Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [1]
Back on stage, Amy was dedicating songs to her imprisoned husband Blake. ‘I can only phone him before or after EastEnders,’ she told her audience during an insightful mood. Away from the shows, she signed up for yoga lessons and chuckled when she learned that controversial Big Brother star Jade Goody and her fella had done a photoshoot dressed up as Amy and Blake. It didn’t look half as ridiculous as one might have thought. Finally, the media reported with some shock the tumultuous news that Amy had got a taxi home after a concert in Brighton. ‘It was really strange,’ said a shaken eyewitness. Hold the front page!
From being blamed for poverty in Africa to her shock-horror south-coast taxi stunner, via burnt foil, Simon Le Bon and so much more, it had been a busy week in the land of Amy.
INTRODUCTION
She told us she was trouble, but we know that she’s so good. Amy Winehouse is one of the most talented, honest and newsworthy artists ever to emerge from the UK music scene. She has sold millions of records, won numerous awards and won critical respect from all ages, tastes and fanbases. Her songwriting skills and rich, soulful voice make her stand head and shoulders above the competition. However, in recent years Amy has become known less for her beautiful voice and wonderful songs than for her hedonistic, controversial lifestyle.
In one of her songs, Amy sings of dying a hundred times. She has certainly had more than her fair share of lives already. At just twenty-four years of age, the dynamic diva had won more musical awards, sparked more tabloid headlines and written more memorable, classic songs than most artists could hope to in a lifetime. Yes, her profile and success have often come at a price but, while that has sometimes been uncomfortable for her, for those who choose to read a book about her life story it is a happier prospect, promising as it does a story full of drama and incident.
Amy’s musical image defies stereotyping or pigeonholing. Her music, which was in the early days steeped firmly in the jazz tradition, has become an increasingly multifaceted affair, taking in funk, soul, R&B and hip-hop among many other genres. Just as her music defies pigeonholing, so does her wider image. In any given week, Amy can be plastered over the front page of a tabloid newspaper for her latest rumoured indiscretion, photographed in a celebrity weekly leaving a bar, have her music discussed in music weeklies and also be chewed over as a cultural icon in the pages of broadsheet newspapers and during highbrow chattery on posh radio stations. She is, all-round, a glorious mass of contradictions. As renowned music critic Garry Mulholland put it, Amy ‘Sounds Afro-American: is British-Jewish. Looks sexy: won’t play up to it. Is young: sounds old. Sings sophisticated: talks rough. Musically mellow: lyrically nasty.’
Her producer, Mark Ronson, expands on Amy’s multifaceted nature. ‘I’ve had the luxury of working with someone like Amy Winehouse, who’s such an iconic figure and makes it sound modern,’ he says. ‘Anyone else might have made it sound like some sort of retro pastiche.’ His assessment is, unsurprisingly, spot on. Her sound may be rooted firmly in traditional jazz and soul from deep back in the twentieth century, but the subjects of her songs have distinctly twenty-first-century themes: footballers’ wives, rehab, Beastie Boys T-shirts. As for Amy, she has described herself as everything from being ‘very maternal’ to ‘an ugly dickhead drunk’.
Then there is contradiction of her stage performances. First there is the supreme confidence: witness the proud, almost sneering expression she pulls during the opening a capella line of ‘Me and Mr Jones’. Yet she can also appear enchantingly vulnerable and uncomfortable on stage, forever readjusting her dress and – of course – often taking to the stage after more than a few drinks, surely a sign of nerves as well as any wider issues.
LA Weekly, writing up a concert she gave