R27, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black set was more or less censored for the U.S. release. The record label omitted the final track on the album, Addicted, her paean to pot (“…does more than any dick did…”), which was strange. The idea that a country that revered Snoop Dog and hip hop somehow couldn’t take a young British woman who smoked pot was odd. It was just one way that her record label tried to manufacture her persona.
On Frank, her first album, her incredible vocal talents are showcased in an extensive and varied set that her record label intended to promote as “nu jazz” or something. You get a great idea of her incredible voice, there’s even some jazz standards (“Moody’s Mood”) and a few that she wrote that SOUND like jazz standards (“I Heard Love is Blind”) but have an unbridled, forthright sensuality that was then uncommon for a young female pop star. (On “In My Bed” she sings of her beleaguered suitor, “The only time I hold your hand…is to get the angle right.”)
Her incredible songwriting comes through on “Stronger Than Me,” for which she won her first Ivor Novello Award, and the sharp, incredibly snarky “Fuck Me Pumps,” among others. The voice and the songwriting artistry really come together on “You Sent Me Flying,” where her desire, passion and self-laceration is in full bloom and the pain and confusion of this young, highly self-aware, woman is predictive of who she was destined to become on Back to Black. Listening to it now, it sounds inevitable.
Back to Black is a writer’s album. Winehouse is in great voice throughout but she’s not showing off, vocally. The bloom is off the rose, as they say. She’s not interested in being Mariah Carey - though she could be, if she wanted. But in that sense, she never would be. On the title track she sings, “And life…is like a pipe…and I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside.” It’s an image that once heard, is hard to get out of one’s head. It’s innately poetic and an incredibly sad and desperate self-assessment. It was all there, for all to hear. At the time, the way the press hounded her, I didn’t understand what people thought they were listening to; the fragility was overlooked, the press treated it like it was only an act. But the artistry, the songwriting and, frankly, vocal restraint was compelling. Amy Winehouse refracted her own biography through the sounds and stories of the ‘60s girl groups with full authority and made it her own. That was where she located herself, in that resonant persona of a beehive girl with a broken heart, only she went further with phrases like “He left no time to regret, kept his dick wet…” The album’s pinnacle is perhaps its centrepiece, “Love is a Losing Game” (another Ivor Novello winner, along with “Rehab”) which sounds heaven sent, a song we’ve never heard before but the moment you hear it, sounds like it’s always been there; as it plays, we’re so stunned by its sublime, slack-jawed honesty and resignation, we don’t know where it begins and where it ends. And “Wake Up Alone,” an incredibly moving song about the inertia of sheer heartbreak that hits hard in its mundane detail (“…I stay up, clean the house…at least I’m not drinking…” and “…and this ache in my chest, as my day is done now, the dark covers me and I can’t run now…”). Our great loss with Amy Winehouse is that she was a great writer. The complexity of her soul is only revealed in her songwriting, her safe space where she dared to say anything. Back to Black is a compelling song cycle where all of her desires and vices are laid bare, “on the kitchen floor”, in all of its Nan Golden-ish glory and the young, heartbroken woman at the centre of it, above all else, claims her artistry with such assurance that she commands our respect. For daring to love with all her heart and every part of her body., and for paying the consequences. And in a last ditch attempt to overcome her heartache she’s saying, “I’ve failed at everything else BUT THIS. This is the only good thing to come out of it, it’s what I’m worth.”
