13 replies to this topic

[mayday]

is that first verse actually how she met blake? and did blake actually shrug off amy cheating on him? what does that song mean to you guys? 

 

its my favorite amy song..

[Ava_Grace]

I think so. I've always wondered if the line I cheated myself means that she somehow kept something good from happening to her or that she, herself, cheated on Blake? Or does she mean both?

[pattieboyd2]

I've always taken it to mean both.  She cheated and in doing so cheated herself of possible happiness.

[Love is a losing game]

Yep that's how they met, in a pub (at the bar), she was playing pool. 'Hurt' maybe cos they were both a mess, or they would hurt each other after they meet?

Blake went back to what he knew (B2B), his ex Chloe, and Amy cheated on him with one of his mates for revenge. Also, she cheated herself cos she was trouble and she knew she would make a mess and ruin things.

Love the song too, especially live versions. x

[TBR]

I always took the 'meet you downstairs in the bar and hurt' to mean they met up rather than the occasion they actually met for the first time. The "He said 'what did you do with him today?', and sniffed me out like I was tanqueray" line is about him being suspicious about her being with someone else. The whole song is about Amy cheating, and then the last verse culminates with him spotting the carpet burns, knowing she's cheated and he shrugs and is apathetic about Amy, and the 'who truly stuck the knife in first?' could be read as either he'd also cheated or more likely his apathy and lack of reaction hurt Amy more than her cheating, either because he expected it or just didn't care anymore.

[LuckyHorse]

“You Know I'm No Good” is about how I couldn't be faithful, and the title comes from my defensiveness when I got found out. Which leads us to "Back to Black", the title track. I split up with my boyfriend and had a few black months. Say no more!"

So it's probably not about when they first met.

[Love is a losing game]

True, the first verse doesn't describe the exact moment when they met for the first time, so they were already hurting for what they had done to each other.

However, they did actually meet for the first time in a pub (at the bar) in Camden, and she was playing pool, they both said so. x

[Ava_Grace]

So the cheating part was when she cheated with Blake's friend or the fact that she was already in a relationship with someone else at the time, I believe it was Alex.

[Love is a losing game]

I think it was Blake's mate in the song, for some reason I associate it to that footage in the movie when she's on holiday with Juliette, and to me it seemed before Alex Clare...I could be wrong, can't remember exactly how and when she got with him. Does anymore remember exactly when she wrote You Know I'm No Good and when they got together? Maybe we can find out 😉

My fav live of the song is at the Grammys, what's yours? x

[LuckyHorse]

“You Know I'm No Good” is about how I couldn't be faithful, and the title comes from my defensiveness when I got found out. Which leads us to "Back to Black", the title track. I split up with my boyfriend and had a few black months. Say no more!"

It's about Blake.

I'm not sure exactly when she started seeing Alex, but she was with him during the time she was recording with Mark Ronson in NY, March 2006.

[Ava_Grace]

I think it was Blake's mate in the song, for some reason I associate it to that footage in the movie when she's on holiday with Juliette, and to me it seemed before Alex Clare...I could be wrong, can't remember exactly how and when she got with him. Does anymore remember exactly when she wrote You Know I'm No Good and when they got together? Maybe we can find out 😉

My fav live of the song is at the Grammys, what's yours? x

I like the live performance she did at the Russell Brand show but the Grammy's performance stood out because I felt she was sticking it to the US gov't for not letting her enter the U.S. and everyone else that was criticizing her. I remember seeing those Grammys and thinking how boring they were, even though they had past great talents since it was the 50th anniversary, and then she performed and stole the show. I also remember Alicia Keys doing a duet with Frank Sinatra and thinking that as much as I love Alicia, that should be Amy up there. Sad to think she has 7 Grammys but was never able to attend a ceremony.

And then the fact that 2008 was her worst year in terms of her health and in terms of the public mockery that she would continue to have until her death, makes the performance very bittersweet to say the least.

[mayday]

amy winning those grammys was the biggest slap in the face for the music industry, no matter how troubled she was, her music was raw, emotional and un replicateable . she was one of a kind..

[WhoDat]

My own personal interpretation is that it's about her being unable to remain faithful to her boyfriend and that in doing so, she cheated herself out of something that could have been good. The lyrics are a bit defensive ('I told you I was trouble'), but I think there's a bit of regret there too, as she knows that her actions are hurtful and that she's no good for him. The first verse isn't about her meeting Blake for the first time. I think their relationship is already in motion at this point, and she is describing how he found out she cheated on him and started a fight in the bar with another man or men. The second verse deals with her cheating on him again with an ex-boyfriend and then him trying to get her to promise to stop once they get married. She cries for him because she knows she won't be faithful. The final verse deals with him discovering a third time that she has cheated again, only this time the lyric 'you shrug and it's the worst, who truly stick the knife in first' suggests that he doesn't care that she cheated, possibly because he cheated on her first. By asking who stuck the knife in first, she is wondering whether she is the one who really delivered the killer blow to the relationship, so to speak. She thought that the revelation of her cheating again would be the ruination of everything, but in fact it's her boyfriend's indifference that does the damage.

 

Didn't Amy say too though that her songs were sometimes drawn from different experiences, incidents, people, etc.? So it's possible that some of the lyrcis can be attributed to different people or moments around the same time in her life and she just put them all together in one song. For example, I think the lyric 'I cried for you on the kitchen floor' is actually taken from a time after the events of the rest of the song, when she was going through that really dark period after the final break-up with Blake, which inspired the album. Apparently her brother witnessed her in this condition, drunk on her kitchen floor.

 

She really was a great songwriter and storyteller.

[HelloSailor]

My interpretation : 

 

Her and Blake have been together for a while (on and off), this song recounts their cheating.

 

"Meet you downstairs in the bar" for me conjures up images of a hotel, Amy tells Blake to meet her in the bar downstairs. They often met in hotels during their relationship ("waiting for ya in the hotel at night"), this may be linked to the fact that Blake was sometimes back with Chloe (at least at first, when they started going out, Amy was the mistress), so they had to be discrete. Not sure why she didn't bring him back to her flat at this stage, or whether he's meeting her in other cities around the UK while she's working. 

Blake understands that she's been sleeping with someone else and gets jealous, asking her what she was doing with him (maybe an ex-boyfriend, or Tyler James who was her fuck-friend). 

In anger he hands her his pint of Stella and runs out, she follows him and they argue on the street/in front of the hotel.

 

She cheated herself by cheating on him, because she knew she would not be faithful, even though Blake is her number 1, at the risk of fucking things up with him ("what a mess we made"). Amy never really was a 1-guy-kind-of-girl, but I think she may have also been hurt by the fact that he was Chloe when they first started going out, so I reckon she sometimes slept with other guys to provoke him/make him jealous/get back at him. She defends herself by telling him from the start that she's trouble. When he gets angry with her for cheating, she basically shrugs it off by saying that she had warned him and that it was to be expected.

 

On another occasion (or possibly the same one referenced in the 1st verse, as a sort of flash-back to before the encounter down at the bar), she's upstairs (in a hotel room) with her ex-boyfriend. The only way for her to reach climax is to think of Blake.

She then runs to meet him outside where they meet for a late-night kebab (chips and pitta, like a chip butty - great stuff, but always gives me indigestion). She tells him she slept with her ex, Blake forgives her because he makes Amy promise that things will be different once they're married. She swears she wont see her ex anymore, but when she's back home some time later having yet again cheated on him and thinking that it's all over, she cries for Blake on the kitchen floor.

We know from interviews that this actually happened after the final deception : when Blake called her in Spain telling her that he was back with Chloe and that they should just be friends, Amy then slept with Blake's best friend to hurt him, and she knew this would be the final nail in the coffin, that they would never get back together after that.

 

Throughout the song, Amy does not respect the chronological order of events for the sake of the song and the rhymes. Also, she wrote this once they had finally split, so she's not just referencing their fights and getting back together, because by now they are well and truly over.

 

After another cheating spell (from him or her), they reunite in Jamaica and in Spain (possibly on 2 separate occasions). (I'm always confused about this reference to Spain. Did her and Blake go there on holiday? Was it when she was there with Lauren as we saw in the doc, but by then I thought he told her it was over...unless she managed to convince him to get back with her. Or was it when she was in Spain with her dad writing B2B? Did they speak on the phone and promise to get back together?)...

While she's having a bath, he notices her carpet burns, the telltale proof that she slept with someone else yet again. Blake shrugs, which seems to disappoint Amy who was hoping for a bigger reaction from him. I interpret the following sentence in 2 different ways. Either Blake shrugs because he also cheated on her, and in that sense he's the one who stuck the knife in first which truly hurt Amy (and explains why she then went on to cheat, as a form of revenge). Or Amy means that she deliberately cheated on him and got carpet burns in the hope that he would notice, as a provocation, and it pains her to hurt him in this way, but feeling the end was near, she wanted to stick the knife in first before he hurt her by dumping her for Chloe. 

 

The song is complicated to understand in my opinion because it's a collage of different events, not always in the right order as some of these snippets might actually refer to events prior to Blake. "Love is blind" already kinda touched on that theme, Amy defending her cheating.