How should Amy Winehouse be remembered? The most gifted breakthrough British pop star of the 2000s would have been 40 next week. Instead, she died in 2011 aged 27. Her downfall took place under callously voyeuristic circumstances. The media turned her ruination with drink and drugs into entertainment. She was scrutinised minutely but wrongly, as if in a distorting mirror. Meanwhile, the songs that she wrote about her suffering were not cathartic in that they failed to alleviate it.
She only made two albums, yet her musical legacy is immense. Her songs move like a free spirit through different eras of popular music, stretching back to jazz and reaching into rap. Her singing is immediately recognisable, needling, cajoling, emphatic, greedy, tender, sorrowful — a voice that demands attention and lavishly rewards it. She is both motive and challenge to the singers who have followed her. “Because of her, I picked up a guitar, and because of her, I write my own songs,” Adele said in 2016.
If her decline was the essence of tragedy, then in her short life of extremes she also embodied the spirit of comedy. The comic side of her character was as forthright as her loud peal of laughter. Her image was larger-than-life, a beehived composite of Betty Boop and Ronnie Spector magicked into being with a mascara wand and singular imagination. She was witty, clever, ribald and charismatic.
A persistent streak of humour runs through her songs. “The only time I hold your hand/Is to get the angle right,” is her bravura description of unsentimental sex with an ex-boyfriend in the track “In My Bed”. It appears on her aptly titled debut Frank, released in 2003 when she was just 20, a precocious display of talent that brought her fame in Britain.
Three years later its successor Back to Black made her into an international superstar. This 16mn-selling colossus was inspired by a break-up. There is anguish in it but also comedy, as with the blackly funny, twist-in-the-tale track about infidelity, “You Know I’m No Good” — the twist being that the man who the singer is cheating on doesn’t care about being betrayed. He also, she realises with a lurch, has been cheating on her.
“Whenever I write anything sad, I never just let it be that way. I put a moral or a punchline in it,” Winehouse says in the posthumous documentary film Amy, which came out in 2015. In the same film, her regular producer and songwriting partner Salaam Remi explains how he conceived his role when she was first sent to his Miami studio as a London ingénue with the sketches of the tracks that would end up on Frank. “What I allowed her to do,” he says, “was put her wit into her songs.”
The tree facing her former house in Camden, north London, is now a shrine to the singer. It is a London plane in a large, leafy square that attractively splits the difference between grandness and ordinariness. Winehouse’s old home, which she purchased in 2010, the year before her death, is at the grand end of the scale, a semi-detached 19th-century villa.
Her impromptu memorial tree has bamboo fencing wrapped around its lower trunk. In the slats of this fencing are numerous commemorative tokens: bunches of dried-up flowers, hair bands, padlocks, a bra, drawings. An irreverent mourner has added a pair of cigarette butts to the medley of objects: nicotine was among Winehouse’s vices.
“I know your died [sic] but people still care about you and I’m one of the people,” reads a letter from a girl in a child’s handwriting. Her “fav” song is “Rehab”. “You never knew me and yet you managed to touch me in a way that doesn’t make sense,” a 31-year-old called Emily from Nashville states in another letter. “Your artistry is so unmatched with this generation,” writes a 21-year-old visitor to the UK called Adrian. A drawing of the singer surrounded by hearts carries the legend: “Remembering Amy Queen of Camden!”
Remembering Amy is an emotional need, and also an industry. She remains a big commercial draw: Back to Black notched up its 127th week in the UK top 40 on its 15th anniversary in 2021. She died without a will. Her estate is controlled by her divorced parents, Janis Winehouse-Collins and Mitch Winehouse. A book marking what would have been her 40th birthday, Amy Winehouse: In Her Words, brings us family photos, teenage journals and poems. Its proceeds are going to the Amy Winehouse Foundation, set up in 2011 to help vulnerable young people.
The flood of posthumous albums that has been observed with other prematurely dead icons has not occurred. Jimi Hendrix, who also died at 27, released four albums in his lifetime but has had more than 80 appear under his name since his death. In contrast, Winehouse’s slender body of work while alive, just the two albums, has been joined by only one compilation of previously unheard recordings, 2011’s Lioness: Hidden Treasures. But the management of her legacy has not been without controversy. A planned tour featuring a hologram of the singer was shelved in 2019 amid accusations of exploitation.
She is not an easy figure to commemorate: there is as much or more to lament in her curtailed life as to celebrate. She suffered from bulimia from her late teens and spoke of experiencing periods of depression. Her hedonistic character took a dangerous turn with her catastrophic relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, the dismally ill-suited love of her life, a fringe music-industry chancer who introduced her to crack cocaine and heroin.
Their volatile relationship furnished Winehouse with the real-life material for her masterpiece Back to Black. Its inspired reimagining of classic soul, torch song, hip-hop and 1960s girl groups dignified the chaos and squalor of their actual time together. This folie à deux was conducted amid a media feeding frenzy.
Her tempestuous marriage to Fielder-Civil was over by the time she died and she had quit hard drugs. Despite a shambolic show in Belgrade, her last headline gig, there were hopes that she could resurrect her music career. That might have led to the happy ending she anticipated when she told her singing idol Tony Bennett after recording a duet with him a few months earlier that their collaboration “was a story to tell my grandchildren”.
But the scales tipped inexorably, sickeningly, towards tragedy. The coroner ruled that alcohol poisoning was the cause of her death. The sight of her corpse being stretchered in a body bag from her house resembled a crime scene.
Winehouse’s childhood home lies seven miles to the north of Camden Square, in the suburb of Southgate. Her mother was a pharmacist and her father worked in a double-glazing company before retraining as a taxi driver. Both sides of her family are Jewish. She lived with her mother after her parents separated when she was nine. In Amy Winehouse: In Her Words, we learn that she gained the nickname “Nooge”, a Yiddish-derived word “that means she was always pushing the boundaries”.
She moved to a flat in Camden after signing to Island Records in 2002. The district is London’s indie-rock heartland. Tattoo parlours, pubs, clubs and venues are scattered around its sprawling clothes market and the surrounding streets. The hard-drinking, weed-smoking, music-loving, vintage-clothes-wearing, tattoo enthusiast Winehouse — her first piece of body art, an image of Betty Boop, was inked on her when she was 15 — took to the grungy pleasure zone as though to the manner born.
There are numerous memorials to the vanished “Queen of Camden” in her old stamping-ground. The best of several murals is a massive portrait on a brick wall at the back of one of her favourite pubs, The Hawley Arms. She is shown in a recumbent posture, head propped up by a hand, with lustrous black hair arranged like ice-cream swirls. Apostrophised by black cat eyeliner, her gaze looks away from the spectator to the street beyond.
Painted on the pub’s brickwork above the mural is the logo for Jack Daniel’s whiskey and its slogan “Make It Count”, a glib comment viewed from the vantage point of Winehouse’s alcoholism. JD’s was among her favourite drinks. Another was a cocktail called the Rickstasy, a mixer-free skull-crusher involving various spirits. The fans who visit The Hawley Arms often ask for one. “All the time,” says a bar staff member called Melissa who has worked there for four years. “But we don’t make it, we never have. We would never make it.”
Over the road is a section of Camden Market housed in what was once a labyrinthine complex of horse stables. In her pre-fame days Winehouse worked in the market, first at a stall selling candles and then, less aromatically, in a fetish clothes store. A life-size statue of her stands there now, erected to mark her 31st birthday, its arms covered in colourful friendship bracelets attached by pilgrims. It conveys how diminutive she was, even with the vertiginous aid of high heels and beehive hair.
Two Parisians, Marie and Anaïs, ask me to take a photo of them next to the monument. Neither is a fan, although Marie’s absent son is. The Amy statue gazes beyond us as we talk, a look of boredom on its metal features. The effect is jarring but apt. Winehouse had a short attention span and was easily bored.
In The Good Mixer pub, I happen across an authentic link to her Camden life. This is the watering hole where she met Fielder-Civil while playing pool, favoured sport of wastrels and one at which she excelled. It turns up in her majestic ballad “Love Is a Losing Game” with its resigned refrain: “And now, the final frame”. An illustration of her with a pool cue hangs over the door to the ladies’ toilets. I narrowly lose a game to Andy, a silver-haired man in dark glasses with a Liverpudlian accent. He tells me that his brother, now deceased, used to be one of Winehouse’s minders.
Dale Davis is a session musician who plays in The Amy Winehouse Band, a tribute act featuring members of her live band. He used to be her bassist. He remembers speaking to her over the telephone on the night she died.
“When she rang me on the Friday, she said, ‘Oh Dale, I’m a little drunk’, and I said, ‘Well, you don’t sound it.’ Then we just had a normal, loving conversation,” he recalls. The call ended with them making plans to meet the following evening. “I love you,” he told her, “I love you more,” she replied, and hung up. “Those were my last words from her,” he says.
Davis joined her touring band in 2003 and became its bandleader the following year. He was instantly struck by her talent. “There weren’t many vocal tricks per se, but she was a great singer in how she told a story with such conviction and clarity,” he says. “She had that incredible ability to be singing with an orchestra in one song and then just being with a guitar on her own in the next.”
Winehouse attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School, but her singing style was mostly self-taught. When Frank came out, she was briefly labelled the “British Badu” due to the influence of one of her favourite artists, the innovative US soul and R&B singer Erykah Badu. But classic jazz had a stronger pull on her imagination.
While growing up she immersed herself in the work of Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday. From them she learnt to hone her exceptional gift for phrasing. In the way of jazz vocals, she treated her voice as a musical instrument. When she first heard Vaughan in her late teens, Winehouse was struck by how the 1950s singer sounded “like a reed instrument — like a clarinet”.
“A lot of people, especially in the pop environment, tend to sing the same every night, but she had a very improvisational attitude towards her music,” Davis says. “As a performer she would take songs and over the next three to four nights she would change melodies and form new versions of what she’d been singing. She was a musician’s singer.”
She was also a writer. “Language is Amy’s strong point,” states a primary school report in Amy Winehouse: In Her Words. Her English teacher at Sylvia Young thought she would become a novelist. “She was always writing stuff,” Davis says. He ventures to place her alongside singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.
He thinks that she was “an incredible singer from 2003 to the end of 2007”. The deterioration was rapid. I saw her play a vibrant gig in Camden in November 2006 when she flourished songs from the newly released Back to Black like a winning hand and bantered with watching friends and family. Just a year later, I witnessed a distressingly awful one in a Birmingham arena during which she came on late, broke down during songs, sang unintelligibly, got progressively more intoxicated and cursed the audience.
In my zero-star review of the concert, I wrote that Davis and the rest of the backing band “wore the expressions of condemned men”.
“That was when things started to fall apart,” he says of the tour.
Tragedy and comedy became entangled in Winehouse’s downfall. Mercilessly chronicled in print and by an upstart generation of gossip websites, her misadventures were treated as a joke. Nicknamed “Wino”, the singer who liked to put punchlines in her songs found herself transformed into one. At the 2007 Brit Awards, presenter Russell Brand rolled her name around his mouth — “Amy Winehouse” — and spat out a gag: “Her surname’s beginning to sound like a description of her liver.”
“Everything got much, much rougher in the 2000s,” says Sarah Ditum, author of the forthcoming book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties. “There was this desire for cruelty.”
Ditum argues that the decade gave birth to a new culture of intrusion, with troubled young female celebrities as its focal point. Traditional media contributed to its creation with reality television series and harshly judgmental talent shows such as Pop Idol. Another driving force was gossip websites such as Perez Hilton’s blog, launched in 2004.
“The gossip blogs brought a much more cut-and-thrust tone to things, much more savage,” Ditum says. “They were able to publish stuff that mainstream publications would not have.” Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’ mental breakdown were grist to the mill of this 24/7 scandal factory. So was Winehouse’s descent into addiction.
Her treatment in the media chimed with that of her friend Pete Doherty of indie band The Libertines, another notoriously druggy musician. But Winehouse faced a different type of scrutiny. Much commentary was directed at her body, not just as the ravages of addiction took hold but also earlier, when she was often described as “curvy”, “buxom”, a “Jewish princess”. In 2006, she was reported to have dropped four dress sizes due to people talking about her weight.
“She came up in the entertainment industry as a girl and very young woman at a time when there were minimal safeguards around sexualising young women and a very aggressive discourse around women’s bodies,” Ditum says.
Winehouse’s plight was compounded by her candour about her private life. She was open about mining it for her songs. “Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen,” she reckoned. Her uncensored way of presenting herself made her easy prey for a new and old media-conducted assault on traditional notions of privacy.
“Because of her personality, her background and her ideas about the kind of music she made, she was perfectly placed to be the fulcrum of the most extreme version of those forces,” Ditum says. “They fell on her at once.”
Viewed as tragedy, Winehouse’s death raises the question of blame. The Oscar-winning Amy, directed by Asif Kapadia (who also made the documentary Senna about the racing driver Ayrton Senna, who died in 1994) spread the load widely, from the singer’s own wilful character to heedlessness about her health on the part of those around her. Winehouse’s father Mitch came out of it badly, portrayed as dazzled by his daughter’s fame to the extent of being blind to its destructive consequences. He said afterwards that he suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of his depiction.
Amy was commissioned by Winehouse’s record label, Universal Music. Her estate riposted in 2021 with a television documentary pointedly called Reclaiming Amy. This reclamation continues with Amy Winehouse: In Her Words, which memorialises her in a positive way, as a loving and highly talented daughter who fell victim to addiction as though struck down by an unpredictable illness.
Competing interpretations of this brilliant but deeply flawed individual will continue for as long as she is remembered. Another version of her life is currently being filmed, a biopic called Back to Black directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. Meanwhile, the real Winehouse gets more distant with each passing year, like the drying tears that recur throughout Back to Black’s songs.
This is where we must turn for a balanced portrait of Winehouse, one in which the conflicting characteristics of comedy and tragedy are resolved — her work. In Back to Black’s title track, her finest song, desperate longing for the lover who has left is envisaged as chips pushed on to a single square as the roulette wheel spins, a metaphor that exists alongside bleaker meanings of depression or slipping into unconsciousness.
“The odds are stacked, I go back to black,” Winehouse sings, stretching out the last word as long as possible. She is telling us about loss, while allowing the faintest hope for the possibility of a win. Good songs cannot end badly, even if the stories they tell do. In her music at least, the singer managed to avoid bad endings. That is where the best memory of Amy Winehouse resides.
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop critic
‘Amy Winehouse: In Her Words’ (HarperCollins) is out now, with all author proceeds going to the Amy Winehouse Foundation
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