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the album,’ she said. ‘We were together when I’d written some stuff, but I don’t think he’s listened to some of the less flattering songs I wrote later on. He did say to me, “How would you feel if I did this to you?” But I was, like, “What? Someone you once loved has written a really nice album about you.” Then he said, “Amy, you called me gay!” So I told him, “I didn’t say you were gay, I just put the question out there. Are you?” He’s just being a baby because someone wrote an album about him. His mates are all probably really jealous.’
    Already, therefore, Amy was setting out her stall as an artistwho was willing to be open and honest in both her lyrics and in interviews. In an age when pop acts are often trained in how to be evasive and squeaky clean in their image, Amy’s frankness was a breath of fresh air.
    However, some wondered, would potential lovers feel quite so enamoured by her openness? ‘Yeah, I’m an open book,’ she agreed. ‘Some men do think I’m a psycho bunny-boiler. But I think that’s funny. If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you. There’s no point in saying anything but the truth. Because, at the end of the day, I don’t have to answer to you, or my ex, or… I shouldn’t say God… or a man in a suit from the record company. I have to answer to myself.’
    So we return to the contradictions that dominate the album. At one point she castigates a lover for being unfaithful but elsewhere she also criticises him for being too faithful. She complains about finding it hard to find a man but then also mourns that she so often picks the wrong man. Nor is it just the words that are at odds with each other. The music is wonderfully old-fashioned and yet the cultural references – text messages, Beastie Boys T-shirts – are firmly rooted in the twenty-first century. ‘It’s different. A break from the same old shit,’ she says of her own music. ‘It’s important to be a great singer. [But] it’s important for me to stand out and be different and do something different and say something different.’
    Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Frank is the fact that Amy has as good as disowned it. Her official website had the following to say about the album: ‘ Frank was her grand andsuitably blunt-speaking break-up record, and it won her a battalion of fans around the world, marking her out as one of the most distinct new voices in pop; confessional, elemental and with that rarest of combinations: humour and soul.’
    So far, so complimentary. However, as soon as she was unleashed in front of journalists, Amy said she was ‘only 80 per cent’ behind the album. ‘I can’t even listen to Frank any more – in fact, I’ve never been able to,’ she confessed to a shocked interviewer. ‘I like playing the tracks live because that’s different, but listening to them is another story.
    ‘Some things on this album make me go to a little place that’s fucking bitter. I’ve not seen anyone from the record company since the album came out. And I know why. They’re scared of me and they know I have no respect for them whatsoever.’
    It was the way that the album positioned her in a place she didn’t want to be that helped inform her distaste of it. For a start, it saw her bracketed by Katie Melua and Jamie Cullum. ‘People put us together because we have come out at the same time, but we’re nothing alike,’ she says. ‘I feel bad for Jamie, being lumped in with me and her. I’m a songwriter and she has her songs written for her. He must feel frustrated. She must think it’s her fucking lucky day. If anyone stands out straight from us, it would be her,’ she continues of Katie Melua, because she doesn’t write her own songs. ‘It’s not like she’s singing old songs like Jamie, she’s singing shit new songs that her manager writes for her.’
    Amazingly, she claims that not only does she not listen to Frank , but, ‘I’ve