Amy Winehouse

Two years ago, in the middle of the campaign for her universally acclaimed, platinum selling debut “Frank”, Amy Winehouse began thinking about what she’d like to do with her second record. Frank was her grand and suitably blunt-speaking break-up record, sometimes a little bitter, with a maturity in the vocal delivery that was never less than sweet. It won her a battalion of fans around the world and marked her out as one of the most distinct new voices in pop; confessional, elemental and with that rarest of combinations: humour and soul. Amy had cut through to the core of the human condition with her debut, adding her own jazzy witticisms to the legacy of the greats. So how to follow it up?
Musically, she was sure where she wanted to go. “I didn’t want to play the jazz thing up too much again” she says now, sitting in the snug of her favourite Camden boozer, ”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. So I started thinking about writing songs in that way.” You can hear it on the subtley 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”. Which other female British singer could turn the opening line on her album – “try to make me go to rehab/I say no, no, no” into a churchy stomp.