People of the Decade: Amy Winehouse
By Jude Rogers
Part One:
Tragic, Doomed, Tormented, Shamed. And underneath the squalid headline, our most authentic diva in decades,
In 2003, a teenage girl educated at two stage schools - the Sylvia Young in Camden and the Brit School in Croydon - made her first album. Her fellow shiny-haired alumni, including Billie Piper and Matt from Busted, churned out sparkly pop that wasn't her style. she sang about Fuck Me Pumps, ranted at weedy lovers ("I'm not gonna meet your mother any time/ I just wanna grip your body over mine") and admitted infidelity without apology ("Why You So Upset? Baby you weren't there/ and I was thinking bout you when I came"). Delivering these lyrics in an extraordinary soul voice - big and brutal when it need to be, soft and stirring when it didn't - songs like Stronger Than Me and I Heard Love is Blind made it clear that Amy Winehouse had lived quite a life already. Into her twenties, she would continue to do so, but little did we know quite how far she would go.
Six years since the aptly titled Frank, it is hard to remember the gifted young Londoner that preceded the tattooed cartoon character smuggling drugs in her beehive, popping out for 4am lollipops under the flash of paparazzi bulbs and falling out of marriages and dresses like a skew-wiff Olive Oyl.
Edited by Lainey, 28 December 2009 - 11:45 PM.