Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [2]
What was especially interesting about the performance was the way Winehouse handled her nerves – besides frequent sips taken from a cup at the edge of the stage. She stared down at the stage a lot, then looked up with a sneer or curled lip that evoked gum-popping, eyeball-rolling femmes from Ronettes to B-girls, gangsters’ molls to biker chicks. But there were also fleeting moments when she clearly checked out of her own performance: Her eyes would simply go blank, and she’d retreat behind them. Still, that voice – the sound of mysteriously missing teeth, Spanish Harlem stoops in summer and declarations of undying love – never wavered, and was never less than amazing.
Her true fans lap up all her contradictions, good and bad. Rarely has there been a more supportive fanbase than that enjoyed by Amy. She might sing a song about being just friends, but her relationship with her real fans is true love, despite reports of disgruntled fans at her winter 2007 UK tour.
She has successfully reinvented her image, too. When she first stepped under the spotlight, Amy was a young, fresh-faced Jewish princess. A protégée of Pop Idol guru Simon Fuller, she had a voice beyond her years and was pleasingly curvy and well behaved. Well, comparatively well behaved. Then, after her first album was released, Amy disappeared off the radar. She then returned as a slimmer, cooler and decidedly darker star. Covered in tattoos with a huge beehive and an unpredictable nature, she was a million miles from her former self. When a television host told her how much he had liked and got along with the ‘first’ Amy during his interviews with her on Channel 4’s Popworld, she laughed and said, ‘She’s dead.’
But is the old Amy really dead? ‘I’m a nice girl,’ she protests. ‘Everyone says I’m a bitch, but, like the stuff in the papers, it’s only the bad stuff. It’s not going to make the papers if I cook dinner for twelve of my best friends and we have a lovely night doing nothing but talking and laughing, know what I mean?
‘That’s really the kind of person I am. I’m just a little Jewish housewife really. It’s just that I’m working so much at the moment that it’s hard for me to look after my baby,’ she said, referring to her then boyfriend. ‘I had my first day off for so long the other day and all I did was stay home and cook all day for my boyfriend, my family, my dad, my manager, clean the house. That’s what I like to do.’
If a single song sums up the new Amy, it is, of course, ‘Rehab’. Here she was at her defiant, controversial and most outspoken best. Her first album might have been called Frank – in reference both to her hero Mr Sinatra and to the directness of her lyrics – but with ‘Rehab’ (which was taken from her second album) she was at her frankest. It was also one of those moments that any artist kills for: a moment that captures everything you’d want in a song. Her chant of ‘no, no, no’ became ubiquitous across the nation.
Amy is a paid-up subscriber to the school of thought that says if you analyse and discuss your magical talent you might risk losing it. However, she has expanded on how she came to write ‘Rehab’, and makes the process sound so simple. ‘I just sang the hook out loud as a joke. It was quite silly really,’ she shrugs. ‘I sang the whole line exactly as it turned out on the record! Mark [Ronson] laughed and asked me who wrote it because he liked it. I told him that I’d just made it up but that it was true and he encouraged me to turn it into a song, which took me five minutes. It wasn’t hard. It was about what my old management company wanted me to do.’
Can it really be that simple to write a song that combines a wonderfully infectious riff with cheeky lyrics that played into the twenty-first-century obsession with the relationship between celebrity, addiction and rehabilitation? We’d all be doing it if that were so. Perhaps it really is that simple, but only for those who occasionally are struck and blessed by a moment of genius.
Whether or not Amy deserves the title of genius has been the subject