June 27, 2012 9:29

Mitch Winehouse: 'Amy wrote 'Rehab' in just three hours'

Excerpt from Amy Winehouse's father's memoir reveals his daughter's relationship with Mark Ronson

Photo Gallery: Amy Winehouse
Photo: Pa Photos

Mitch Winehouse has revealed that Amy Winehouse wrote the track 'Rehab' in just three hours.

In an excerpt taken from his memoir, Amy, My Daughter published in Rolling Stone, the late singer's father recounts her first meeting with producer Mark Ronson and their early work on the tracks that would form her seminal album 'Back To Black'.

"She told [Ronson] about the time at my house after she'd been in hospital when everyone had been going on at her about her drinking. 'You know they tried to make me go to rehab, and I told them, no, no, no,'" the excert reads. It continues:

'That's quite gimmicky,' Mark replied. 'It sounds hooky. You should go back to the studio and we should turn that into a song.' She'd told me before she was planning to write a song about what had happened that day, but that was the moment 'Rehab' came to life.

He then recalls how Ronson suggested she gave the track a "Sixties girl-group sound" to give it a "jangly feel". He wrote: "Amy was unaccustomed to this style – most of the songs she was writing were based around jazz chords – but it worked and that day she wrote 'Rehab' in just three hours."

The book Amy, My Daughter, which is published tomorrow (June 28), also contains a collection of personal letters and handwritten notes, many of which were sent to her dad while she was away on tour.

The late singer's parents are currently in talks to build a life-size bronze statue of Winehouse at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, London.

The venue was where the singer last performed in public with her goddaughter Dionne Bromfield shortly before her death in July last year. The proposed memorial would be placed on the first-floor balcony of the venue.

Winehouse's house was recently put up for sale by her family for £2.7m. The street outside the three-bedroom house in Camden was turned into a shrine for the late singer after her death.

Her relatives have said they placed the house on the market as it would be inappropriate for any of them to move into it. There had been suggestions that the property could be used as the headquarters for the Amy Winehouse Foundation, a charity set up in the singer's memory that will fund causes close to the her heart, including a new performing arts scholarship to Sylvia Young Theatre School where she herself went as a teenager.

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