Amy Winehouse - Back To Black

This is the end

How many people are now ready to claim that such extravagant praise is only ever bestowed on musicians once they're gone, when everyone wants to paint even the most modest performers as untouchable, chasing after improbable talents beyond all reason? Yes, that praise we're reading everywhere following the premature (and, this time more than ever, predictable) death of Amy Winehouse. And no, ladies and gentlemen, in this case you're wrong: the English artist was one of the few phenomena on the contemporary music scene to earn unanimous acclaim while still alive, and in a thoroughly cross-cutting way.

Amy Winehouse was loved (and now will be loved even more) by Motown-style devotees and incurable indie snobs alike, by die-hard jazz purists as much as by hedonistic guitar-rock fans, right down to those who simply want reassuring harmonies and pop melodies from their music. And yet her songs were anything but reassuring. Take "Rehab", in which she openly declared to the world her firm refusal to undergo any kind of detox treatment, and start from there to retrace the dark arc of the British singer-songwriter's story.

Parallels

Her personal story recalls the downward spiral of Kurt Cobain: both scattered throughout their songs (and their behaviour) a series of unmistakable cries for help that no one ever managed to properly answer. Is it really possible that no one in the music system had the sensitivity to force her into a rehab facility? Besides, her recovery would have had the immediate consequence of turning Amy once again into an inexhaustible source of money for managers, record labels, booking agencies and all the related industry around her. An industry that, in an era when the record-as-object is in irreversible coma, is ever more in need of genuine phenomena to coddle and milk dry.

Instead, on 23 July 2011, Winehouse officially joined the unsettling "27 Club", that terrible imaginary place that has long been home to, besides the Nirvana frontman, also Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, just to name the most striking examples. All extraordinary rockstars, all snatched away by the grim reaper at the very same age, whether by their own will or as the ultimate consequence of their respective excesses.

Some people these days are trying to downplay Amy's significance, occasionally resorting to rather macabre irony. It's often said, for instance, that compared to Joplin, with whom she shared an unrestrained love of alcohol, while Janis managed to give her best precisely while drunk, Winehouse's recent performances revealed her utter inability even to stand up straight. As if to say that Amy, all things considered, didn't even have the physical stature (let alone the artistic one) of the great names she keeps being compared to.

Her last concert (if we can even call it that), held on 18 June 2011 in Belgrade, was a disaster. It was meant to mark her triumphant return to the stage; instead, twenty thousand people who had each paid around forty euros to see her booed her loudly after she proved unable to sing, to stay on stage, or even to remember the names of her own musicians.

If you want to remember her in a fitting way, better to go back and watch her beautiful performance at Hyde Park for Nelson Mandela's ninetieth birthday, on 27 June 2008.

Starting points

Amy Winehouse was born in Enfield, Middlesex, on September 14, 1983, into a working-class English family, the daughter of a cab driver and a pharmacist (a sadly prophetic detail), who instilled in her a love of jazz music from an early age. After her parents' separation, and having been expelled from school at the age of fourteen, she began strumming the guitar and writing her first original compositions.

After some tentative early steps in little-known rap outfits, some of her recordings began circulating and caught the attention of the major record labels. Amy signed with Island, and on October 20, 2003 she made her major-label debut with the album Frank, an elegant but not essential record, from which emerges the still somewhat unripe personality of an artist moving through moods at the crossroads of r'n'b and jazzy atmospheres (just listen to the brief vocal flourish that opens the tracklist, or the more structured "Moody's Mood For Love/Teo Licks"), not forgetting fitting contaminations with the bossa nova of "Cherry" and the offbeat rhythms of "What Is It About Men" and "Amy Amy Amy", even though the young singer loves to shape her vocal cords above all over soft, enveloping beds of sound ("You Sent Me Flying", "There Is No Greater Love").

The seeds are already here that would sprout in a more defined and fully realized way in the following months: the arrangements are at times minimalist ("I Heard Love Is Blind"), at times reaching the heights of the most exhilarating afro-funk ("In My Bed"); and don't miss the two ghost tracks "Brother" and "Mr. Magic".

"Stronger Than Me", the first single released, is the right song to start cracking the market open, bolstered by a video that tries to highlight the touch of sensuality still very much present in Winehouse's figure. The subsequent videos too ("Take The Box", "In My Bed" and "Fuck Me Pumps", the other three singles taken from the debut album) help showcase a performer with undeniable talent, light years away from the embarrassing figure she would become in later years.

Don't trust anyone who tries to pass it off as a masterpiece, but Frank is without doubt a splendid debut, one that quickly became a solid success in England (reaching number thirteen on the sales charts) and picked up a couple of Brit Awards nominations, with its sales only improving further over time.

23 years old

But to achieve international fame, we'd have to wait for the follow-up, Back To Black, released exactly three years later, which immediately received glowing reviews pretty much everywhere in the specialist press.

With this second work, the then twenty-three-year-old Winehouse set aside the jazz atmospheres of her previous record, immersing herself in soul and r'n'b territory, which suited her far more naturally, without neglecting pop flourishes and the occasional funk edge.

Amy stands out above all for the qualities of her voice: a cantankerous, dishevelled voice, bruised by scrapes and scars, yet clear, luminous, and comforting like few others — a voice that renews and pays tribute to the glorious tradition of heroines from the golden age of jazz and soul (Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone), grafting it onto the sensibility of illustrious contemporaries such as Macy Gray, Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu.

But Winehouse isn't simply a "voice": as with Frank, she wrote or co-wrote every song on the tracklist, a quality that elevates her artistically above the many mere performers populating the market of her day.

Amy pulls off the feat of reviving the soul flavours of the past in an original way, recontextualizing them in the present. Take songs like "Wake Up Alone", or the heart-wrenching "Love Is A Losing Game": thoroughly derivative songs that call to mind the great Stax/Motown names of the '60s, yet ones in which Amy carries out the task in an utterly personal way, being above all herself, never running the risk of being mistaken for the immortal stars of the past.

It's impossible not to fall in love from the very first listen with the smooth title track (which cemented her standing with the wider public, even here in Italy) or with the opening white-funk of "Rehab", her most famous song on an international scale. The reggae-tinged drift of "Just Friends", the exquisite perfection of "You Know I'm No Good" and the languid joyfulness of "Tears Dry On Their Own" broaden the range of influences on display.

Back To Black is produced by Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, skilled at giving the songs a strongly classic character while still keeping them original, with a horn section ready to drape the melodies in well-judged swing counterpoints.

Within a few months, accolades poured in from every direction: Amy picked up end-of-year awards all over the world, bagging no fewer than five Grammy Awards (out of six nominations) — a success no British performer had ever achieved before. But Winehouse wasn't able to collect her five Grammys in person, since her problems with drug and alcohol dependency were already public knowledge, and the United States was unwilling to let the English star set foot on its soil.

Her fame spreads like wildfire, and the record label makes the most of it, churning out a string of singles from Back To Black (six in total by the end, each more beautiful than the last: “Rehab”, “You Know I’m No Good”, the title track, “Tears Dry On Their Own”, “Love Is A Losing Game” and “Just Friends”). Back To Black quickly becomes an instant classic, so much so that barely a year after its release a deluxe edition hits the market, padded out with eight additional tracks, some of which (“Valerie”, “Cupid”) are anything but filler.

Last star of soul

By 2007, Amy Winehouse is universally recognized as the leading star of the contemporary nu-soul scene, and comparisons with the greats of the past abound. But Amy manages above all to be herself, perhaps unwittingly launching a new way of vocally approaching the music, to the point that a host of rising talents take inspiration from her, in some cases finding great success — just think of the likes of Duffy and Adele, or, in Italy, the astonishing breakthrough of Giusy Ferreri. Amy is certainly no great beauty, she has more tattoos than a truck driver, and she visibly tends to lose weight, yet she becomes an icon to emulate, a symbol of womanhood for our times, capable of achieving overwhelming success without having a supermodel's body.

But as the months go by, all her instabilities take over. Winehouse increasingly retreats into her addictions, willingly and definitively (as we can say today) giving up her own clarity of mind. Meanwhile, the urgency of gossip shows no mercy: she is repeatedly targeted both online and in the tabloids, which never hesitate to publish embarrassing photographs showing her in an unpresentable state. The importance of a front-page story thus constantly takes precedence over the respect owed to the artist. Nothing helps — and in all likelihood it only made things worse — including a (toxic) marriage, entered into too hastily and lasting little more than two years, to Blake Fielder-Civil.

I know it’s over

Fans and true music lovers had hoped for months for a triumphant comeback, and were almost certain it would happen, but the new record remained a mysterious object, constantly pushed back.

Rumours circulated more than once about the English artist's desire to produce something leaning towards reggae sounds (who knows, perhaps one day we'll get to hear at least some rough recordings), but the direction her career might have taken will forever remain a mystery.

Jim Morrison took refuge in Paris, in search of new artistic horizons; Jimi Hendrix was absorbed in countless experiments and might soon have crossed paths with the great Miles Davis; Kurt Cobain just managed to offer an acoustic version of his work, hinting at the mature age of the grunge hurricane. But what these geniuses of the seven notes might have gone on to create in life will remain forever unknown.

Perhaps after a few years they would have ended up like Elvis, reduced at forty-two to playing a parody of himself; or perhaps they would have survived, like modern-day Keith Richards figures, the vicissitudes of a life always lived to excess. Amy Winehouse could have become the cursed version of Aretha Franklin — she had all it took — but instead depressive crises, complicated love affairs, sudden hospitalizations, constant lapses and lethal addictions ended up bringing her down for good. Perhaps she never truly recognized herself as a first-magnitude star of the international music firmament: too psychologically fragile to take on a role that would have put her at the centre of media attention for the rest of her days.

On 23 July 2011 she is found dead inside her London home, at 30 Camden Square, a victim of yet another cocktail of alcohol and drugs. By the time her body is discovered, there is nothing more to be done. It seems that in the last week of her life she had been found unconscious no fewer than three times. A death foretold. Bodyguard Andrew Morris, who finds her lifeless, will later testify that he had left her the night before, having dinner in her room while watching videos of her own songs on YouTube, surrounded by a worrying number of vodka bottles.

The autopsy will confirm death by “stop-and-go shock”, following a massive intake of alcohol. Just a month earlier, in Belgrade, on one of the first stops of the European tour that was meant to relaunch her career, she had been forced to leave the stage because she was too drunk to continue the show: the sad video testimony can unfortunately still be found online. It's easy now to predict a long string of posthumous releases that will reinforce a myth destined to endure through the years. We want to remember her by letting the poignant song that gave its title to her most inspired and successful work ring out forever: “Back To Black”.

Hidden Treasures

The first posthumous album is released on 5 December 2011, just a few months after her death. For some time there had been rumours about the follow-up to Back To Black, about what new direction it might take; Amy worked on it in fits and starts, and in her few moments of clarity, some precious glimmer of genius still emerged from her immense and indisputable talent.

The most credible rumours converged on the idea of a more reggae-leaning sound, not a new direction for the English artist, and curiosity grew ever stronger, not only among the countless fans scattered around the world.

Lioness: Hidden Treasures opens precisely with the offbeat rhythms of “Our Day Will Come” (an outtake from Frank), rich with those gospel inflections that make it a perfect single for the approaching Christmas season. The following “Between The Cheats”, which brings us back to the fifties/sixties flavours Winehouse had already explored so well in the past, is one of three newly recorded, previously unreleased tracks included on the album, dating back to sessions held in May 2008. The second unreleased track is “Like Smoke”, where the presence of rapper Nas ensures just the right blend of soul and hip hop. The third unreleased track, perhaps the album's high point, is the wonderful closer “A Song For You” (currently Amy's last known recording, dating back to spring 2009), ending with a dedication rich in meaning to the hugely successful soul man Donny Hathaway, another complex and troubled figure, who at just 33 ended his life by jumping from the fifteenth floor of a New York hotel on 13 January 1979.

There are three alternate takes of Back To Black songs: “Tears Dry”, which would later become “Tears Dry On Their Own”; “Valerie”, which appeared on the deluxe version; and the stripped-down demo of “Wake Up Alone”. These are mostly curiosities for die-hard fans and completist obsessives, since the already-released versions remain unquestionably preferable. “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” is a heartfelt cover of the Shirelles song, written in 1960 by a very young Carole King: Winehouse's voice is worthy of a standing ovation, but the drums seem a touch too intrusive, with that somewhat forced, martial beat. “The Girl From Ipanema” is the track Amy played for Salaam Remi back in 2002 to win his attention — a none-too-personal version of the Brazilian evergreen, in which Amy has fun trilling in a jazzy style. Jazzy atmospheres also mark the cover of “Halftime”, previously recorded by Frank Sinatra and dating back to the “Frank” sessions (with Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson of The Roots on drums), as well as the breezier, more playful “Best Friends, Right?” and the successful duet with Tony Bennett, the nocturnal “Body And Soul”.

Lioness: Hidden Treasures is far from being considered Winehouse's third "true" album; it's certainly not the record she aspired to make, but rather a compilation of rarities than an organically conceived album, a list of twelve tracks that lines up (as the title rightly states) a series of "hidden treasures": a handful of unreleased songs alongside alternate versions of already-known tracks and a few demos polished up for the occasion.

It's nonetheless an enjoyable record, one for which the two producers, Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson, put in considerable effort to blend together recordings from different sources, with wildly uneven source quality to begin with. Still, it's a godsend for anyone who couldn't settle for the handful of songs contained on the only two albums released during the lifetime of one of the most fought-over, controversial and talented stars of the new millennium.

A year later, Island (Universal for the American market) released 14 tracks recorded for the BBC across various sessions between 2003 and 2009. The proceeds from Live At The BBC were donated to the Amy Winehouse Foundation. A box set was released alongside it, adding a full three live DVDs to the live album.

As easily predictable, her death fuelled the myth and, alongside it, the speculation surrounding one of the most gifted and, at the same time, most unhappy singers of our era. Of course Amy was bound to become the subject of film scripts too. In 2015 came the feature-length "Amy: The Girl Behind The Name", a documentary (Oscar winner in the "Best Documentary" category) dedicated to her, which will certainly not be the last attempt to shed light on her life and death, not least because the singer's family promptly distanced itself from it, and it's reasonable to expect new perspectives on her troubled story to emerge. "Amy" ran in Italian cinemas for three days, came out on home formats within a few weeks, and was accompanied by its own soundtrack: the musical record of a life that was indeed short, but long enough to establish her as the greatest star in the soul firmament of our time.

Across the twenty-three tracks of the soundtrack, the film score, composed by Brazilian composer Antonio Pinto, coexists somewhat awkwardly with some of Winehouse's classics, drawing from rarities, demos and live versions, among which "We're Still Friends" stands out, an unreleased track captured live in 2006. Alongside some of her signature songs, such as the hugely famous "Stronger Than Me", "Rehab" and "Love Is A Losing Game", the collection also includes the cover of "Valerie" (the song brought to success in 2006 by English band Zutons), performed with Mark Ronson, and the duet "Body And Soul", alongside Tony Bennett.

All very nice, but almost all already heard before, and in the end Amy: The Original Soundtrack has neither the strength to stand as a celebration, nor to live up to the claim of going down in history as an essential best of: it's really just a companion piece to the film, fine as a very mainstream Christmas gift, but little more than that. For anyone who wants to keep the memory of the beautiful and doomed Amy intact, the two excellent official albums released in her lifetime will always be enough, along with the images of her we still have in music videos and live performances found online. Everything else will always be nothing more than crude speculation to make money off her tormented figure.

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