Wine woman and song
Published on Sunday 12 November 2006 01:05
AMY WINEHOUSE is on form.
It's hard not to fall for Winehouse. When she mooched on to the music scene three years ago with her platinum-selling album Frank - promptly hailed as Britain's most promising young soul singer and awarded an Ivor Novello - she was seen as an anti-Katie Melua figure. The fact that such a charged, mature voice came out of one so young, and with so much bad attitude, led people to either love or loathe her. It made for compelling viewing to see someone so willing to bare their soul. But with it came a fear that it was too much too soon.
Still, Winehouse was mouthy, honest and, most importantly, talented, making her part of a dwindling minority of singer-songwriters in our X Factor age. Three years on from Frank, after a "blink and you'd miss it" spell in rehab, coping with an eating disorder and a break-up that she says made her want to kill herself, Winehouse's comeback is far from squeaky clean. But somehow she manages to be charming, outrageous and to unveil her stellar talent even further. This time round it seems the vulnerability that lurked beneath her Cockney 'come ahead' exterior has been replaced by even bigger hair, tattoos and an album, Back To Black, which is nothing less than a modern soul classic. If anything, she seems more confident and bolshie than ever.
"I've got nothing to hide," she says. "I'm just a young girl who gets f*cked up sometimes. Sometimes my head is screwed on tighter than bolts, but a lot of the time I do mess up and lose the plot like everyone does. But because I'm so defensive and sensitive I lash out a lot. I'm not a nice drunk."
This is said with another cackle. To put it mildly, Winehouse has a tricky relationship with the bottle, both revelling in it and worrying about drinking to excess, which she regularly does. "I get defensive about it because it's a problem," she says with disarming honesty. "If it wasn't, I'd be like 'yep I'm a pisshead'. But it's not the bane of my life and I'm not at the point now where I wake up and go, 'Where's that bottle of Jack Daniel's?' I was like that.
"But I know I set myself right up calling my song 'Rehab'."
Her favourite cocktail du jour is the Rickstasy - three parts vodka, one part Baileys, one part banana liqueur and one part Southern Comfort - though she has swapped them with Jack Daniel's "for Lent". She is liable to knock someone's lights out if she's had one too many, and the tabloids have, unsurprisingly, been full of her sozzled antics, which include attacking anyone who comes within punching distance, including her current boyfriend of seven months, Alex. When she appeared on The Charlotte Church Show recently, Winehouse was so inebriated that her finale with Church, singing Michael Jackson's 'Beat It', was completely incomprehensible. When I mention this though, expecting at least a touch of hungover shame, she just laughs and tells me she can't wait to see it. Her devil-may-care attitude is confounding, though clearly something which requires hard work to maintain.
In the years between Frank and Back To Black, Winehouse started to lose weight and develop the drink problem. "First, I stopped smoking weed and I was happy and content," she says. Then she met her now ex-boyfriend, Blake, and her life was turned upside down. Describing him as the first person she fell in love with, Winehouse says that when they split up, she broke down, and that was when her problems began. It was then that her record company - and her father - suggested she go into rehab. She gave it a go... and then walked straight back out.
"I really think if you have problems and you can't sort them out yourself you're in trouble anyway," she says. "I also got sent to food rehab, and that was exactly the same as the alcohol one. I walked in and was like, 'I don't need this', and walked straight back out. I had to tell myself: 'Amy, you're not the queen of the world and you don't know everything'."
In the end it was the challenge of making her second album that turned out to be Winehouse's rehab. After Frank, she went back into the studio and recorded a couple of tracks, but it was 18 months later, when she met New York producer Mark Ronson, that she became inspired and ended up writing the album in six months flat. This compared with the four years it took her to write Frank.
"I love that dramatic Sixties girl group stuff," she says about the distinctive sound of Back To Black, an album which has already been lauded as one of the best of the year by NME, and has been called the best British soul album since Soul II Soul's Club Classics, Vol 1. "It's all sound-effects and atmosphere and you can almost hear their hairstyles. It's an era I definitely should have been born into." As for Ronson, Winehouse says he was "the nuts", praise she also bestows on Lily Allen, who she wants to sing with at the Brit Awards. She had been asked to sing a duet with James Morrison, to which her response is unprintable.
In the sleeve notes to Back To Black, as well as thanking the Shangri-Las, the Sixties girl group whose influence Winehouse breathes into every track, she dedicates the album to "anyone who falls in love every day". It sounds as though it's a habit she's familiar with, but Winehouse insists she doesn't fall in love easily.
"I meant falling in love with the day itself, not with people," she says. "You know what I saw the other day? This little old tramp polishing his boots and I thought, 'Go on, son!' That kind of thing just swells my heart. I just like people who are warm and lovely and who see the nice things in people rather than seeing the world as s***. "
Much of the time, in spite of her posturing and bad girl repartee, Winehouse sounds as young, confused and fed up as the next 23-year-old. She says she's having a tough time with her 21-year-old boyfriend, whom she lives with in Muswell Hill along with another friend and her boyfriend. After Winehouse's recent appearance on Never Mind The Buzzcocks they had a huge row and she has decided she needs some space. "Usually he throws a fit and I follow him down the road, but this time I said, 'You should probably just go.' We're at a point where our relationship has become very domesticated and there's no romance anymore, no fireworks. But I'll make it work with him because I love him so much."
It doesn't seem as though she has changed all that much since she was the troublemaker at school setting off the fire alarm or getting kicked out of the Sylvia Young stage school for not applying herself. But Winehouse says she has definitely grown in confidence and is more content with Back To Black than she ever was with Frank.
"My attitude has changed," she says. "I never used to believe that I'd get anywhere and thought people wouldn't like me. When I made Frank it was a learning curve for me and for the record company, because I'm such a fruit loop. I never really wanted it, you know? I was like, 'Are you sure you want to pay for me to make an album? Are you really sure?' I was insecure. But now I'm a lot more inclined to think that the world is yours if you want to take it."
http://www.scotsman....-song-1-1416865
