Obituary: Amy Winehouse

It was with an air of inevitable tragedy that Amy Winehouse’s death came to light. It has been five years since her last album Back to Black. Since then no music has appeared as Winehouse struggled with various drug and alcohol problems. Her stormy failed marriage with Blake Fielder-Civil was just one of many problems spread across the tabloids. She was photographed was cocaine stuck to her nose, and a video showed her taking crack cocaine. Her father made a desperate appeal for her to quit her lifestyle on live radio, to no avail. Her last concert appearance, dazed and confused in Serbia, saw her being booed off, drunk and unable to sing. At the time of her death, all touring had been suspended and new recordings were unlikely. A sad end to one of Britain’s finest soul singers in the last decade.

But while it is Winehouse’s sorry decline into addiction, regardless of the cause of death, that has coloured the immediate time after her death, her celebrity scandal retrospective pales in regard to her back catalogue. Frank, recorded when she was just 20, and Back to Black, are quite simply outstanding, and anyone only aware of the scandal and not the music should seek out the latter immediately. The legacy of Motown is written all over her songs, in her deep unforgettable voice. You can taste the cigarettes and regret in her voice, which adds extra flavour to her misery and struggle on songs like ‘You know I’m no good’ and 'Rehab’. Glee covered the latter but their happy-clappy version didn’t have one hundredth of Winehouse’s power. Her lyrics were brilliant as well. “And although he is nothing in the scheme of my years” sings Winehouse on ‘You sent me flying’, one of the best songs of her debut album Frank, ‘it just serves to bludgeon my futile tears. And I'm not use to this, I observe, I don't chase, So now I'm stuck with consequences, thrust in my face'. In an age where pop stars are handpicked from reality songs to sing bland covers and songs written by a team, Winehouse’s songs, uniquely personal and intimate, are a release from that.

So what is Amy Winehouse’s legacy? Apart from being another addition to the gruesome "27 club", it’s right there in the charts now. Adele, though labeled by many as a poor man’s Winehouse, has broken all sorts of records and looks to be wooing America as well. Duffy, another artist who has also despite a lackluster second album, had the best-selling album of 2008. And Lily Allen's recent turn, especially her song 'It's not fair' where she derides the sexual incompetence of a boyfriend, owes much to Winehouse's 'Stronger than me' where she questions her lover's sexuality. Motown UK, for want of a better phrase, is alive and booming. And Amy’s honest appraisal of her own life’s breakdown through her music, which will surely undergo a renaissance after her death, will hopefully dislodge the current trend of electronic autotuned bleeps and bloops. It is hard to pinpoint where addiction ended and Amy Winehouse began, but hopefully a retrospective of her work will acknowledge her for what she is – one of the most talented musicians of her generation – regardless of the addictions she faced during her life.

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