There will be no generations of grandchildren now, and the stories that will be told will not be happy ones. Amy embodied the best and worst of the music business, an exceptionally gifted artist brought low by the kind of self-destructive, hedonistic lifestyle that is such an integral part of the rock and roll myth. Like her heroine Holiday, or the great Janis Joplin – exceptional singers who struggled with addiction in less media-saturated times – Winehouse became a poignant rather than a heroic figure, someone whose intensity of expression and tendency towards self-destruction seemed psychologically linked.
There was, in truth, little hint of what was to come when first appeared on the pop scene, in 2003. Then she just seemed incredibly precocious. The progeny of a middle-class Jewish family from north London, Winehouse somehow contrived to sound like she was raised in the speakeasies of Chicago during Prohibition. Her grandmother was once engaged to Ronnie Scott, and Amy behaved like smoky jazz clubs ran in her blood.
The divorce of her parents seems to have hit her hard, but she remained close to both, and idolised her taxi-driving, Sinatra-singing father Mitch. There are suggestions she might have been a handful – she was expelled from the Sylvia Young Theatre School at 15 – and although she briefly attended the BRIT School in Croydon, she never spoke as if her time there was either happy or productive. But she liked to sing, and could be found performing with jazz orchestras and swing bands, anyone who would give her a platform.
The first time I saw Winehouse perform live was in the basement of Pizza Express in Soho, in 2003. It was a more innocent time before the beehives and tattoos, before the release of her witty debut album Frank, later the same year. It was also long before the breakaway global success of Back to Black, and the well-documented personal problems that followed in one of the most spectacular falls from grace the modern music business has witnessed.
When she began her recording career, Amy was just a great young singer-songwriter, with a set of smart, sassy, soulful original pop songs and some classic jazz standards. She was only 19, but even in an era when pop stars seem to keep getting younger, the almost preternatural combination of vitality and maturity of Winehouse was surprising. Her big, smoky, sensual voice sounds steeped in a century of jazz and soul, but her beats and attitude burst with the contemporary snap of a 21st-century urban teenager. She was, by turns, dirty, flirty, funny, sarcastic, abusive, self-lacerating, heartbreaking and extraordinarily worldly-wise.
"I'm not a great singer, yaknowotamean?" she told me. "People are very throwaway with their words these days. If someone comes out and they've got hoop earrings and a big bum, it's like, 'She's a diva!' You have to earn these things. Not from other people, from yourself. You have to earn your own respect."
She really earned it with the release of Back to Black in 2006, by which time she was already well on the path to self-destruction. Musically, she had embraced the girl group sounds of the Sixties, but her lifestyle was lurching out of control, with drink and drugs and a short-lived marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil, a man who seemed every bit as troubled as her.
Her fame grew in parallel with her addiction, until a UN drug czar was moved to condemn her as "a poster girl for drug abuse". It was unfair; if she was a poster girl for anything, it was her own suffering. Photographed emaciated, bruised and bleeding, weeping over her jailed husband, slurring onstage, cancelling shows, her closely – and somewhat salaciously – documented journey from pop princess to barely functioning addict seemed more like a cautionary tale. She may have sung "No, no, no" to rehab, but the celebratory defiance of that line was tempered by news that she had been in and out of rehab ever since. Two years ago, a producer who had to abandon recording sessions with Amy, described her as "a write off."
The terrible tragedy of Amy Winehouse is that none of this was inevitable. It never is. She could have come through it. Many addicts have recovered and gone on to live full and productive lives. And what's more, she had the talent to make something amazing out of all her suffering. But when you are a junkie, you really are one shot away from self-annihilation. But let's try not to remember her for this.
Her recordings are sad and soulful and spirited enough without tawdry tales of drugs and despair attached. I've heard her sing up close, and I know how alive to the music she was.
When I first interviewed Amy in 2003, she told me that all she cared about was music. "If my career should die right now, I would go to Vegas and be a lounge singer. I'd do that every single night for the rest of my life and I would be completely happy, yaknowwotamean?" Maybe in some alternative musical universe of happy endings, that is where we can always find her.
Article Source KBG Test Blog (http://rc.kbg.me)
