FEATURE:
(There Is) No Greater Love
IN THIS PHOTO: Amy Winehouse at the Prince's Trust Urban Music Festival at Earl's Court, London in May 2004/PHOTO CREDIT: David Montgomery
Remembering the Iconic Amy Winehouse
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ON 23rd July…
IN THIS PHOTO: Amy Winehouse in promotional images for Lioness: Hidden Treasures/PHOTO CREDIT: Bryan Adams
it will be ten years since we lost the immense talent of Amy Winehouse. Taken from us at the tragically young age of twenty-seven, I wanted to post a final feature that marks a decade since we said goodbye to one of the most powerful and inspiring voices of her generation. I am not going to go into the controversial side of her life and how she died – that would not be fitting or appropriate. Instead, I wanted to spend a little time talking about her legacy. Born in Enfield, London, Camden’s adopted daughter released two studio albums in her lifetime: 2003’s Frank and 2006’s Back to Black. I am not sure how close Winehouse was to releasing a third studio album. Given the incredible reception to Back to Black, there would have been a degree of pressure on her shoulders to top that work and provide something that was a step on. 2011’s Lioness: Hidden Treasures is a posthumous compilation that combines some unreleased or rare originals alongside some covers. We get a glimpse of where Winehouse might have headed, in addition to how brilliant an interpreter of other people’s work she was. Whilst some are all too eager to demonise Winehouse, there are many more who lionise and salute a wonderful talent. Many new features will go online that mark ten years since Winehouse died (the documentary, Reclaiming Amy, is broadcast on 23rd July; it is well worth watching). I want to bring in a few older tributes that explore her fascinating love of music - and what she left behind. One can debate ‘what ifs’ and predict where Winehouse would have headed.
Would she have produced many more albums and turned her life around? Although addiction and her struggles are a big part of her story, one cannot define her by it. I feel Winehouse would have developed as an artist and we would, no doubt now, be readying ourselves for new work from her. I think that the press intrusion was as big a factor as anything as to why she was so troubled. I am not going to dwell on that. Instead, I want to source from a few articles that highlight Winehouse’s legacy. In this feature from The Sunday Post from a couple of weeks ago, Stuart Cosgrove looked back on an amazing and unique artist:
“Camden was uniquely rich in youth and pop culture. It was her first real love affair. From her early teenage days, she feasted on the neighbourhood’s rich relationship with rock and soul. It was an area of old London pubs, pop-up street markets and dance venues, a simmering stew of music and fashion, of the stylishly old and the shockingly new.
Significantly, it was also the home of vintage fashion, decades of secondhand clothes recycled by stall-owners, young designers and local street kids. It was in Camden at the height of retro chic that she developed her trademark beehive hairdo and the spider-black eyeliner that made her such a visible presence on stage.
Like Paul Weller, Winehouse had a curatorial personality. She delved into pop and soul history, digging out old CDs and buying scratched vinyl in junk shops in North London, excavating her way through rockabilly, the blues, northern soul and showtunes seeking inspiration for her own songs or a hidden gem worthy of revival.
One of the songs she picked up along the way was Toots & The Maytals’ 1969 ska classic Monkey Man, which she performed live on television with Jools Holland, another was The Temptations song Ain’t Too Proud To Beg which she recorded in concert with the Rolling Stones.
My personal favourite is her achingly grandiose version of Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s Brill Building standard, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, originally a hit for the girl group The Shirelles.
The past fascinated Amy Winehouse and it permeated her music. It was her father, a London taxi driver who introduced her to the crooners and to show-tunes music, it was her grandmother Cynthia, a cabaret singer, who inspired her love of jazz. When her grandmother passed away in 2006, Amy visited a tattoo artist and had an effigy of her inked into her arm, styled as an old-school pin-up girl.
Although Back To Black is her requiem for lost love, it was the nagging disobedience of Rehab – a song about her father’s unsuccessful attempt to put Winehouse in a rehabilitation clinic – that came to dominate the charts and speak to disaffected youth around the world. She wrote the song in only a couple of hours, after a casual conversation with her writing partner Mark Ronson, and it became an anthem for a troubled generation, as resonant to its era as The Who’s My Generation or The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks had been in the decades before.
In 2011 Winehouse made her final recording and it proved to be epic in many ways. She joined forces with her favourite singer, the crooner Tony Bennett to perform a version of Body And Soul, another song about lost love and the emotional wreckage of breaking up.
On hearing of her death, Bennett issued a statement: “Amy Winehouse was an artist of immense proportions, and I am deeply saddened to learn of her tragic passing. She was an extraordinary musician with a rare intuition as a vocalist and I am truly devastated that her exceptional talent has come to such an early end”.
It is worth quoting from The Guardian’s article of 2012. They discussed the job of assessing Winehouse’s work following her death and working through the archives. They state that, despite the way some painted her, she left something very special behind:
“Last December, Island Records released Lioness: Hidden Treasures, a collection of unreleased songs and demos selected by Winehouse's family along with producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi. It immediately reached No 1 in the UK album charts, selling almost 200,000 copies in its first week. To some it seemed rushed out with undue haste, but for others it met not only a demand but a need – solace for the devastated fans who craved more of her very particular brand of salty, rough-edged soul.
It was also, crucially, the first step in the shift away from the Winehouse of common caricature, the Olive Oyl figure with the beehive, and the drug abuse, the saucy mouth and the baleful talk of "Blake Incarcerated"; the artist people had sadly come to expect – who had once offered to lamp a member of the audience at Glastonbury, and who had last graced a stage at a festival in Serbia, where she stood swaying and mumbling before a baying audience of 20,000.
How we process the death of an artist and how their legacy is then established is a peculiar and somewhat unsettling art. There is a gulf to be bridged between the rawness of a musician's departure and the new world of biopics and boxsets; a period of grace, in which their image and their music must lie in state.
But the velocity of our world now, and the encyclopaedic inclinations of modern technology, make this period of sitting musical shiva harder. In our desire to refresh and consume new entertainment, we are eager to forget that which went before; and should we wish to remember, all of the misdemeanours, the unflattering photographs, the phone camera footage of that shambolic performance in Belgrade are preserved online in perpetuity.
On the cover of its latest issue, Q magazine labels Winehouse "the voice of our time". It is a bold claim (and some might argue that the true voice of our time is the autotuned drone of American pop), but it is another stride towards the cultivation of her legacy, the fading of those images of the singer roaming the streets with bloodied feet and wild eyes.
After all, though she provided fodder for the gossip columns and the morally outraged, Winehouse also brought something remarkable to the music world, a tarry, beetle-black voice and lyrical humour. A songwriter who wrote of an intensely female experience, of the pain of love, as well as the hunger for sex, drugs and alcohol. And, of course, she helped create an appetite for the soulful British voice, paving the way for the likes of Adele, Duffy and Plan B. It is the voice that we hope will be remembered”.
Since that 2012, there are so many other artists who have been influenced by Winehouse. She was such a powerful force in the world. Her voice was so rich, expressive and stirring! Her lyrical voice, too, was personal yet universal. She could perfectly describe the sides of her personality whilst also speaking to so many other people. From the more intimate songs on her debut, Frank, to the sweeping and bigger numbers on Back to Black, it is no surprise that Winehouse is still being talked about so fondly a decade after her death.
There is no doubt that Winehouse is an icon. It is bittersweet remembering her now. After a decade, I feel there has been so much new investigation and love of her music. Besides artists influenced directly by her work, there are many others who have discovered her music and have been hugely moved by it. The final article that I want to draw from is from 2016. It wonders what music would have been were it not for Winehouse’s undeniable gifts and influence:
“What would the music world look like in 2016 without Amy Winehouse, particularly for artists in the UK? Where better to start than with Adele, one of the best-selling artists in the world today. While fellow Londoner Adele is quite clearly an exceptional talent in her own right, many have questioned whether she could have sold more than 100 million records had Amy not passed her the baton, particularly in terms of trans-Atlantic success. Adele said so much herself in a 2011 tribute:
“Amy paved the way for artists like me, and made people excited about British music again. I don’t think she ever realised just how brilliant she was, and how important she is.”
One of the most original artists of recent decades, Lana Del Ray, has expressed her admiration for Amy’s strong sense of authenticity. She put it beautifully when she said: “I believe she was who she was, and in that way she got it right.”
IN THIS PHOTO: Florence Welch
Florence Welch, of Florence And The Machine, has stated that seeing one of Amy’s early Glastonbury performances was a big moment of inspiration for her: “Seeing her up there made me think, wow, there is a place for female singer-songwriters in this world," she said, in 2011.
Pop singer, Ellie Goulding, like Adele, has gone on record to say she owes a debt to Amy Winehouse for being able to reach American audiences as quickly as she did; and Sam Smith and Paloma Faith - both also from London - are very similar musically (Faith also notably has hairstyles and outfits not dissimilar to those worn by Winehouse), and it is difficult to imagine their soul pop reaching such wide audiences had Amy not come before them.
Quirk-pop sensation, Lady Gaga, has also praised the iconic songstress, putting forward her belief that she made the music scene a much less banal place, and made it easier for eccentric artists to break through. And frequent collaborator and producer, Mark Ronson, described her death as “losing a musical soulmate.”
Amy Winehouse is immortalised in a statue in her beloved Camden Town, and also in wonderful street art tributes around the capital. With musicians like her, it is easy to focus too much on ‘what could have been’ thoughts, especially when considering how one of the most famous singers of modern times only released two albums. But it is a testament to how phenomenal those two albums are. After her death, record labels actively sought singers who were British, female, and had a fierce sense of independence. Amy Winehouse bemoaned the quality of the music industry in her early years, and she left it a vastly better place than when she found it. For that reason, songs such as Back to Black and Love Is a Losing Game will endure forever”.
On 23rd July, the world will mark a decade since Amy Winehouse died. We will share memories of her music and try to articulate what she meant to us. To me and so many others, her music is still in our heads. It is so immensely affecting and memorable! I do not think we will see anyone like her ever again. Some quibble whether she was the voice of her generation – I believe that she was! Although it has been a decade since we lost the amazing Amy Winehouse, this icon will…
NEVER be forgotten.