FEATURE:
Lioness: International Treasure
PHOTO CREDIT: Phil Griffin (2006)
Was Amy Winehouse the Last Great Original Voice and Icon?
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SOME people might contest that question…
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Bergen/Redferns
and argue that there have been artists since Amy Winehouse’s passing who are iconic or have a more striking voice. Others might claim that Winehouse was a little overrated. I am writing this feature because 2021 marks two anniversaries. In October, it will fifteen years since her second studio album, Back to Black, was released. Before then, on 23rd July, it will be a decade since we lost one of the most extraordinary voices we have ever heard. Even though Winehouse struggled with addiction (alcohol abuse led to her untimely death at the age of twenty-seven) and there was controversy through her life, the legacy she has left and the music she released is so important and amazing. From her style and realness through to her unique voice, I think that Winehouse was one of the last true stars and icons – in the sense that so many artists look up to her and she has such a following. There are those who may say that Winehouse’s voice is a mix of influences like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. A documentary film, Amy, directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees, was released on 3rd July, 2015. The film covers Winehouse's life, her relationships, her struggles with substance abuse both before and after her career blossomed. It is one of the most honest and memorable documentaries.
You are amazed by Winehouse’s talent but feel sad at the same time that she is not here. I think that the media villainised her and they projected this image that she was a wayward woman who courted trouble - whilst overlooking her immense talent. Not every media outlet, but certainly quite a few should hang their heads.. In actuality, Winehouse was a very down-to-earth and shy person who, I think, became overwhelmed by the pressures of fame and media intrusion. Fortunately, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Winehouse’s passing, a new film will show her in a new light:
“A new Amy Winehouse film is set to air on BBC Two, marking 10 years since the singer’s death.
Amy Winehouse: 10 Years On has been commissioned by BBC Two and BBC Music to explore Winehouse through the people who knew her best.
According to a press release the film will be “shining a light on parts of her life that have, to date, not been heard about”.
The film is set to be told primarily from the perspective of Winehouse’s mother, Janis, whose perspective “often differs from the narrative we have been told before”.
“I don’t feel the world knew the true Amy, the one that I brought up, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to offer an understanding of her roots and a deeper insight into the real Amy,” Janis said.
Other family members and friends will also contribute to the documentary, which is being described as a “female-driven interpretation of her life, her loves and her legacy”.
Before giving some biography about Winehouse and focusing on her two studio albums (a posthumous album, Lioness: Hidden Treasures, was released in 2011), I want to bring in something that has been brewing for a while now. Come this July it will be heart-breaking, as we mark a decade since Winehouse died. A daughter of Camden, London, I am sure we will see people congregate and pay tribute to a magnificent artist. There has been talk of an Amy Winehouse biopic for a few years. Last year, as NME reported, there has been some progress:
“A biopic about Amy Winehouse‘s life will be released in “a year or two”, her father Mitch has revealed.
Mitch has said the film will offer an truthful portrayal of the singer’s life after he previously hit out at Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy for its “misleading” portrayal of the relationship between him and his daughter.
He told Paul Danan’s ‘The Morning After’ podcast: “We’ve got a lovely movie, a lovely Broadway show coming, and that’s how we’ll get our own back, by portraying Amy the way she was.”
He added that a script was currently in the works.
“The movie is gonna be in a year or two. We’ve gone beyond talks, we’re at script stage. The film is going to be a biopic,” he explained”.
I want to bring in some biographical information about Winehouse. She had this modest start with the debut album, Frank, in 2003 before becoming international with 2006’s Back to Black. In addition to addiction and personal struggles, she did receive awards and huge plaudits:
“Amy Jade Winehouse was born on September 14, 1983, in the suburb of Southgate in London, England. Her father, Mitch Winehouse, worked as a cab driver, while mother Janis was employed as a pharmacist. In her early years, Winehouse was immersed in music; many of her uncles on her mother's side were professional jazz musicians, and her father sang as a child with his family. Winehouse's paternal grandmother was also once romantically involved with British jazz legend Ronnie Scott. Winehouse grew up listening to a diverse range of music, from James Taylor to Sarah Vaughan. At the age of 10, she was drawn to listen to American R&B and hip-hop acts, including TLC and Salt-N-Pepa, and she founded a short-lived amateur rap group called Sweet 'n Sour.
Amy Winehouse broke into the music business when, at age 16, a classmate passed on her demo tape to a record label. She signed her first record deal as a jazz vocalist, and her music later blossomed into an eclectic mix of jazz, pop, soul and R&B. Winehouse won five Grammy Awards connected to her 2006 album Back to Black, and earned acclaim for songs like the title track, "Rehab" and "Love Is a Losing Game."
Regardless of personal setbacks, 2009 proved to be another strong year for Winehouse. In 2008, her album Back to Black was declared the second-highest selling album in the world, and in 2009, she earned entry into the Guinness Book of World Records for "Most Grammy Awards Won by a British Female Act."
Aside from her music and the fact that she was grounded and relatable, I think Winehouse’s style and fashion is another reason why she is so revered and influential. Her love of 1960s girl groups might have led to her famous beehive hair. The Cleopatra makeup look came from The Ronettes. Like icons such as Madonna and Prince, I think that Amy Winehouse had so many sides that makes her much more than an ordinary songwriter. It would have been interesting to hear where Winehouse headed after Back to Black had she recovered from addiction struggles and recorded more music. Although most people will agree Winehouse’s greatest album is Back in Black, I think that Frank is a marvellous debut. More indebted to her Jazz icon heroines, there is plenty of brilliance and promise throughout. This is what AllMusic wrote in their review:
“If a series of unfortunate comparisons (like the ones to follow) cause listeners to equate British vocalist Amy Winehouse with Macy Gray, it's only natural. Both come on like a hybrid of Billie Holiday and Lauryn Hill who's had a tipple and then attempted one more late-night set at a supper club than they should have. Despite her boozy persona and loose-limbed delivery, though, Winehouse is an excellent vocalist possessing both power and subtlety, the latter an increasingly rare commodity among contemporary female vocalists (whether jazz or R&B). What lifts her above Macy Gray is the fact that her music and her career haven't been marketed within an inch of their life. Instead of Gray's stale studio accompaniments, Winehouse has talented musicians playing loose charts behind her with room for a few solos. Instead of a series of vocal mellifluities programmed to digital perfection, Winehouse's record has the feeling of being allowed to grow on its own -- without being meddled with and fussed over (and losing its soul in the process). Simply hearing Winehouse vamp for a few minutes over some Brazilian guitar lines on "You Sent Me Flying" is a rare and immense pleasure. Also, like Nellie McKay (but unlike nearly all of her contemporaries), Winehouse songs like "Fuck Me Pumps," "Take the Box," and "I Heard Love Is Blind" cast a cool, critical gaze over the music scene, over the dating scene, and even over the singer herself. With "In My Bed," she even proves she can do a commercial R&B production, and a club version of "Moody's Mood for Love" not only solidifies her jazz credentials but proves she can survive in the age of Massive Attack”.
I do think that Back to Black was quite a big leap. More varied in terms of its themes and sounds (she retained producer Salaam Remi from Frank and joined up with Mark Ronson), I think that the mix of producers and Winehouse growing as an artist contributed to this strength and nuance. I am not going to go into depth regarding tracks from Back to Black, as I am ending this feature with an Amy Winehouse playing. I am going to finish by offering some conclusions. Before then, there is an interview that I want to source. In terms of the press for Back to Black, there was so much praise and love. This is how The Independent judged the album:
“That directness applies equally to her lyrics, whose sexual frankness and pottymouthed articulation leaves no room for misunderstanding. Lines such as "He left no time to regret/ Kept his dick wet/ With his same old safe bet" act like turbochargers on the emotion, bringing an unmistakable modern slant to the loping Fifties R&B of songs such as "Back to Black" and "Me & Mr Jones", an ironic Noughties equivalent of Billy Paul's affair anthem. When the same candid attitude is applied to female sexual obsession in "Wake Up Alone", the result is like Millie Jackson crossed with Peggy Lee, a blend of unashamed assertiveness and languid vocal power.
The lack of shame is probably the album's defining characteristic. From the opening "Rehab" to the closing "Addicted", there's none of the blame-shifting or hand-wringing apologia that American singers routinely employ. In the former - all fat horns, R&B feel and tubular bells punching up the lines - she refuses flip, therapeutic explanations for her melancholy and drinking ("There's nothing you can teach me/ That I can't learn from Mr Hathaway" - Donny, presumably); and in the latter, she gives equally short shrift to a flatmate's lover who smokes up all her stash without offering to replace it. If a man has treated her badly, as in "Tears Dry On Their Own", she doesn't whinge, just chides herself for placing too much faith in him: "I should just be my own best friend/ Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men"; and it's clearly hard for her to feel too guilty, in "You Know I'm No Good", about keeping two lovers on the go.
Productions, split almost equally between Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson, are perfectly sculpted to reflect the updated soul mode, with Motown-like grooves, Otis-style horn arrangements, and a rich, smoky Southern soul feel. But, for all its musical purchase on the past, what sets Winehouse's album apart from those of her peers is its rejection of genre clichés”.
Before concluding my discussion of her legacy, I want to source from an interview Paul Du Noyer conducted in 2004. Winehouse, at that point, was virtually unknown. For that reason, I think she is less guarded and we get a look at an artist who, through massive success, would be affected more by attention and fame:
“This year’s girl sits in a Camden Town tapas bar. She’s a young pop star in waiting with a record that everyone loves. But she endures the WORD photo shoot with a show of martyred patience. Amy Winehouse does not look as happy as you might expect, and I settle in for the interview thinking this one could be heavy going. But when our small talk turns to London her mood magically brightens.
“Oh, I love this city! I love it. Wherever I go in the world, to land back in London is the best feeling. I get to see so many amazing places when I’m working, like Miami, and I think, I could live here. But then I go, Yeah, but I wouldn’t be in London.”
Last year Amy Winehouse made a great London album. Frank was her diary of a torrid adolescence –she was just 19 when it was recorded – sung with the funky melisma of a jazz veteran and the glottal stops of a mouthy schoolgirl on the Piccadilly Line. It’s a great piece of modern British R&B: for all its vintage American stylings, Frank could not have been made anywhere but in London, in the 21st century.
“Thank you so much!” she beams. “That is the best compliment you could pay to me. The city is really important to me. I’ve always been a really independent girl. From the age of 13 or so I’ve always found my own way in the city and there’s nothing I like more than to find another part that I didn’t already know. It really fascinates me. It’s a really English album but I guess I’m a typically English girl.”
So we’re getting along OK, this year’s girl and this morning’s interviewer. She has a striking, exotic look. Being curvy and with a pronounced bone structure Winehouse looks Amazonian in some photographs, but is actually petite in person. Yet she has a cold stare that you guess she could deploy to deadly effect. She is very bright, though not in a systematic way, as if she has learnt so much so quickly that the patterns have not yet come together in her head. She seems a forthright young woman, and her conversational manner is confrontational. By the interview’s end, however, she looks preoccupied by private anxieties.
She already has a reputation for moodiness. Overnight success seldom makes people easier to get along with. But some reports suggest that Amy Winehouse has gone from nought to Van Morrison. Sauntering over to Camden Town I felt like one of those brave chaps in bomb disposal, who crawl up to unexploded devices. With perspiring brow they manipulate the delicate, deadly wiring: one false move and – KA-BOOM! – there goes the neighbourhood. But Amy is now under pressure from her minders to curb her enthusiasm for controversy. Gone are scathing comments about her record company, and the criticisms of her album and the sideswipes at Dido. (Well, almost. Like a recovering smoker she can’t resist a sly one now and then.)
Frank was released last October to great reviews: it was often called the debut of the year. But Top 20 action had to wait until this year: after a couple of Brit nominations Frank began to settle into the charts. The soul/jazz hybrid of Amy’s style won deserved praise, but most commentators were struck by the songs’ autobiographical tone. There are graphic accounts of her sexual infatuations and star-crossed romances. You would not want to be the former paramour who is rubbished in Stronger Than Me (“feel like a lady but you my lady boy”); an infidelity of her Dad’s is resurrected in What Is It About Men? and In My Bed commemorates a waning relationship: “The only time I hold your hand / Is to get the angle right”.
Frank is a story-teller’s album, in the way that great country & western records used to be. If she seems self-absorbed, she’s refreshingly observant, too. Another track, called Fuck Me Pumps, paints a merciless portrait of women who prowl the clubs of London on their primal hunt for alpha males: “You can’t sit down right / Cos your jeans are too tight… Your dream in life / Is to be a footballer’s wife.” In a certain light, Amy Winehouse could pass for a hip hop Jane Austen.
So, Amy. The Frank album. Are you happy with it?
“Yes and no. If I’d been 100 per cent satisfied then I could have relaxed and gone on holiday for six months. But it’s a constant thing for me to better myself. I’ve got a clear ambition now, to make a record of what I hear in my head. Like Stevie Wonder did. It was a learning curve. I always thought I would do music, but I certainly didn’t expect to have a record deal by the time I was 19.”
Winehouse was raised in the north London suburb of Southgate. Her mother is from Brooklyn and her father, a taxi driver, is an East Ender. Her parents separated when Amy was nine, though her father remains in close touch. “He’s a great man, my Dad,” she says. “I love him. I love my Mum, but me and my Dad are two peas in a pod. We’re really impulsive people. It’s good that my Dad moved out when I was growing up, or we would have had some terrible clashes.”
On her American mother’s side of the family she has relatives in Miami and Atlanta, though she rarely had the chance to visit: “We didn’t have that kind of money. I’m sure the family would have paid for us, but we’re proud people.”
It’s the norm now for young musicians to be weaned on their parents’ record collections. But Winehouse denies her jazz buff Dad was a formative influence. “Not really. There was what he had in his car. And there were tapes at home. I would go to sleep listening to things like Sinatra and James Taylor. But that’s as far as my parents went. You discover music the most when it’s music that no one tells you to listen to, that you find out for yourself.”
So you weren’t sat down and told, Listen, this is good for you?
“Ha! I’d have told them to fuck off. I’ve always been a rebellious person. The only music that truly spoke to me was jazz and hip hop.”
It’s often said that first novels are autobiographical. People use up their life’s experiences. Did you do that with your first album? Could that be a danger for the second?
“Yeah but… I dunno. Life is inspiring, regardless. I don’t want to make a second album talking about record companies and stuff. The thing that always drove me with Frank was human interaction and that will always drive me. Relationships and how fucked up they can get. I guess that’ll always inspire me.”
If you had to give up either singing or songwriting, which would it be?
“I’d cut my throat out. Singing is singing. If I couldn’t sing a song, and express it, which – ” (her expression darkens) “ – which I haven’t been able to for the past five months but that’s OK it comes from me, I understand that – if I couldn’t do that, I’d be fucked. Singing and writing go hand in hand for me, it comes from one place”.
I think that Amy Winehouse is the last iconic artists we have seen. There will be others in the future but, since her death in 2011, nobody has come along that has the same attraction and gravitas! Her influence is huge. In terms of the artists that she has inspired, there is a long and impressive list:
“Adele has credited Winehouse's success in making her and fellow British singer Duffy's journey to the United States "a bit smoother." Lady Gaga credited Winehouse with paving the way for her rise to the top of the charts, explaining that Winehouse made it easier for unconventional women to have mainstream pop success. Raphael Saadiq, Anthony Hamilton and John Legend said "Amy Winehouse was produced by people who wanted to create a marketing coup. The positive side is that it reacquainted an audience with this music and played an introductory role for others. This reinvigorated the genre by overcoming the vintage aspect."
Other artists that have credited Winehouse as an influence and/or for paving the way for them include Bruno Mars, Tove Lo, Jessie J, Emeli Sandé, Victoria Justice, Paloma Faith, Lana Del Rey, Sam Smith, Florence Welch, Halsey, Alessia Cara, Estelle, Daya, Jorja Smith, Lauren Jauregui and Billie Eilish.
After the release of Back to Black, record companies sought out female artists with a similar sound and fearless and experimental female musicians in general. Adele and Duffy were the second wave of artists with a sound similar to Winehouse's. A third wave of female musicians that has emerged since the album was released are led by V V Brown, Florence and the Machine, La Roux and Little Boots. In March 2011, the New York Daily News ran an article attributing the continuing wave of British female artists that have been successful in the United States to Winehouse and her absence. Spin magazine music editor Charles Aaron was quoted as saying "Amy Winehouse was the Nirvana moment for all these women," "They can all be traced back to her in terms of attitude, musical styles or fashion." According to Keith Caulfield, chart manager for Billboard, "Because of Amy, or the lack thereof, the marketplace was able to get singers like Adele, Estelle and Duffy," "Now those ladies have brought on the new ones, like Eliza Doolittle, Rumer and Ellie”.
It will be tragic to think that, very soon, it is ten years since the music world lost one of its greatest stars. Although Winehouse’s influence is wide and we can see it in artists of today, her inimitable personality (the shyness and realness mixed with a more controversial edge) and stunning music will live forever. Not only would I suggest people buy her studio albums but, from 7th May, you can get Amy Winehouse at the BBC. Resident describe the two discs like this:
“this will be the first time that the two discs ‘a tribute to amy winehouse by jools holland’ and ‘bbc one sessions live at porchester hall’ are available as audio-only.
the set features tracks from later with jools across the years, notably amy’s first performance on the show in 2003 with ‘stronger than me’, as well as two performances from the mercury prize – take the box in 2004 and love is a losing game in 2007”.
I will close it there. I really wanted to pay tribute to a simply amazing and peerless artist. The amazing Amy Winehouse was a lioness with a huge voice and an amazing lyrics book. The unforgettable Winehouse, in so many senses, was…
VERY much one of a kind.