Celebrity stories

What's it like being the parent of a singing sensation whose failings are documented each day on the front pages of the nation's newspapers?

Mitch Winehouse: voicing his hopes

If one person knows it's Mitch Winehouse. The 57-year-old London cabbie has gone from watching daughter Amy's name appear in lights to seeing pictures of her apparently smoking crack splashed across the tabloids.

But things are getting easier, he tells 94.9's Gary Crowley, and reveals that the music star's "latest drug, if you like" is a desire to start a family.

Amy Winehouse's musical success has never been in doubt.

But it has come at a price. Aged just 24, her lifestyle choices are a "definite problem", according to her father, triggering a high-profile stint in rehab and currently, an extended stay in a London hospital where tests are pointing to the lung disease emphysema.

Mitch maintains that Amy is no different to many twentysomething-year-olds. "When she went out for a drink, she went out and got plastered," he says in reference to her alcohol-fuelled exploits in some of Camden's music pubs.

crisis point

But things are improving, he insists, after last summer's crisis point when pictures of his daughter and husband Blake Fielder-Civil covered in blood and unexplained scratches were published to widespread alarm.

Amy pictured with husband Blake

"The choice she is making at the moment is to seek help and get help.

"Amy understands she can't continue her life the way she used to, and the way these things work is by gentle persuasion."

Where the singer and her beleaguered husband, still awaiting the outcome of a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice, go from here is for the pair to decide, maintains Mitch.

Tellingly, he's looking forward to being a grandparent.

"Amy wants to have a family but she can't do that while drugs are involved, and that's more important to her than anything else."

Mr Winehouse also confirmed the singer would perform at the Glastonbury Festival and Nelson Mandela concert this weekend.

Listen to the rest of the interview here, or catch it in full with all the music intact on Saturday's Gary Crowley show on BBC London 94.9. It's available on iPlayer for the next seven days.

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