🇬🇧 Amy Winehouse

Biography

On February 10, 2008, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, a twenty-four-year-old British singer stood in front of a satellite feed from London — she had been denied a U.S. work visa due to pending drug charges — and accepted five Grammy Awards. Five. In a single night. The record for most Grammys won by a female artist in one evening, tied that night, had been held by Beyoncé. The artist collecting the awards remotely, surrounded by her family in London, wearing an enormous beehive hairdo and a skin-tight dress, was Amy Winehouse, who had recorded Back to Black eighteen months earlier in a Notting Hill studio for approximately what a mid-range car costs, working from a notebook of lyrics she had written about a relationship that was destroying her. The album had gone to number one in the United Kingdom and the United States. It would eventually sell over twenty million copies. She had not yet turned twenty-five.

Amy Jade Winehouse was born September 14, 1983, in Southgate, North London, the daughter of Mitch Winehouse, a taxi driver, and Janis Seaton, a pharmacist. Her grandmother, Cynthia, had been a singer who worked clubs in East London; her uncle, Harold, had played alongside Ronnie Scott. Jazz was not a genre in the Winehouse household — it was furniture. She grew up hearing it, singing along to it, absorbing the phrasing of Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan at an age when most children are absorbing whatever is on commercial radio. By twelve she had taught herself guitar. By fourteen she was writing her own songs.

She enrolled at the BRIT School for Performing Arts in Croydon at sixteen — the same institution that had produced, and would produce, Adele, Leona Lewis, and Jessie J. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not use the school primarily as a platform for developing commercial appeal. She was deepening her knowledge of jazz harmony and learning the craft of songwriting as a formal discipline. A classmate submitted a demo she had made to a music management company without telling her; the management company signed her immediately. Island Records signed her by the time she was eighteen.

Her debut album, Frank — named as an adjective, not a name — was released in October 2003, when she was nineteen. The album was critically acclaimed and commercially successful in the United Kingdom, reaching number thirteen on the UK Albums Chart and earning her two Ivor Novello Awards for songwriting. It was produced in a jazz-influenced idiom that felt deliberately anachronistic against the contemporary R&B landscape; critics noted that a nineteen-year-old North Londoner sounding simultaneously like Billie Holiday, Erykah Badu, and no one else was an unusual phenomenon that deserved attention.

Back to Black, released in October 2006, was produced by Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, who understood something important: that the sound of 1960s Motown girl-group records — the reverbed drums, the wall of sound production, the melodic simplicity of the hooks — was the perfect frame for Winehouse's voice and subject matter. The album's eleven tracks documented the end of a relationship with a precision and a lack of self-pity that made it feel more like reportage than autobiography. "Rehab," the lead single — a sardonic account of her record label's suggestion that she enter treatment, and her refusal — reached number nineteen on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of the most recognizable songs of the decade. "Back to Black," "Tears Dry on Their Own," "Love Is a Losing Game" — each track was constructed with the care of a short story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that resolved nothing.

She died at her home in Camden, North London, on July 23, 2011, of accidental alcohol poisoning. She was twenty-seven years old. She had released two studio albums. The second had sold twenty million copies and won five Grammy Awards. The documentary Amy, directed by Asif Kapadia and released in 2015, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and presented her life and career with a clarity that the tabloid coverage of her final years had specifically prevented: it showed an extraordinarily gifted young woman who had been caught between a talent that demanded everything from her and an industry and personal life that were incapable of protecting her from herself.

Timeline

Peers in Perspective