The first thing Amy Winehouse did that confused people, when she turned up in 2002, was to talk and live in an earthy, uninhibited way and yet to sing conventional torch-song jazz - music that Jamie Cullum had already made seem conservative and dull.
That debut album, Frank, sold a quarter of a million copies, but it was a false start. Its follow-up Back to Black does Winehouse much greater justice, showing how a 23-year-old Jewish cabbie’s daughter from north London can inhabit and update emotions and music more associated with American black women of the 1940s. She had a firm vision - fuelled by Motown, hip-hop, Dinah Washington and Donny Hathaway - and, with sympathetic producers, she delivered it. It should (but won’t) shame two current pop production lines - the post-Cullum fake jazzers and the Pop Idol-type stuff - into a standstill.
Ever since her sozzled performance on The Charlotte Church Show, Winehouse has become notorious for liking a drink. Though this threatens to define her in the media, it’s likely that it just makes her a normal young girl. As her hit “Rehab” memorably confirmed, she’s grounded enough to stay in one piece while crashing through the experiences that let her music describe physical and emotional excess so precisely. But this gig at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, her first since her Brit award, does her few favours, cursed as it is with aircraft-hangar acoustics and a boozy crowd. Winehouse, with her black cocktail dress and tottering beehive, seems dressed for a more sophisticated affair. The disjunction between the kind of venue success brings and the intimate nature of what she actually does cripples the show.
But you can still appreciate the way she smears and scats the syllables of “Tears Dry On Their Own” and attacks notes like Aretha does, stitching them together to mean more than lyrics. Her technique exists an emotional world away from Mariah-style note-scaling, or polite Norah Jones tune-caressing.
Her hunger for the music is striking. She clutches the mic stand like a crutch, rolling her eyes as she throws out a smoky wail - suddenly she’s like a bluesy torch singer. Her band offer acoustic jazz guitar last heard in mainstream pop on some Fifties Sinatra album in her Dad’s collection, alongside bossa nova shuffles, Seventies soul-funk, ska and Cuban brass. It’s a voracious musical diet, more Clash than Cullum, topped off with a cover of The Zutons’ “Valerie”. “Let’s not overdo it,” she murmurs, as a Jack Daniel’s and coke materialises in her hand. She had been shakily nervous at first, but she is in control tonight.
Back to Black’s hip-hop undercarriage has been dispensed with in favour of straight band music. But the shimmying, brassy Latin pop of “You Know I’m No Good”, and “Rehab” - Motown, minus the charm school - are varied enough.
Her success may be dragging Amy Winehouse into inappropriate places, but that’s the price of making pop music this good.