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 As
a journalist, I will openly admit to anyone who will listen
to me... I am hooked on Amy Winehouse. The music, the
personality, the "I don't give a shit" tattoos. Stale cigars,
and bluesy night clubs. Thin bird like solo guitar players
belting out their sorrow for a bottle of bathtub gin in
somewhere New Orleans... before it was destroyed by the upper
class college punks... before the flood. Darkness. A lone blue
light floats down like dust from center stage. The ghost of
Billie Holiday shimmers out the rear exit into a black sedan to
chase the next fix. The band starts out soft, slow. Jazz cut by
Motown tinged in Blues. All eyes leave their drinks. Amy
Winehouse takes the stage. Perhaps in a black velvet sequined
dress...perhaps in a pair of torn blue jeans... Fresh from her
triumphant performance at the Brits where she picked up the
British Female Solo Artist award, Amy Winehouse has had her much
anticipated new single, ”Back To Black”, released on April 16th
through Island Records. The single is the title track from Amy’s
stunning album “Back To Black”, which this week re-gained the
number 1 slot, and looks set to go triple— platinum in a matter
of weeks with sales fast approaching the 900,000 mark. It’s been
a fantastic few years for Amy since the release, at the end of
October 2006... of her anthemic single “Rehab”. “Rehab” entered
the chart at number 7 and was quickly followed by “Back To
Black” which was released to universal acclaim and finished the
year topping many end of year polls. A second single, “You Know
I’m No Good”, featuring Ghostface Killah, was released in
January and gave Amy her second big hit. Two Brit nominations, a
South Bank Show award and an Elle Style award followed before
Amy scooped the British Best Female last week at Earl’s Court.
Amy’s live shows feature songs drawn from her platinum debut
“Frank” and “Back To Black”.
“Frank”
established Amy Winehouse as one of the most exciting and
challenging artists in pop music, and “Back To Black” merely
proves, beyond any reasonable or unreasonable doubt, what a
truly remarkable talent she is. Winehouse’s song-writing and
fearlessness as a lyric writer has been grafted and infused onto
some of the most astonishing material in her short career thus
far. “Back To Black” sees her teaming up once again with “Frank”
producer Salaam Remi and, for the first time, with New Yorker
Mark Ronson (Lily Allen, Robbie Williams and Christina
Aguilera).
 Following
the ongoing success of “Frank”, Amy began thinking about
what she’d like to do with her second record. “Frank” was her
grand and suitably blunt-speaking break-up record, and it won
her a battalion of fans around the world, marking her out as
one of the most distinctive new voices in pop; confessional,
elemental and with that most rare of combinations: humor and
soul. “I didn’t want to play the jazz thing up too much again. I
was bored of complicated chord structures and needed something
more direct. I’d been listening to a lot of girl-groups from the
fifties and sixties. I liked the simplicity of that stuff. It
just gets to the point.” You can hear it on the subtlety
Supremes-referencing intro of “Back To Black”. But her reach
stretches further. While the girl-groups of the sixties to which
she had become enthralled contained their vocals, Amy can break
loose with Aretha-style vocal stylings on “Just Friends” or by
turning the whole idea of drying out into a gospel spiritual on
the stunning opener “Rehab”. “Love is a Losing Game” is pure
classic modern song-writing: brief, to the point and drenched in
emotion. Other profound highlights include the Nas inspired “Me
and Mr. Jones”, the positively beautiful “Wake Up Alone”, “I’m
No Good”, the personal epiphany that you can behave just as
badly as all those guys that have messed you around and stamped
all over you, and the bluesy smooch of the title track, “Back
To Black”.
 February
of 2008 saw Amy Winehouse duly honored with 5 of the US
Recording Academy’s most prestigious awards: Best Pop Vocal
Album, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, Best New Artist, Song
of the Year (Rehab) and Record of the Year (Rehab) at the 50th
Annual Grammy Awards held in Los Angeles. This incredible haul
made Amy the first ever British female artist to win 5 Grammys
in one night and saw her join Lauryn Hill (in 1998), Alicia Keys
(in 2001), Norah Jones (in 2002) and Beyonce (in 2003) in the
elite group of female artists who have won 5 awards in just one
evening. The Grammys had capped off a remarkable 18 months for
this hugely talented and unique artist. During that time “Back
To Black”, her second album (and the biggest selling UK album of
2007), sold over 5 million copies worldwide and turned Amy into
one of the hottest stars in the world. The critical response to
the record has been every bit as impressive and in addition to
the Grammy’s Amy has picked up a series of awards including a
Brit, South Bank Show Award, Ivor Novello, Mojo, Glamour, Elle
Style Award, Mobo, MTV Europe’s Artists’ Choice Award and Q
Award for Album of the Year. Meanwhile Amy’s 2003 debut album
‘Frank’ has now gone double platinum selling an incredible
300,000 copies in 2007 alone. I had the unique opportunity to
share a pint with Amy at one of London's seedier sections of
town. But trust me when I tell you... it was cool. What follows
is an overview of our brief encounter and conversation...
 UPBEAT:
Things have taken off rather quickly for you— how exactly... are
you dealing with all of your well-deserved fame?
Amy Winehouse "It's really
cool. Look around you [laughs]. My life isn't really different
to how it used to be. It's better in that I'm working more now.
You know how when you don't go to work, you don't always feel
100 percent? Well, because I'm working a lot, I feel like I'm
doing good things now. [she takes a drag on her cigarette and
pauses reflectively] I never wanted any of this and that's the
truth. I would have been happy to sing in a cover band for the
rest of my life. And I wouldn't have gone on one of those shows
in a million, billion years, because I think that musicality is
not something other people should judge you on. Music's a thing
you have with yourself. Even though the people who go on those
shows are shit, it's really damaging to be told that you are."
UPBEAT: Is it fair to say that your lyrics are overtly
emotional?
Amy Winehouse "They're very
personal and very intense, in a way. But I think there's a lot
of humor in there as well. I've always wanted to present a point
with a twist. You know, like 'I'm really angry about this,
you're a bastard and you can't even get a boner!' I just want to
say things I would find funny if I heard them."
UPBEAT: Where do you see yourself ten years down the road?
Amy Winehouse "Well, I'll have
at least three beautiful kids. I want to do at least four or
five albums and I want to get them out of the way now. And then
I want to take ten years out to go and have kids, definitely. I
never used to be broody, but then I realized that I'm turning
into a soppy bitch. Goodness in life comes from a sense of
achievement and you get that from having a child and putting the
child before yourself."
UPBEAT: Are you religious?
Amy Winehouse "I'm not
religious at all. I think faith is something that gives you your
strength. I believe in fate and I believe that things happen for
a reason but I don't think that there's a high power,
necessarily. I believe in karma very much though. There are so
many rude people around and they're the people that don't have
any real friends. And relationships with people— with your mum,
your nan, your dog— are what you get the most happiness in life
from. Apart from shoes and bags."
UPBEAT: Are you going to turn into a diva?
Amy Winehouse "I'm probably
already one, if that means that you don't give a shit about
people's opinions. I don't suffer fools gladly. I'm not really
here to make friends. I've learned all of that the hard way— I
used to not say things like 'I really want to hold a guitar in
my video', because I was trying to make everyone like me. But I
don't give a shit now. At the end of the day I'm there to do my
job, I'm not there to have picnics. So, if that's being a diva
then yeah, I will be one."
 Most
people have multiple systems of measuring time. They wear a
"hip" watch on their wrists, hang a culturally correct clock on
the wall, and a calendar next to the clock covered in sharpie
notes with a different kitten for each month of the year. I
measure time in a different, but no less accurate manner. It’s a
three-month cycle, common amongst nearly all drug abusers... it
is marked by the amount of time it takes for Amy Winehouse to
have a new drug-addled video crop up on the web. She’s like the
Icarus of drug addiction and represents, unfortunately, the
darkest depths of the rock n roll lifestyle. But let me just say
for the record... it takes real guts to walk out on stage and
perform your personal tragedies for public consumption in a
stadium-size venue. It takes even more to defend yourself when a
few people think your emotions might just consume you whole. I
know that I couldn't do it. I doubt many of her fans could.
Because Winehouse is a real, honest talent. A great unflinching
songwriter with a raw voice. And, in the tradition of artists
like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, she comes out and gives it
all to us, how it felt. Passionate, desperate, tragic and
lonely. She is a little lost girl with the strength to howl it
like it was. I've seen Winehouse perform many times, apparently
drunk and seemingly sober. To be perfectly honest, it's pretty
tough these days... to tell the difference. She always slurs,
wanders, wobbles, gets caught up in the emotions. I saw her sing
to a small group of about 12 or so people in a small London pub
with nothing more than an acoustic guitar for accompaniment. She
poured her entire soul into those songs. She didn't seem to care
who was listening. And that's true artistry.
 Amy
Winehouse was reportedly hospitalized with a suspected chest
infection. The fallen tortured angel who is still battling her
ongoing drug addictions and inner demons... to no avail— was
rushed to The London Clinic on a late Saturday night after being
ill for a few days. Onlookers said Amy, merely 25 now, looked
drawn with stained yellow teeth and painful sores on her skin.
The singer was hospitalized in June of this year and her father
Mitch said doctors had feared she was showing early symptoms of
suffering from a potentially fatal lung disease. Amy had
precautionary scans at the hospital. A doctor visited her at
home in north London but her health deteriorated over the
weekend. Amy's mother explained earlier this month, "It is hard
seeing pictures of her looking like that. She's very thin and
frail. But as her mother she probably looks worse to me." We
asked Amy's publicist for a comment on the recent turn of
events, here's what she told us, "Amy is still in the hospital
undergoing more chest and lung tests. She should be home in a
few days." God... we hope so. UB
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