Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse: The Songwriter Behind the Beehive

At three in the morning UK time in February 2008, a visa refusal having kept her out of Los Angeles, Amy Winehouse stood in Riverside Studios in London and sang "Rehab" down a satellite link to the Grammy Awards. She won five that night, tying the then-record for a female artist in a single ceremony and becoming the first British woman to do it. She was twenty-four, and she had already made both of the albums she would ever complete.

A Household Full of Jazz

Amy Jade Winehouse was born at Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield, north London, on 14 September 1983, to Mitchell Winehouse, a taxi driver and amateur singer, and Janis Winehouse, a pharmacist. Her paternal grandmother Cynthia had been a singer who once dated the saxophonist Ronnie Scott; several of her maternal uncles were professional jazz musicians. Her father sang Sinatra and Tony Bennett around the house, and once performed "Fly Me to the Moon" before a meeting with her headmistress. The family was Jewish, and she was proud of it without being religious: "being Jewish to me is about being together as a real family. It's not about lighting candles and saying a bracha."

She grew up in Southgate, went to Osidge Primary and then Ashmole School, where her grades were surprisingly good. From 1992 she spent Saturdays at the Susi Earnshaw Theatre School learning to sing, act and tap dance, then transferred at fifteen to the Sylvia Young Theatre School after auditioning with "On the Sunny Side of the Street." A brief spell at the BRIT School followed. One teacher remembered a pupil who wrote so well she could have become a novelist or a journalist. She joined the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and recorded before anyone had signed her. She picked up her brother Alex's guitar, then bought her own, and started writing.

Frank, and an Argument With Her Label

In 2002 she signed to Simon Fuller's 19 Management for £250 a week against future earnings and was kept, as she put it, a recording-industry secret while she sang standards at the Cobden Club. A publishing deal with EMI followed, then Island Records, after the producer Salaam Remi introduced her to the label head Nick Gatfield.

*Frank* arrived on 20 October 2003, largely produced by Remi. Winehouse co-wrote every song but two covers, and critics reached immediately for Sarah Vaughan. It went platinum, was shortlisted for the 2004 Mercury Prize, drew two BRIT nominations, and won her an Ivor Novello for Best Contemporary Song for "Stronger Than Me." She was unimpressed with her own record, saying she was only eighty percent behind it because Island had overruled her on songs and mixes.

Back to Black

The second album took eleven tracks in five months, with production split between Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson working with the Dap-Kings. Winehouse initially assumed Ronson was a sound engineer and had expected an older man with a beard; he came to value how bluntly she told him when his work was no good. Released on 30 October 2006, *Back to Black* went to number one in Britain, reached number two in America after the Grammys, sold 1.85 million copies in the UK in 2007 alone and more than twenty million worldwide. "Rehab" was *Time*'s song of the year. "Love Is a Losing Game" won a second Ivor Novello, this one for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. In 2025 the Library of Congress selected the album for the National Recording Registry.

The look arrived with it: the beehive weave and Cleopatra eyeliner lifted from the Ronettes, the red lipstick, the tattoos. *Rolling Stone*'s Joe Levy called it "a knowing collage" that mixed "Bettie Page with Brigitte Bardot and adding that little bit of Ronnie Spector." Spector's own reaction to a photograph of her was: "I thought, 'That's me!' But then I found out, no, it's Amy!" Fred Perry built a seventeen-piece collection around her in 2010.

The Unravelling

The public collapse was slow and thoroughly documented. Heavy drinking and drug use had begun by 2005; her grandmother's death in 2006 removed a stabilising influence. In August 2007 she cancelled a European tour and was hospitalised after a reported overdose. In May 2007 she had married Blake Fielder-Civil, who later said he introduced her to crack cocaine and heroin; they divorced in 2009. There were assault charges, a Norwegian cannabis fine, an aborted 2011 European tour that ended with her booed off stage in Belgrade unable to remember the city or her band's names.

By her physician's account she had quit illegal drugs in 2008; alcohol replaced them. She refused the dialectical behaviour therapy she was offered and described herself as a manic depressive rather than an alcoholic. She was found dead at her Camden Square home on 23 July 2011, aged twenty-seven, with a blood alcohol level of 416mg per 100ml, more than five times the drink-drive limit. Toxicology found no illegal substances. Two inquests returned the same verdict: misadventure. Her brother later argued that the bulimia she had suffered for years was what left her too weak to survive it.

Why Amy Is Called a Genius

The most useful assessment of her comes from the obituary Alex Macpherson wrote for *The Quietus*, and it is not the one most people reach for: "Winehouse was an excellent, moving singer – but she was a great songwriter." That inverts the usual claim. The voice — a deep contralto that the BBC's Garry Mulholland called "the pre-eminent vocal talent of her generation" — was, Macpherson argued, "a mannerism that seemed totally natural, a mimicry of a 'classic' mode of singing that fit Winehouse just right." An undeniable instrument, but a borrowed idiom.

What was hers was the writing. She co-wrote almost everything she recorded, and her particular skill was structural: setting devastation to arrangements that sound cheerful, so that the gap between the horn line and the lyric does the emotional work. "Rehab" is a joke about refusing treatment, delivered as a Motown stomp, by someone who would die of the thing she was joking about. The two Ivor Novellos matter here in a way the Grammys do not — they are awarded by songwriters, for composition and lyric, and she won them a decade apart for entirely different reasons. George Michael said he had not heard a record like *Back to Black* since the 1970s.

The counter-case is unavoidable and she would probably have made it herself. Two albums is not a body of work, and the second was cut in five months. The sound was substantially built by Remi, Ronson and the Dap-Kings; strip them out and it is not clear what remains of the production. Her subject matter was narrow — one relationship, examined repeatedly. And she never got to develop; the rumoured reggae album never happened. The journalist Sophie Heawood recalled that Winehouse would "become very small and nervous" when anyone compared her to Billie Holiday, and reportedly shrivelled into a ball when her album went platinum. She did not think she was a genius. She thought she was a songwriter who was good at it.

Legacy

She holds a Guinness World Record for the most songs by a woman on the UK singles chart simultaneously — eight, after her death — and *Rolling Stone* placed her among the 200 greatest singers of all time in 2023. The Amy Winehouse Foundation continues the charitable work she did quietly while alive, including paying £4,000 for a stranger's surgery in Saint Lucia. The 2015 documentary *Amy* and the 2024 biopic *Back to Black* have both tried to sort the artist from the tabloid. Heawood's verdict remains the fair one: "The records will outlast any tabloid scandal."

Achievements

• Grammy Award for Best New Artist — 2008
• Instruments: guitar, drum kit and voice
• Genres: soul, rhythm and blues and jazz