasn't working in my head but then we were doing a show in Holland, and a daughter brought her mother who was dying. One of her wishes was to see the band before she died. At that point, I thought, it's really not about us, it's the audience.
Does it feel strange performing Rehab?
I see what you mean. It doesn't seem strange, but we have extended it [as performed now, doesn’t end on one emphatic note]. At the end, Amy wanted to go to rehab, so we've got to be respectful. You can't make it too crazy, but the thing is when that song first came out, Amy was so excited. Obviously, as circumstances changed, it almost became like a noose around the neck. The problem was, she was so prophetic. Songs like Wake Up Alone or Love is a Losing Game are heavy, heavy songs, aren't they? You're almost predicting your own outcome, but she was wonderful in that she had the ability to express what was going on in her head in a way that would touch everyone.
What's your favourite song to perform?
There's a couple: Moody's Mood For Love on Frank – just because of the musicality – and Me and Mr Jones. Moody’s Mood is a very difficult song, and she learned it in only one week. When we were on the road with Frank I said, ‘why don't you do Moody's mood’ and she said ‘it's pretty difficult’ but the following day we went to rehearsal and she sang it, so I thought, we're going to keep that in the set.
Me and Mr Jones is my other favourite because it’s got that rock and roll do-wop swing, and it is full of humour: it's just Amy. I've got that picture of her little mischievous mind working. She wasn't malicious, just mischievous. She could see things so quickly, her observational humour was amazing, and I could just imagine the laugh she was having with herself.
Tell me more about how you came to work with Bronte Shand as your lead vocalist.
I was doing an open mic night in Bristol with a friend, and as soon as Bronte opened her mouth I thought, wow! We had a singer before who was good, but there's only a few people can do this gig.
And she’s got a great look.
Yes, and I don't need anyone to look like Amy. The first person we had looked like Amy and after two weeks, I said I don't want that. The organisers had a certain vision which just didn't match mine.
Bronte grew up listening to Amy from the age of eight, so she was well versed, and they are similar in some ways. They're young girls and a bit quirky, but ultimately very talented.
How do you choose your set list?
Amy only had two albums: the third album was posthumous, so we don't play any tunes off that, because she never performed them. We’re fitting in Frank, all the ska stuff and covers, and Back to Black. The whole point is to stay as original as possible.
And have the songs evolved since you’ve been touring again?
Very slightly but we keep the same structures. The whole point is to play the music in the same way Amy did. If we were to go down the route where we play everything differently it wouldn’t really be authentic: it would be my interpretation, the band’s interpretation, of what we think Amy would have done.
Amy was very progressive. She might not have wanted everything to sound the same over the years. I just try and stick to the original to respect her and the way we performed with her.
Dale on Amy...
Amy was a tortured person. She was an amazing person, but her spirit was haunted. I've never seen one person take so much mental pain. She was very spiritual as well – that's something people don't realise.
When I first started working with her, I didn't realise she was a bulimic. I met her in 2003 at the Ten Room at the Hotel Café Royal in London. I was only there because I was playing – I could never afford to go in those places. She came in, and she looked at me and – it sounds weird – but her eyes were so bright that the light just seemed to come out of them. She was that sparky and that intelligent, she just had so much life: she was a beautiful person.
I went for the audition to work with her, and I didn't get it, because she fancied the bass player who was in before me. He did the first gig, but he was working with George Michael and Cliff Richard, and he wanted more money. They called the cheaper version: me.
We got on very well. After two weeks of working with her I thought, this is a special talent. Because I was quite a bit older than her I used to look out for her, and we became good friends; she was my son's godmother. She was a wonderful person, and she was the most pure, perfect artist in many ways. She was a great musician and a great songwriter and a great performer, as well. It was a shame they took away the guitar. I think that didn't help because she's such a fidgety character, so that just made her more fidgety, I think.
Amy was a very loyal person, if she loved you she was going to fall in love with you hard. She was dedicated to Blake, and in Back to Black [the 2024 film directed by Sam Taylor Wood] they tried to show it from Amy's perspective. That's why Blake might not come off so harsh because she didn't see him in that way, necessarily. Also [her grandmother] Cynthia's influence was a massive thing. There's a bit of fiction in the Back to Black movie, but the most important points are there.
There's a couple of things with a documentary [the 2015 film Amy by Asif Kapadia] I would like to have seen. They don't talk about Janice [Amy’s mother], and they don't talk about Cynthia. Last summer, [I met up with the] family at the Back to Black premiere. We don't speak often, but when we do, it's a nice scene.
Amy always said her mum was such a gracious person, a serene person. I love Janice, and people don't really talk about her, but it's because she's been through so much. She lost her husband a few years ago and it doesn't get any easier for her. It must be so hard because her and Mitch broke up when Amy was young, and then when Amy got signed she had developed multiple sclerosis. So on top of all the pressures that she had dealing with Amy, she's had to deal with her own stuff.
[If Amy was alive today] she’d probably be like any crazy 40-year-old woman – she'd be quite wacky. Amy was so quirky but a beautiful person. Listen, I don't think I've got any better over the years, so I'm still just as unhinged in many ways as ever and it's an occupational thing as well: you're a bit quirky going into the industry, and then you've got to deal with the industry, so that makes you quirky. I don't think Amy would ever be normal because of what's happened to over the years.
Some people are not meant to be around for long, but they do so much while they're here. People say it's a waste, but she'd been singing ever since she was a kid, so she’d have done more singing than a lot of people probably do in a whole lifetime. You just don't know when your time's coming. Six months beforehand, Amy had said to my ex-wife that didn't think she'd see 28.
The Amy Winehouse band will be performing at the Waterside Theatre in Aylesbury on 2 November, at the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon on November 18, and at the Town Hall in Cheltenham on 20 November.
For tickets bookings and information on other venues in the current tour, including Symphony Hall Birmingham (with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra) on November 14, visit theamywinehouseband.com
