Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [3]
Often, artists are merely conduits for a range of human experiences and emotions that they might never have experienced themselves. Witness pop idol Gareth Gates singing ‘The Long and Winding Road’ at the age of just seventeen. However, in the confessional, touchy-feely twenty-first century, the public is increasingly receptive to artists who bare their souls on stage, singing about their own lives and experiences.
Robbie Williams sang about his own demons in numerous songs including ‘Strong’ and ‘Feel’, and Libertines frontmen Pete Doherty and Carl Barat portrayed their intense friendship in ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’. Concert halls are becoming more like therapy centres with the stage representing the couch and the audience becoming the shrinks. Amy fits as neatly as you like into this atmosphere. Her songs are nakedly about her own experiences. Her first album, Frank, was almost entirely about her relationship with one man, and, even when the songs deviated from that theme, their origin was still personal, such as about her father’s infidelity.
Her second album, Back to Black, was largely about her tumultuous relationship with her husband Blake Fielder-Civil. Again, there were also songs about other aspects of her personal life, including the aforementioned ‘Rehab’ and also ‘Addicted’, which is her warning to a flatmate to stop her boyfriend smoking Amy’s weed. While Amy’s fearlessly honest lyrics may be bad news for those in her life who have their dirty laundry aired over the airwaves, for the public it is a joy to behold an artist who actually is – in that embarrassingly overused phrase – keeping it real. When asked how she would like to be remembered, she replied, ‘As genuine.’ It’s hard to see her wish not being fulfilled, though here’s hoping we will not need merely to remember her for a long, long time.
‘I’m much harder on myself on the album than I am to any man,’ she says of Frank. ‘I know he couldn’t help being a certain way, but it still frustrated me, so I lash out with my lyrics. But I’ve never had a man come up to me and say, “You hate men don’t you?” I love boys. That’s my problem. That’s why I’m so messed up. My ideal man would not play games. I’ve met a couple of the most beautiful men in the world, but just because I don’t know where their heads are I’m like “You’re a headache – goodbye!” I just can’t be bothered.’
The honest, confessional nature of her songwriting is no creative accident but is rather a deliberate method and tactic on Amy’s part. It is also one that she has learned from her heroes. ‘I realised’, she once said, ‘that the Shangri-Las have pretty much got a song for every stage of a relationship. When you see a boy and you don’t even know his name; when you start talking to him; when you start going out with him; and then when you’re in love with him; and then when he f**king chucks you – and then you want to kill yourself.’
One can chart those different phases of a relationship through Amy’s discography. ‘A lot of music now is trying to be cool and, like, “Yeah, I don’t really care about you” – a really blasé attitude,’ she has said. ‘I think it’s much nicer to be in love, and throw yourself into it, and want to lie in the road for that person. It