Six years on from her tragic and untimely death at the tender age of just 27, the music world still mourns the loss of arguably one of the greatest singers of the last fifty years in Amy Winehouse. A blazing fireball of talent fizzing across the popular music landscape, Amy packed more stunning pop moments into a few short years than most stars manage in a lifetime. In tribute to a dearly-missed lost light, Music Crowns explores the late great Amy’s defining musical moments.
Fuck Me Pumps
Crazy as it may seem now, it was highly unusual – if not completely unheard of – for a mainstream female artist to use the F-word as a song title back in 2003, when Winehouse released her debut album Frank on Universal’s seminal Island label. A venomous riposte to the WAG subculture, Amy fires barb upon barb at brassy gold-diggers with such an lilting croon it’s easy to forget the sugar-sweet notes are laced with poison: “Don’t be too upset if they call you a skank / Cos like the news, every day you get pressed.” Ouchie.
What It Is
The B-side of her debut single ‘Stronger Than Me’, this is perhaps the first indication of the brittle fragility hiding underneath Amy’s sneering, smoky facade. Accompanied solely by acoustic guitar, she inhabits the song’s lyric completely, pushing the disappointment out of it and right into your skin. It’s easy to understand from this performance how her future record company spent months trying to find her after hearing her sing backing vocals on another artist’s track.
Rehab
Her biggest hit, but arguably not her best track, Rehab signalled the public outing of Amy Mk.II. Ensconced in a destructive, dysfunctional relationship that would ultimately set her off on the downward spiral that lead to her death, this track documented her burgeoning alcohol and drug problems and subsequent refusal to head to rehab to address them. Bold, brassy and ballsy with new producer Mark Ronson‘s trademark Ronettes-esque touch, on the face of it this is a strong woman telling the rest of the world just to get off. Ten years down the line, it’s heartbreaking to listen to.
Valerie
A staple of any Saturday night out on the town anywhere in the world, Amy’s version of cosmic Scousers the Zutons‘ 2006 rather plodding ode to a lonely heart had an unlikely birth. Recorded for Mark Ronson’s mega-selling Version album, the producer recalls asking Amy to cut a track for the record, explaining its concept and asking her if there was a modern guitar band whose songs she liked: “She said, ‘well, I love this song ‘Valerie’ by the Zutons. They always play it at my local’… The song wasn’t blowing me away, but she knew what a great song it was… Those chords spoke to her, and she knew how great it would be when she cut it.”
Body and Soul
Amy’s last studio performance, recorded four months before she died, was a duet with legendary jazz singer Tony Bennett, one of her idols. Recalling the session, Bennett reminisced: “She was very nervous… but I said, ‘You know, it sounds like you’re influenced by Dinah Washington.’ And all of a sudden, her whole life changed… from that moment on, she just relaxed. And it came out wonderful.”
With no time to rehearse the session, the singers went straight in to cut the track. Belying her vulnerabilty in the twilight of her life, Winehouse’s charismatic, impassioned vocal twisting and turning around the effortlessly cool delivery of Bennett doesn’t let her down. Here are two of the greatest singers of modern times finding great empathy with each other – they both knew the pain of too much tenderness.
