Amy Winehouse -The Girl Done Good: A Documentary Review | Amplified

[Music] even though there's lots of great female artists out there she's just doing her own thing and it's completely different it's just her album and just her lyrics are really funny people can relate to it when she starts singing i just melt with the voice [Music] i think she's very different very original very talented i love amy winehouse [Music] [Applause] when amy winehouse burst onto the uk music scene in 2003 with her debut album frank she sparked a jazz and soul revival that coupled with her combustible and exuberant personality marked her out as one of the most exciting songwriters of her generation the sense that there's real meaning in what she's singing and that that comes through in everything comes through in the voice and the lyrics and the sense of who she is in the voice and the lyrics and i think that's a really wonderful and exciting thing [Music] wait a minute this ain't the girl that was in the newspaper with the big beehive long hair yeah that's it really i don't support you she's vulnerable honest edgy stylish and talented with a big big t with her sophomore album back to black establishing the singer as a musical phenomenon on both sides of the atlantic winehouse has become the most celebrated female artist of the millennium this is a review of the remarkable career that turned a precocious north london schoolgirl into a cultural icon and global superstar [Music] and i believe i can run a decent marathon thank you very amy winehouse's talent for both music and rebellion surfaced early in her life a place at london's sylvia young theatre school from the age of 12 said much for her ability but expulsion at 14 suggested that the young singer was developing rapidly as a non-conformist after resurrecting her musical tuition at the brit school in croydon winehouse received her first major opportunity in the shape of an invitation to join the national youth jazz orchestra i had a call or must be eight years ago now i suppose from sylvia young of the silvia young stage school which is just around the corner from us and i hadn't met her she just said that um they got this thing and they couldn't really do anything with and she left the school where she'd been asked to leave the school to prevent frank and um gone off to the brits school in croydon and could we deal with that i said well don't worry me they just come if they like it they stay and if they don't like it they go away again we don't try and discipline them and tell them what to do you know so anyway amy came and um she just saw she was 16 she was a young dark jewish girl her first words were hello my name is amy winehouse that's a jewish name that's her very first words and she said i said fire and i said something like i'd never have guessed we were stuck for a singer one sunday morning and i rang her and i said look can you be at ranger's lane by her past 12 and i'd like to sing four songs she said i don't know four songs so i said she said oh don't worry i'll learn them on the tube so she actually came and on the tube from finchley wherever she lives she learned four songs she sang them perfectly didn't need any any words any lead she just sang them absolutely perfectly and there was a friend of mine called alan stewart who was their saxophone player and he just said to me this girl said if you don't sign this girl i will she's going to be a superstar she was 16 i mean he could hear the talent i would honestly think that she's got the best talent of any young female singer any female singer i've heard i mean she she could do ella fitzgerald she could do billie holiday but in tune and with good intonation and she was just unbelievably good as a singer amy's stint at the national youth jazz orchestra brought her to the attention of 19 management headed by pop impresario simon fuller the man behind both the spice girls and pop idol 19 quickly signed a contract to represent the singer and a record deal with universal island duly followed he decided the next big thing was going to be big bands and he wanted to form a big band they rang up and they said have you got any female singers because we won't have a female singer and for whatever reason there were not that many female singers who wanted to do what you might call straight ahead big band type singing you know plenty wants you to sing like maria carey or somebody but they weren't interested in in more straight ahead singing so i gave them about four of my singers and one of them i gave them was amy because i reckon that frankly that 19 management and amy white has deserved each other so i gave gave her them her numbers she came along they they liked something about her i mean obviously they were looking for somebody with attitude and that's something i think you can safely say that amy's got and they um signed up to 19 management and so when she says she owes her a break totally to nigel and me well it's no more than the truth but it was really more to get rid of her than because i actually thought that she was the ideal person for them i first met amy kind of before the first album even came out she came on my show because there was sort of a bit of a buzz about this girl this sort of sassy north london jewish girl and i'm a good north london boy myself and also i knew her dad uh because her dad's a cab driver mitch who's obviously become very famous and he used to phone in on my show on my radio program and talk about kind of london arcana and cab driver stuff anyway so i knew kind of a bit about amy before it all kind of broke loose and the first time i interviewed her she came on my show and she was this kind of slightly chubby girl a little bit awkward in herself until she opened her gob and she was just this barrel of attitude i mean she came on she had a real go at me about something i'd said i can't remember what i'd done wrong but she sort of tore into me on live radio and sort of had all the elements that we've come to know about her she was kind of neurotic psychotic and yet with this magnificent voice that you instantly knew he was a star at the age of 10 she formed her own rap group i mean that shows real resourcefulness and then at 13 she gets a guitar and she teaches a self-guitar that's real dedication she goes to stage school she gets chucked out of stage school because she's going her own way and then really works out the um producers that are best um suited to her vocal talents um so she's she's been incredibly organized right from the start um but also um wonderfully single-minded in in knowing instinctively what way to go with her lyrics with her voice um and not worrying about approval social approval which i think a lot of women feel hamstrung by that hasn't ever held her up in 2003 winehouse began to work on material for her debut album frank though principally a jazz singer her youth and personality demanded a contemporary setting for her vocals and the muscle of both 19 management and universal records secured the services of highly respected hip-hop producer salaam remy the first installment of the winehouse remy collaboration stronger than me appeared in the uk singles charts in october that year and set the template for the young artist sound stronger than me kind of introduces the amy winehouse theme which is relationships on a a really uh tenacious and um uh candid way of discussing relationships as an opening song for a first record from a young girl in the context of uh british pop music as it's dude at that time it's like whoa you know it's like uh here's somebody who's not um not playing any script she's singing about a man who's seven years old with honor is for a start which is you know well that's a that's quite uh you know a step aside from you know a kind of anonymous girl pop where it's all you know cute to see anonymous boys uh whatever you know she was very specific uh as a songwriter [Music] [Music] amy's singing about him uh in a sense feeling like she's the older woman in a relationship even though the man's older than her i'm your lady you my [ __ ] i mean it's really nice really nice lines that stick in your mind with that song in a way she set out the amy winehouse blueprint lyrics that are kind of quite street and street aware but within a musical context that's that's almost retro it's almost like vintage r b it's jazz with a a kind of camden town 21st century attitude so it isn't straight ahead and nothing about amy was ever gonna be straight [Music] it is an incredible insight into young females and young female psyches today um it's interesting that you've got all the james the james singer the the male singer-songwriters called james the james morrisons the james bluntz very soft and soulful and sort of wind-swept and winsome and sensitive and you gave me winehouse that is she has the brute force of a rampaging bull male just blows all these people these kind of soft cuddly boys out of the water and in a way what amy's expressing is that new lad culture or ladet culture that was that was celebrated in the 90s and she kind of feeds that into her songs and you can see that as well in songs by lily allen you can see that in um sort of beth ditto's attitude they're they're the new girls really they're asserting themselves in in in a really refreshing way though winehouse's persona may have been that of the modern urban young woman her musical identity appeared to be more conservative and mature released in october 2003 much of frank sound recalled vocal and compositional styles that were the progeny of traditional jazz well from the first moments of the first album the agenda's pretty clear you've got this this jazz guitar turn around this kind of and her scatting along all that business you know so she's telling you straight away jazz first of all secondly great time great time she's swinging like mad thirdly great sound very unusual lots of attitude lots of sass and she's inventive the the main thing is but what the main thing that you get from that is if you're a jazz listener is that she's speaking the language [Music] one of the things people find difficult about scat singing is what syllables do i use they don't know is it a language or do i make that up or what now of course what she's done is just she's listened to sarah vaughan she's listened to you know ella and those people who who did it as a matter of course it's infused within her she speaks it and it's all there in the first 15 seconds of the first album this is you know she's saying this is where i'm from this is what i'm about these this is the language i speak it was kind of jazz but it was a uh it was kind of there was a bit of billy holiday in there and there was there was quite a lot of kind of judy garland in there and it was it was kind of an odd mix really because there was there was a it was quite showbiz there was a touch of stage school um but there was also a real deep down blues in her and you just didn't couldn't work out where it came from it didn't look right in this body somehow but it sounded fantastic and she already sounded like someone who'd lived a [Music] think life trying nothing since this is the perfect spot to learn [Music] go on from very early on what became apparent about amy is that she can inhabit a song that she doesn't just sing them she somehow kind of gives birth to them if you like they seem to have come from her even if it's a standard even if it's a song that was written by someone else a very long time ago you sort of feel that she's singing it about her i mean she's got that quality that the very few great singers have and she had it absolutely straight away she made you believe her even though it was kind of preposterous for this little girl to be singing these songs you knew she meant it somehow in the past you were defined in jazz largely by your ability to sing the great american songbook i think the space has moved so much that it can encompass all kinds of things some of which i think don't count and some of which i think sort of fall in on the edges and i think she falls in on the edges because of the large level of improvisation around the phrasing she's got such distinctive phrasing and it's lovely and it's fresh and inventive and coupled with her ability to hold a note without vibrato and then use vibrato nudges are inside jazz for me [Music] almost here [Music] [Applause] there's quite a lot i think of subtlety in the approach and there's a sense of power withheld and i think that's a very it's a very wonderful thing because you know that there's more there and you're not necessarily getting all of it and and the the way that sound is is very slightly just teased and nudged along that it almost seems casual and there's something very wonderful about that you might think about again you might think about billy holliday in that context you know that it's not full pelt singing it makes no difference [Music] please don't talk about me please don't talk about well if you're thinking of her jazz vocal influences is a very clear dinah washington influence now dana washington is on the bluesy end of jazz singers she tends that her melodic shapes tend to be very bluesy and that seems to suit amy very well i mean it also suits jazz singers who are not changers singers if you know what i mean they don't sing the changes they don't sing the chord changes so much but they can sing great bluesy gospel shapes you know and that's the sort of thing that that amy winehouse does really well uh you can hear a real dinah washington influence when she's singing standards but also when she's doing her her own thing because that's you know these sort of bluesy shapes are um essentially what make up her her melodies you know a lot of the time only a moment ago [Music] that this was no commonplace story [Music] to listen to these people and understand them and then be able to filter them through your own personality and present represent this kind of musical language uh in your own music is quite an achievement you know it take it takes great time talent it takes great ears it also takes a great instrument yourself you've got to have a great voice to be able to do it she's got all of these things winehouse's ability in this respect is perhaps best highlighted by the covers of two jazz standards that appear on frank there is no greater love made famous by billie holiday and moody's mood for love a song that since the 1950s has been performed by a legion of jazz legends there's great thing about those two jazz tracks on the debut album is that they work perfectly and so they fit seamlessly onto the collection and um that does an incredible job of demonstrating how great the new songs are because they work they they hold up very nicely thank you very much next to the classics but the jazz standards also provide amy winehouse with an opportunity to do what jazz singers do well and what she does brilliantly which is to improvise and extemporize in a jazzy way [Music] there's music all around [Music] it's clear from her performance of moody's mood for love that somewhere along the line someone's roasted her through some difficult material now moody's mood for love is an improvised saxophone solo by james moody the improvised solo was then lyricized by a fellow called king pleasure so and so it sounds like a song but actually what it is is an improvised jazz solo put to lyrics [Music] there's music all around me crazy music music that keeps calling me so very close to you take me your sleigh [Music] in order that it's in your ear that you can then [Music] now it's a traditional training ground for jazz singers to to go through that piece because it's not easy to sing it's quite easy to sing badly and not easy to sing well amy winehouse sings it very well up above [Music] [Music] that really uh satisfying yourself she don't make any more records or anything i'm still one of her fans but it's everything's coming through moody blues for me because um a lot of people's tried that song and not very good it comes out wishy-washy you know with that but she jumped on it stomped on it and almost made it her own you know like making it her own you know i mean and that says a lot you know you know singing is not um the kind of thing that i think we now associate with lots of those um competition programs where people show how much like somebody else they can be that's karaoke what amy winehouse is doing is singing it's something that comes from inside of her and comes out and it's her and her alone and and that's what makes her i think remarkable frank's nord to tradition was complemented by distinctly modern production salaam remy's form in the hip hop world where he had previously worked with nas the fujis and miss dynamite broadened the range of winehouse's sound and set her songwriting firmly within an urban context there's more to her than just jazz she's just not she's not going to just give us a bunch of standards in a swing style you know the beatbox kicks in and there's all kinds of other influences there's contemporary r b there's there's uh there's soul and and you know ray charles is obviously as important to her as sarah vaughan was you know so all of that stuff is there in terms of her lyrics i think amy's very much influenced by hip hop and and female rappers like tlc and salt and pepper and maybe some some of the less well-known um female rappers of the 80s like roxanne shantae mc light you know there's a real um astuteness there with with her lyrics and the way she writes that comes directly from rap like a lollipop should be lit came to my scissors and i chill for a bit don't know how you do the lulu [Music] um [Music] [Music] you know that's what's on the radio when she's growing up that's what's there that's what's glaring out of the street when she walks down it and she just absorbs all this stuff [Music] [Applause] [Music] otherwise the different ways [Music] the way that she kind of plays with rhythm and breaks stuff up and kind of there's there's real bits of hip-hop in there and it's come out again on the second album as well and it's one of the things that makes them not sound like retro records um because there's just enough of that kind of hip-hop way with with rhythm and with kind of using vogue you know her vocal style it makes it sound very contemporary and it means that a kid who's who's more used to hearing kanye west or something can latch onto that and can and then can be led into the you know the other elements of her music [Music] [Music] passing [Music] see there's a tendency when you get a girl who comes along like this with a you know a big belting voice that you want to stick strings on it and lots of heavy production and make it all sound very shiny but it doesn't do that they're actually it's quite sketchy in some senses and so therefore what you've really got is her and you get a real sense of her through coming through these records you don't sit there and think oh that's wonderfully well played you kind of feel her pain or a joy or a sexiness or or whatever it is you get her and i think that was really really clever to place her at the absolute center of her own music this strong sense of personality was in large part due to amy's lyrical ability with nearly all the tracks on frank having been co-written by the singer the sexual confidence and self-revealing content of much of the album stood in sharp contrast to the more restrained work of her contemporaries another woman who's paved the way for amy's is madonna being so sexually forthright and singing about sex um as as a real woman and as a mature woman singing about the the issues of of control and pleasure and those are much the same themes that amy's exploring in in her work her kind of sexual references in her songs are are quite fresh but they're not they're not pornographic or even suggestive really they're just um honest um and i think that's another reason why people like her because everything about her is kind of honest do you feel that because you're a female artist that you get treated differently within the music industry only when i'm on my period thing who is your favorite female singer i like alice cooper she's great do you consider yourself a sex symbol miss winehouse i need to gaze she sings songs from an almost what what could be construed as a masculine point of view like i heard love is blind where she's saying well i was cheating but you were on my mind but in a way i think she's she's singing honestly and i think women feel the need to tone themselves down to get approval and for their records to sell that they have to present themselves in a certain way and to sing really honestly about sexual relationships in that way um i think probably a lot of women would be afraid that it would affect their record sales um whereas oh clearly amy that that was wasn't something that bothered her his [Music] [Music] is [Music] i don't suppose she's a feminist icon i don't think that such things exist anymore but she ought to be because it's wonderful role reversal in all of this here's a girl who's gonna sleep with whoever she wants and taunt the guy she's kind of you know fooling around with and you know she's she's the boss in the bed you know and that's great [Music] [Music] you can still trust me just name your fidelity despite attracting broad critical acclaim frank proved to be a slow mover on the uk chart where it entered at number 60. an upsurge in sales of the album in january 2004 pushed it to number 13 and boosted amy's public profile in advance of her second single release take the box take the box it's a masterpiece of restrained vitriol if you listen leisurely or with only one ear to that song you could just imagine it's it's a really lovely beautifully arranged ballad of course closer attention to the lyric once again reveals things about her character and the uniqueness of her vision and it works on so many different levels it works as a latter day example of great torch song from the 50s contemporized by the production but it works as a glimpse into what it's like to be young and falling out of love in the 21st century in london it's got those two different things so you can see exactly why amy winehouse would appeal to 50 somethings that used to love ella fitzgerald when they were kids the lapsed music buying fans but you can also see how it would appeal to teenagers and early 20-somethings that want a gritty portrait of the life that they're living i don't have a key for downstairs [Music] it just seems very quintessential amy there she is she's some caught between a rock and a hard place there's this man that she really desires really wants to be with but at the same time he's probably behaved badly so okay take the bra take all the presents you know take them away but at the same time i really want you um uh it has that real candor of um a lot that's typical of a lot of amy's songs [Music] [Music] all the issues that she's got um with men with her own with her own substance abuse you know it's all there and i think i don't think that alienates people i think um people can hear the vulnerability in her voice and they even though they might not have been through something like that themselves they can identify with the emotion though frank bought winehouse a host of industry award nominations including a short listing for the mercury music prize and an either novello for stronger than me she began to attract press headlines of a more unwelcome nature rumors of eating disorders and alcohol problems coincided with the breakup of her relationship with boyfriend blake fielder civil and though the couple eventually reconciled the singer wrote the bulk of a new album during a period of depression prompted by the split the second album was written about the kind of bad stage of our relationship does that ever bother you when you hear this can do but i mean it's kind of at first it bothered me but now it's kind of more of a glad that's over with kind of thing yeah i think amy feels sad about performing see i watch you when you watch her and you just look so proud yeah of course but it's funny because the song's all about me luckily enough it worked out the way we both wanted it her great strength is obviously her ability to um describe emotions and and when you see you see she says things like she can't listen to extreme jars like john coltrane because she get she feels music so deeply and it would put her into a trance you know she's obviously she's only a very very sensitive uh girl and i mean she said somewhere after the first record you know to write a second record maybe i'll have to go and cry in a room for four months and uh you know in some regard that's probably what those songs were a product of you know always certainly a product of emotional turmoil there's no there's no doubt about that the escalating tabloid interest in amy's excesses eventually brought her into conflict with her management team with the singer refusing to undergo treatment for alcohol abuse when she eventually surfaced to release a new single in october 2006 it was with rehab an acid reposse to the criticism and rumor that surrounded her drinking and a top 10 chart hit what a stroke of genius everyone's going into rehab and just brilliant singing about that in a really frank way really open honest and i'm not gonna go it's like she's the bad girl she's not gonna go um and but singing kind of tongue-in-cheek um and resurrecting that that girl group sound there with the with the chorus no no no um it sounds almost a bit like the chiffons meets pj harvey and it's all kind of all mangled up they tried to make me go to rehab i said [Music] [Music] rehab is like it kind of pretty pr is a prime and premonition of what is going to be in her media life i mean whether you know it's our life imitating art or whatever it's it's kind it's an extraordinary announcement it's only a pop song but then so was sympathy for the devil for mick jagger or so was help for john lennon these songs are kind of songs that you know they kind of it's an artist's script in their own career in a way [Music] [Music] when you can write it and sing it oh man yeah now that's i have a talent because a lot of people can say but they can't write a lot of people can write but they can't say they got to let someone else do an interpretation of your ideas whitney houston does not have the chance that amy has because whitney don't write nothing she's got a great voice but she needs somebody to serve the song on the plate say to me so if that song don't come she's down because that voice don't mean nothing if you can't get the song you're saying me so amy can save herself that way billy holiday could save herself that way but if you ain't got that talent for writing they will drop you so quick and make your head spin a record company her people that discovered her you know you see them talking on documentaries about the album we were gonna make you know well it was her that really made it you know i mean you couldn't say from the aspirations they had for her and the first artist were the first first album that the aspirations they had for her were kind of like oh we've got this radio two smooth jazz post nora jones miller jimmy collum sell a lot of records that way we'll do that and she basically said no this is uh i mean the defiance and rehab the song rehab was like you know it wasn't just about not going to rehab it was about no no i'm going to do what i'm going to do she's just one of those people that is a rebel and um you know the rap the rebellion is because she knows what she wants to do really and uh other people don't know what she wants to do she knows what she wants to do and this spirit of rebellion and self-assertion proved to be not just a feature of winehouse's songwriting in advance of her second album back to black the singer underwent a radical and headline-grabbing change of image from teenage jazz vocalist to a tattooed beehive diva when she started out she was it was smoother it was more normal in a way nice jazz inspired vocalist and then for back to black my god what happened she could she just seemed so skinny and she had these tattoos and her hair was piled on top of her head and she has said the more insecure i feel about my looks the bigger the hair so it's like her hair's enormous right now um and then this really savage black eye makeup i think it's a good look i mean it combines punk it combines sort of 60s girl group era but at the same time there's something slightly disturbing about it i don't think it's particularly sexy it it just seems to signal someone who's damaged but it's very compelling at the same time she was never demure you have to say you know that wasn't what she was but there was the big shift from the the one on the first album to the the tattoo bee-hived kind of you know ripped and torn thing of the second album and i guess that's amy finding herself don't forget you know she's still a kid and she's living all this out very publicly and you know literally drawing her future on her skin i mean you know she's she's experimenting with all sorts of things she's experimenting musically i suspect she's experimenting chemically and she's experimenting with her image as well and she's doing it all kind of in front of our eyes and you know and she's arrived at this strange creature whether she'll stay there i don't know i think what's interesting about her image and i think what we have in common um obviously because people keep talking about it to me recently you know the whole revival of the beehive thing because i revived it in the 80s but originally it was from the 60s and from dusty springfield it's quite severe really with the eyeliner and it's war paint isn't it she's going out to battle i think and winehouse's self-reinvention was not merely restricted to her image released at the end of october 2006 back to black showcased a radical change of sound alongside new work with salaam remy the album was also a product of a collaboration with new york dj and producer mark robson and the resulting tracks moved away from the traditional jazz forms of frank and into the edgier territory of 60s influenced r b it was a real surprise i think that she made this kind of stylistic leap because the first album did really well and it establishes her as a you know a new talent so there would have been i'm sure lots of people saying well let's make another one of those let's make a lounge album or a swing album and let's do some lerner and low tunes or something but no she doesn't do that she kind of switches in in you know in the middle in midstream to to suddenly picking up on kind of 60s girl group stuff and and kind of ray charles sounding music i mean it's a real big leap from where she was with that quite sophisticated kind of swing sound into a much dirtier raunchier kind of old-school rhythm and blues sound movement look um attitude and you can trace it back you know you can go oh the ronettes there's a kind of slight sense of ronnie specter i think there's a tiny little quality of if you think back to um to uh to the ronnie spector material you could slightly see it you know and and the eye shadow and hair you'll see a little bit of a nod there and a little bit of a nod here [Music] oh [Music] with back to black amy moved into new territory she she let go of the jazz sound um and it was more straightforward r b with the sort of references to the girl group sound and a very unified sound i think i think it really really works as a great pop album the second album is um much more a a kind of homage or an updating of the early 60s girl groups motown and there's a bit of doo-wop in there you know me and mr jones is is straight do one [Music] with the lovely [Music] is [Applause] it's exactly the stuff you know the 12 8 kind of uh now it's it's uh you've got major seven chords [Music] which has a lovely kind of plaintiff sound a lovely a kind of pretty sound to it and that juxtaposed against it what kind of [ __ ] is this that's got a great swing to it and it's holy her who else could have done that you know so that's that's that's what's going on with that it's it's doo-wop with a potty man [Music] me mr jones is quite stacky i think to me rather than motown motown was out of those two labels was a little bit more commercial really a little bit more glossy stacks was always you know had a bit more balls if i may say that [Applause] is [Music] god you've got 70 soul reference of the title musically a motown thing going on and then you've got this um language which you know is is so uh is so blunt and um rude um which is a result of hip-hop things so you know that is definitely um something that occurs in a second record a much braver a much more direct and in your face amassing other influences making them sharper and putting them straight across the sound of back to black represented both an exercise in capturing the essence of 1960s production and a process of framing it in a modern context bronson had built much of his reputation on reinterpreting well-known songs and together with the dap kings and new york funk and soul revival band he sought to achieve an authentic r b atmosphere for the album i think mark ronson's influence is quite key to back to black um he's he was british originally but he's grew up in new york um and very very at ease with rock and hip-hop and mixing together those sounds um and quite a strong um aesthetic with quite a really good ear um and i think that that framed a lot of back to black it does sound quite new york actually in in the in the sort of the edginess of it and um uh and it's very gritty what the dap kings and amy winehouse and mark rodson have achieved on back to black is what the white stripes did with their recent recordings whether you they insisted on using this primitive technology and it's a cert it's a sort of sound that they've achieved on this album that cannot be achieved with modern equipment amy's choice of the duck kings as her backing band not just on tour but also in the studio was was really inspired i mean these guys they're new yorkers they're just steeped in 60s and 70s seoul they've been playing together for years they've been on the circuit working really hard and they're so tight and so they sound like a real sort of james brown soul review and so really what amy was getting with them was the real thing [Music] what you're doing is a you're making it sound earthy and real i mean you know you can do most of that stuff on computers now but somehow it's not going to have the sweat it's not going to have the the sex and the strut and the funk that they bring to it and so what that makes it sound is authentic so kind of people like me who are kind of you know soul music snobs can't complain about it it's the real thing they're the real thing and so is she [Applause] [Music] for a modern pop record it actually sounds quite analog and um almost mono as if they deliberately just turned up the drums turned up the voice and made it quite minimal so there's lots of space there in between all the different elements and i think that's what gives it the feel of something that's quite 60s almost quite retro as back to black climbed to number one on the uk album chart media focus on winehouse's wild child image reached new highs the winter of 2006 had seen the singer appear on british television shows in a state of some disrepair and public displays of drunkenness provoked a torrent of tabloid stories that amy had succumbed to drink and drug abuse [Applause] [Music] i think amy did hit a bit of a crisis point went back to black really went global um suddenly she was much more exposed and i think that's where people often do have a point of crisis when they reach i mean kurt cobain did once he had that level of stardom stardom that he never even imagined and i don't think amy whitehouse imagined that it would blow up in the way that it did um and i think it caused awful anxiety for her and her way of dealing with it was to um create this image almost as a distancing device like you know keep away i'm gonna have huge hair and these mad eyes and tattoos keep away keep away you know i get a drink please you can't have another drink because already a bit tipsy amy come on alright do you want another drink yes no do you what you want to just sit here while you drink yourself to death is that what you want like another peter dockerty is that where you want to be seeing him late what are you doing with him he wants to do a tune together i'm going to go and meet him he wants to sell you drugs that's what he wants to do don't go near him people take alcohol and excess for all manner reasons and you know i mean i'm not a psychologist but you know with someone like her would succumb to any of those uh um recreational pursuits you know you could you can quite easily see it's all in her songs why that would happen can we resuscitate the old wine house oh no i loved you when you were sober she's dead go away go away this isn't even a pop quiz anymore it's an intervention amy i think the kind of press attention that amy gets um and the headlines you know drink drugs drugs bust etc um uh it inevitably um impacts on her career and the way people um listen to her music and the way they they see her and and i think it diminishes her power i think people are seeing her more as a victim now um whereas she is actually someone who's very powerful has got a really powerful talent do you not like the rep that the media gives you it's all right it's fine tonight i mean you can't care about what people think about your life you know what because we stand that we're different we don't fit into the moment everyone else is we've got to be proud of proud of ourselves being different it's like when you're a kid or anything you don't fit in that's a cool thing that works for you not against you your fans mean a lot to you it's quite hard for me to get my head around the fact that i've got fans i suppose which is really silly and i like going out with you because you get more people saying things to you than i do it's really cool no one knows me it's really cool even with my silly bee hive if amy was making headlines for the wrong reasons the aptly titled single you know i'm no good restored press attention to her music released in january 2007 the record joined rehab in the uk top 20 and also became the first single from back to black to be issued in the u.s you know i'm no good was a perfect choice for another single completely different to the other songs lifted off the album as singles much more sort of easy going laid-back summery soft stevie wonder style mid-tempo ballad and oddly released almost at the height of amy winehouse's infamy uh you get this crazy juxtaposition between you know the the sound of the song and the um the intensely off the rails nature of her of her personal life at the time [Music] [Music] you know [Music] amy comes across almost like a camden alley cat in a way you know i'm trouble and uh and she sings almost cheerfully about her self-destructive tendencies um and there's it has such a hook line that just um stays in your head is is a great example of pop meets r b um and very soulful as well i think when you talk about soul and amy it's not the kind of eulating current r b kind of oversouling over fake emoting that you get with a lot of contemporary singers she doesn't go in for that there's not a lot of self-pity in her songs but there's a lot of self songs like tears dry on their own and love is a losing game are really quite emotional songs and she fills them up with emotion the emotion is is is quite hard edged and like you know she'll she'll get over it i think that's what you get from amy when she's burying her soul there's something um heartfelt about the revisiting of these of these old styles and that comes through probably because of the way she deals with the lyric because the lyric is so is so personal and so close to herself that the fact that her the dressing of it seems to hark back to a previous era it's given it's given given a completely different twist it's got convincing musical impact that's the point she's not just wiggling and singing ooh baby love my baby love she's singing something much darker much more personal um much more affecting and a little troubling the melancholic soulful aspects of winehouse's songwriting were perhaps best represented by the album's title track and third single release back to black though the record failed to chart as highly as its two predecessors it received particularly strong reviews making many critics song of the year lists it's kind of in the vein of what they called the death songs the um 1960s death songs like leader of the pack that real um heightened sense of melodrama that the girl group the girl talk you know well if you're gonna leave me now then you can go to her and i'll just go back to black and there's this whole pause and it's this high drama [Music] i versus two notes sorry three notes but mostly it's just two notes and mostly it's actually just one note so on the page that wouldn't look like very much but what she's singing about you know the bereft feelings that she has on the departed the departure of a significant other and the way she times it the way she pulls away from the beat the way she just the whole thing just hangs away in this slightly kind of decadent way and the sound that she makes this this sort of drawling purring voice that she's got with a little bit of acid in there as well you know it's it's uh it's an extraordinary sound that she's making uh and it's it's all happening with a note or a note or two and at best at three in that whole of that verse and it's absolutely mesmerizing [Music] i [Music] the great thing about back to black and a lot of the songs in the album of that song in particular it could have come straight off you know a motown gold album i mean it's just a it's a classic instant classic song without it being too much in the pocket of what the motown guys were doing in 1966. although i said that i thought a lot of the tracks were stackzy that's the one that is very motely just because of its kind of you know we only said goodbye with words you know it's got that bouncy rhythm it's it's very melodic uh but it's groovy as well and so i think it does sort of sound like oh didn't the supremes do this but they didn't but they could [Music] it came today [Music] [Applause] [Music] one house's ability to interpret and update classic soul and rmb forms resonated particularly strongly with american audiences released to coincide with the singer's first tour of the states back to black entered the u.s billboard chart at number seven making it the most successful debut album from a british female artist i think the fact that she's done so well in america is test testimony to to many things a to the fact that she's a terrific singer and b the you know her music is full of blues and soul and jazz and essentially american forms and so to pull that off and to convince them that you've put it off you've got to be damn good but also i suspect they quite like the fact that although it's blues and jazz and soul it's clearly an english girl doing it she doesn't really sing in an american accent although she sounds kind of deeply steeped in there and again that's that's a difficult trick you know she is this gore blimey london north london girl and yet she convincingly sings songs that would make billie holiday weep while in the us in may 2007 amy married long-term boyfriend blakefielder civil at a ceremony in miami florida the couple's relationship continued to develop in tempestuous fashion with a series of public spats attracting an army of paparazzi photographers to their london home though the singer continued to tour back to black her live performances became increasingly unpredictable widely celebrated appearances at the summer festivals and a fourth successive top 40 with tears dry on their own were accompanied by several lackluster shows and a series of cancellations [Music] he walks away but i am [Music] [Applause] live amy is very unpredictable i mean you know whether she'll turn up at all but when she does you don't quite know whether you're going to get this super confident girl who can go out there and come on the stage and bra you know belt them out or you're going to get this rather nervous looking kind of slightly shaky little girl i think that's all part of the fact that that it's real clearly you know her emotions are kind of you know always just at the edges of her fingertips i mean she's not she's not a polished manufactured performer when i saw girls aloud recently on tv it was kind of like watching soft porn just the way they were playing up to camera you don't get any of that with amy it's in fact when she's on stage she looks absolutely terrified and that's quite interesting because you would think with all the other elements that she'd walk on and be a real kind of slick entertainer um but she isn't she tends to kind of look straight ahead you know over the tops of everyone's heads in the audience and it's almost like she's in a place where i think she's sort of thinking if i don't look at anyone i'll be okay when she comes on stage it's like she don't want to be there it's like the action is somewhere else you know the name and um that could be what uh problems that she has in a personal life uh and the stimulants is coming from outside instead of on the stage where it should be when amy's on form and she's really singing well uh she's a brilliant performer um she's so compelling when she delivers a song but oh my god when she's not on form it's like amy's left the building i mean she's there in in body but um you know she's not really inhabiting the song she's just kind of it's embarrassing um and uh at some of her festival appearances um in in 2007 she just seemed to be sleepwalking through the songs which is a real shame because when she can turn it on she's just um dynamite one of the central features of winehouse's summer live dates were performances of scar and two-tone classics that marked another sonic experiment for the singer a deluxe edition of back to black released in november 2007 featured a bonus disc with a number of live recordings b-sides and previously unreleased tracks the collection included covers of hey little rich girl and monkey man two songs that had previously been hits for the 70s british scar outfit the specials it's quite significant that it's almost like an addendum to the album it's like okay i've done this you know this album where broadly stacks motion girl groups are the uh you know the significant uh influences that you can parse on it but then you know she's developed this thing with valerie and the specials covers were she's she's a dual you know sky is a very significant part as well so um yeah i mean that and that's such a street culture as well you know i mean scar runs from the specialty clash of the original two tool mods [Music] it's an ongoing process the the the uh the melting pot of of of pop music and all its genres is is what pop music is that's how it works and uh amy's one of the better examples of how to make it work really creatively [Music] is [Music] i'm sure that they are people doing cultural theses on her because she's very much a product of um you know post multicultural britain it's jamaican music at root but it's it's so it's such an empowering part of culture in this country she's keeping a very strong cultural affinity i mean she you know she's essentially like you know dirt poor kid from the skids or whatever but you know she's uh she's a london girl and um that's uh you know any london girl that's into music that that's gonna be her cultural heritage [Music] while the deluxe edition of back to black continued to keep the album riding high in the uk charts speculation over amy's health and state of mind maintained her as a fixture in british tabloids the release of the next single from back to black love is a losing game came as the troubled singer cancelled a series of winter dates and the state of her marriage again made headlines with the arrest of her husband blake fielder civil on charges of assault love is a losing game is a song i mean that's a song written by a 50 year old in the body of a 23 year old i mean it's such a wise beyond your years so um and the the delivery and and and uh you know that this this it's kind of like a mutant ballad reference there but it's it's such a it's such a rich piece you know and uh um the maturity that it shows just between the first and the second record you know i i mean i i guess there's life has been lived in between [Music] i mean that really did you know i was filling up when i heard that song and that's so unusual for me for and with modern artists you know it just doesn't i can listen to a modern artist and think yeah they've you know they can sing oh yeah that's interesting but it doesn't move me you know um whereas she moves me and when i heard love is a losing game i thought my god this is like it's like a classic actually um everything about it you know lyrically the references she makes and and you also think she really means it she she lives this the song you know it's um [Music] that's probably why it made me cry because it's it was her telling her own story but but also it's a clever song because everyone can relate to it memories [Music] and now the final frame [Music] it's an album full of singles i mean that that's such a a great thing as well i mean every song and that you can pick rehab uh love is a losing game back to black tears i mean they could all we're all happily hanging is singles they'll all happily be in the firmament for for years for people to cover i mean they're they're songs that people connect with they're songs that other singers will connect with though love is a losing game was the least successful of the back to black releases and failed to break the top 40 amy ended 2007 back at the top of the uk chart a new collaboration with mark ronson on a cover of the zoutons valerie gave her a number two hit and together with a raft of awards and six grammy nominations the single brought down the curtain on a year in which winehouse had experienced the contrasting fortunes of both unparalleled professional success and considerable personal turmoil when she chose to cover that zhuton song valerie this one that kind of mark ronson things she's been doing um i think that's great as well because she sings a song about a girl and yet manages to make it sexy and so you're suddenly thinking well does she like girls too is it what's going on here she's playing with the sexuality of that you know and and she sings about you know i love the way you dress now she doesn't try and kind of twist it you know it's just that's really clever [Music] [Music] i think she needs to be encouraged and and applauded she's a very rare artist you know in in today's scene who's got that sort of depth to her listening and that intrepid quality to her writing and it's no wonder that you know characters like prince and dear old george michael you know want to be with her and make music with her hang out and and and and collaborate because she's she's a one in her generation kind of character [Music] the most brutally real female singer-songwriter this country certainly this country maybe any country has ever produced [Music] she's a fantastic singer and songwriter i forget all the stuff about the the way she looks or the the trials and tribulations and and you know the tabloid stuff or any of that it's it's a very rare beast who is that good not just as an interpreter of songs as a writer of songs and a singer of songs she's brilliant [Music] [Applause] [Music] they

Channel: Amplified - Classic Rock & Music History

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Keywords: Amy Winehouse 27 club, amy winehouse death anniversary, amy winehouse last performance, pop culture documentary, Amplified, music documentaries, art documentaries, documentary movies - topic, music documentary, TV Shows - Topic, full length documentary 2022, old school music, amy winehouse back to black rehab, amy winehouse bio-pic movie, amy winehouse dad interview after death, amy winehouse dad killed her, amy winehouse dad reddit, amy winehouse conspiracy, amy documentary

Id: 2yifpL_Qh0c

Length: 78min 31sec (4711 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2022