Amy Winehouse_ The Biography - Chas Newkey-Burden [4]
Don’t expect Amy to stop reflecting her personal life in her music any time soon. ‘If I haven’t done it, I just can’t put it into a song. It has to be autobiographical.’ Songwriting for her is like keeping a journal; it’s almost her blog via the airwaves. ‘It’s an exorcism. I get all my stuff out there. If I didn’t have this medium to get my experiences across, I would be lost.’
Returning to those contradictions, where does Amy stand in musical tradition? She has been compared not just to many acts of yesteryear but a lot of today’s stars too. This includes male stars and, given their shared passion for drugs, Pete Doherty’s name is often mentioned in the same breath as Amy’s. The similarities are obvious, and Doherty has been a supportive friend to Amy and her husband Blake.
However, perhaps a more apt comparison would be with Oasis’s Noel Gallagher. He and Amy share a remarkable knack for songwriting and a tireless wit, and are both as exciting as interviewees as they are performers. What a breath of fresh air compared with the PR-trained acts who dominate the modern music scene! Also, Gallagher previously took drugs for England, but has since packed them in, without needing rehab to leave them behind. Despite the notoriety she has gained for her ruthless and hedonistic ways, it would be no surprise if tough Amy managed the same transition when the time is right for her.
It’s in the arena of interviews where the two are most similar. Indeed, if Amy is open in her lyrics, she is just as honest and frank during her interviews. People speak of ‘early disclosers’ and Amy is very much on the punctual side: she even once cut her stomach with a shard of broken mirror during one interview. While being quizzed about her self-harming, she was asked how it felt. Her reply was, ‘It feels like, “Ow, that fucking hurts.” It’s probably the worst thing I’ve done.’ Well, it’s a succinct answer.
She has described Dido’s sound as ‘background music – the background to death’ and said of pop princess Kylie Minogue, ‘she’s not an artist… she’s a pony.’ Elsewhere in interviews she once chimed up with the following sexual confession: ‘I would fuck Sting. I don’t know about ten hours, though!’ In the meantime, she can be just as unpredictable onstage as she is during interviews. As well as the notorious ‘you monkey c**ts’ incident at the Birmingham National Indoor Arena (NIA) in 2007, she has screamed ‘Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it!’ into her microphone during a concert in Cornwall, a performance that also featured her hitting her own head with her microphone in frustration at apparently forgetting her lyrics.
As a fan observed, ‘The gig became absolutely awful. Members of her entourage were coming on to the stage, obviously worried she couldn’t go on, and she would just shout “fuck off” at them. Everyone in the crowd just felt sorry for her.’ She has also punched a fan in the face and spat at another during a concert.
However, even though Amy is a self-confessed tomboy – she says she thrived educationally only in classes where there were few boys present for her to muck around with – the most apt comparisons must be made with other female stars. NME deputy editor Krissi Murison attempted to place her among the pack. ‘Acts like Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen have got opinions falling out everywhere, they don’t do what they’re supposed to, don’t act the way they’re supposed to. It’s what the world needed.’
Sophie Ellis Bextor took the discussion on a stage when she said, ‘When I made my first album, pop was a dirty word. Now you have people like Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen who have helped to make it more popular.’
Natasha Bedingfield echoes this: ‘When I started out, if you were blonde you would just do a little pole dance and mime. And I was like, “I want to sing live and write about things that mean something to me.” Now it feels like there’s a lot more people doing that, and I’m happy about that.