Yesterday’s news of Amy Winehouse‘s death was met with two very distinct reactions – the first camp expressing their sadness at the tragedy of a young woman losing her life, and the world of music losing a shining star, and the second reacting with morbid pragmatism, suggesting that noone should be shocked, or saddened because she brought it upon herself, and her story pales into insignificance next to the heinous attrocities committed in the name of religious extremism in Norway the day before. The nature of her later life and career will continue to spark that debate long after the bad-taste Rehab jokes have subsided and the gleefully authorised anti-drugs commenters have stopped using the 27 year old as a poster-child for abuse.

What isn’t up for debate here is that Winehouse’s talent was unlike the majority of musicians currently working today – the explosion of her career heralded a rich rebirth of British soul music and in Frank and Back to Black, she was responsible for two of the greatest albums to come out of Britain in the modern era.

The singer’s story isn’t one particularly marked by tragedy, despite her solace in substance abuse, and her rise to being signed by Simon Fuller‘s 19 Management in 2002 was nothing short of meteoric in comparison to the thousands of jobbing musicians who scratch a living without ever getting discovered. She was considered such a talent that she was kept a secret, somewhat unthinkably effectively hiding her talent for a year while she was moulded and until the Mercury nominated Frank was released in 2003.

Success would follow swiftly – the album receiving Brit nominations for both “British Female Solo Artist” and “British Urban Act”, as well as the Mercury nod, and an Ivor Novello songwriting Award for Best Contemporary Song (for “Stronger Than Me”) and impressive triple platinum sales – and precipitated a creative shift for 2006′s follow-up album Back To Black. Reunited with producer Salaam Remi, and with Mark Ronson now in a duel-producing role, Winehouse shifted away from jazz in favour of a jukebox classics feel that would inspire a number of top-selling singles and a raft of critical awards.

And while there will be comments that like the other members of the dreaded 27 Club, her music wouldn’t have been the same without her personal demons, devoid of the cutting emotional undertones and visible wounds, her early musical career suggested an emotional rawness that substance abuse and fatalistic relationship choices would merely make “cool” in the eyes of the media. The passionate, music-loving girl who spoke with such devotion of her desire to remodel a stagnant British music industry in the wake of her debut album’s release may have been a million miles away from the broken version who was unceremoniously booed off stage in Serbia last month, but she was no less fluent in the verses of real musical substance.

But sadly the truth is that without addiction Jim Morrison’s music would likely have been pretentious, impenetrable poetry, a care-free Kurt Cobain wouldn’t have written the tortured operas that defined a generation and an entire musical genre (and killed hair metal in the process) and a sober, reserved Jimi Hendrix probably wouldn’t have injected his music with such chaotic energy or drive. And who is to say that a clean, untroubled Amy Winehouse wouldn’t have gone the way of Joss Stone – disappearing without trace after early, hugely soulful promise.

Personally, I feel that Amy would have been able to create Back To Black – her accepted magnum opus – without the demon influences that supposedly sprung up after her destructive relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil (sure to be presented as the unanimously agreed villain of this story), but which were evident in her lifestyle before they were married (though addiction reportedly didn’t take its hold until mid-2006). Because, contrary to popular opinion, and indeed Winehouse’s own assertions, Frank is the superior album, infusing more elements of jazz to her soulful foundation than Back to Black’s preoccupation with girl-group pop of the 1950s and 60s.

And while Back To Black is eminently more playable for radio stations and music channels, Frank feels less like a product – perhaps because Mark Ronson wouldn’t come on board as a producer until the second album with his hyper-polished techniques and eye for a hit. Crucially, Winehouse wasn’t given free reign over the album (something she expressed regret and annoyance at post-release), with the record label assuming some creative control and guidance in a way that might well have stopped her spiral into dangerous self-abuse years later.

Because the meteoric rise to fame that brought her universal acclaim and wealth also brought with it severe dangers, as Karen Heller of The Philadelphia Inquirer brilliantly summarised back in 2007:

She’s only 24 with six Grammy nods, crashing headfirst into success and despair, with a codependent husband in jail, exhibitionist parents with questionable judgement, and the paparazzi documenting her emotional and physical distress. Meanwhile, a haute designer Karl Lagerfeld appropriates her dishevelled style and eating issues to market to the elite while proclaiming her the new Bardot

And who is to say that proper authoritarian control, and a stabilising influence would have lead to a rich, and far longer career for the singer and her fans?  As it was, she was the epitome of the troubled artist, whose personal life was catastrophically presented as fair game by a tabloid culture that sought to both villify and celebrate her magic. She became an unfortunate casualty of the modern disease of cultural commentators seeking to destroy the artistic mysticism that had preserved the rock icons of the 60s, 70s and beyond as untouchable demi-Gods despite their transgressions, and somehow the blame was apportioned to her. But personal her life should remain when we consider her music, apart from an acknowledgement of influence, and my final tributes will focus entirely on her two released albums (as well as that one other unavoidable track)…

 

Frank (2003)

This debut is nothing short of the perfect showcase for Winehouse’s talent and potential. From the moment the unnecessary Intro is dispensed with and that distinctive, million dollar voice oozes out of the speakers like rough-edged honey, it’s impossible not to feel completely enchanted by Winehouse’s singing. First time round, she sounded like a revellation, like nothing else anywhere near the charts for years, and yet she also felt oddly mainstream, the vehicle by-which relatively non-popular musical genres are finally welcomed into the ears and arms of the masses.

What is even more astounding, for this album as a jazz concern (which I remember it being marketed as back in 2003), is that it arrived into a generic context that had oddly seen the regeneration (albeit short-lived) of the Smooth Jazz subgenre. One cursory glance through my own vast CD collection picks out at least three collections bearing that label, which seemed to grasp onto the possibilities offered by the Ballearic inspired Chill-Out subgenre in an impressively opportunist move. But Frank is a counter-point to that movement, stripping back the idea that smooth was somehow better by offering hob-nailed vocals and rusty nailed backstreet jazz flourishes that almost single-handedly killed the Smooth moves.

I said I preferred this album to its follow-up, and here’s where I qualify that statement. In the same way that there is always something more visceral and personal about under-polished debuts and early albums across all musical genres, for me personally Frank says more about Amy Winehouse as a singer than Back to Black ever does. That album is a triumph of production as well as of talent – and is rightly heralded – but Frank is rawer, and even despite the lack of perennially radio-friendly tracks like Rehab or the occasionally stereotypical emotional pique of Tears Dry On Their Own, it feels somehow less glib and manipulated.

A lot of the rawness, which finds its perfect antithesis in the engaging jazz undercurrents of Winehouse’s personal influences, comes from hip hop legend Salaam Remi, who was charged with producing the break-out hit alongside Winehouse herself, as well as Commissioner Gordon, Jimmy Hogarth and Matt Rowe. His influence overstrides the drum-beat accompaniment of stand-out track Stronger Than Me, giving the song a far more appropriate and current (for 2003) hook that the Intro suggested may not have been possible (Winehouse scats in what is the only personal low-point of the album).

There isn’t quite the vocal finesse of the follow-up on show, but the production and the precedence of every track showcase’s Winehouse’s voice in such a way that the astounding sound she produces is king of every song – something that wasn’t ever an option for the important second release but which makes the listener feel closer to the singer, without the fog of over-production.

And the artist behind Frank is far different from she who made Back to Black: here she is outraged, infuriated and mildly amused at the boy she sings towards and it is far more appropriate here to imagine her standing, defiantly with a “fuck you” raised eyebrow and a cocked hip than it is to see her as the bruised victim of Back to Black. Frank is a statement of strength, endorsed by the free-flow heritage of jazz and the anti-establishment suggestions of hip-hop in which Winehouse fiercely shouts her right to independence and her resistance to the wounds some cruel ex-lover has tried to force on her.

The album is also a wonderful precursor to What Amy Did Next – across one album we see are treated to a retrospective journey during which Winehouse visits the numerous stops of her musical influences – female jazz, soul, reggae, modern hip-hop, early girl groups (Diana Ross as opposed to Sporty Spice) – in order to establish where the singer is headed. The album is a cornucopia of mixed influences, all played through the filter of that deliciously moreish voice and an attitude like few other artists of the same year, and while the influences appear obvious, they never overwhelm the individualism of this sparkling new star.

In short, a brilliant, breath-taking debut.

Key Tracks: Stronger Than Me, I Heard Love Was Brown & Help Yourself.

 

Back To Black (2006)

What could so easily have been a hugely self-indulgent sophomore release – the hints were there in the scatting, and the on-stage vocal flourishes that Winehouse could so easily have pulled a Terrence Trent D’Arby and disappeared up her backside to a chorus of her own applause – ended up being one of the albums of the decade.

Listening back to this album for the first time in a while, it is easy to forget, thanks to the familiarity of almost every track, just how astoundingly well put-together the whole endeavour is. The chief achievement of this album wasn’t Winehouse’s decision to infuse her iconic vocal idiosyncracies and innate nostalgic feel with the 50s and 60s girl-group heyday style (though that ranks a close second), it was the decision that saw Mark Ronson take up a co-producing chair alongside Remi that should be most heralded. It is his name that sits in the Produced By column for almost all of the biggest commercial hits of the album, and ignoring for a minute his occasionally espoused, jocular “Just Add Trumpets” persona, this album is as much a showcase of his talent as it is of the singer.

The Amy Winehouse of this album is audibly a victim – even the apparently strong-willed defiance of Rehab now sounds like a cry for help, the melancholic, tragic statement of not being able to give up – either love or other destructive influences – that finds its painful echo in final track Addicted. There is no defiance here, no independence as in Frank – instead we are introduced to a character, built through song, who is wholly defined by her addictions, and who fundamentally doesn’t seem intent or capable of rising above and beyond them.

Strangely, the marriage of high-end production and the repeated motifs of addiction seem now to recall the suspicion that nobody really wanted to help Winehouse for fear of losing her creative spirit under a nullifying blanket of sobriety and normalcy. There isn’t the same willingness to laugh off her problems, instead they seem to now define her. Every song that positions her as the victim  is highly-glossed, designed for success and oddly devoid of the musical melancholy one might expect from this sort of music, and yet it all seems authorised, encouraged even. And while at the time the album looked to be full of promise of a potentially earth-shattering career, right now, in light of what has just happened, it sounds more like an appropriate end.

The death of the singer of course adds that tragic caveat to the album’s brilliance, and may well encourage further analysis of the songs now, but it in no way diminishes how well received it was, and will no doubt continue to be.

Key Tracks: Rehab, You Know I’m No Good & Back To Black.

 

And then there was Valerie.

The last really notable recording of Winehouse’s career started out as an addition to the gallery of wonderful curios that lives under the BBC Radio One Live Lounge banner, but picked up universal acclaim and a play-til-it-breaks circulation thanks to inclusion on Mark Ronson’s 2003 album Version. The original, recorded by The Zutons (who will eventually make more money from the cover than from their own music) the love-sick song which was already oddly up-beat despite its lyrics was given a further injection of cheer by Ronson whose version almost entirely obliterates the sentiments of what is said in favour of a wonderfully infectious bias towards how it is said, and the musical accompaniment.

More than anything though, the Winehouse version shows off her vocal range, and the idiosyncratic and fascinating way in which her musical pronunciation of words renders the meaning completely unnecessary – lyrics become sounds, offered with distinct style but without the emotional quivver that Zutons singer Dave McCabe intoned them with (perhaps because the song was written in response to a tryst he was involved in with the Valerie of the title).

Recently, Amy Winehouse was not the same artist who blew everyone away with those two albums however, and her form was marked badly by a series of public appearances in which she appeared drunk or worse, unable or unwilling to perform, and inspiring presumably hurtful responses of the audiences who once fawned at her every on-stage movement. I can only hope now that the long-mooted third album, produced once more by Salaam Remi, and worked on sporadically since Back To Black’s release proves a fitting legacy for the singer’s short, bright career. But that depends on Remi’s ability to pull together a finished product from the material that has so far been recorded, and unless that material is of the highest quality, may well never happen.

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