She wasn't the first person in history to be gripped by an uncontrollable urge to tell the U2 frontman to put a sock in it, but the latter part of her heckle seemed to pertain less to his acceptance speech than herself and have a genuine and slightly troubling ring of truth about it. "Shut up! I don't give a fuck!" she famously yelled at Bono during an awards ceremony. She already had a reputation as a handful, a prodigious weed-smoker and drinker who occasionally seemed rather the worse for wear during interviews and onstage. She offered some fairly blunt assessments of her own record company: "I hate them fuckers, man.
She told them she didn't particularly care for her debut album, which she claimed she had never bothered to listen to all the way through and didn't even own a copy of. There was a hint of something dark about songs like What Is It About Men? and I Heard Love Is Blind and, indeed, about the way she seemed to deliberately align herself with the late Billie Holiday: she claimed her big influence was Sarah Vaughan but there was no mistaking where some of her vocal tics had been borrowed from.Īt a time when record companies had begun to surgically deprive mainstream artists of their personality via media training, journalists who met her came back a little startled by how charismatic and funny and candid she was. The voice was obviously there, and even if it hadn't quite found the songs to match it, there was a scabrous wit fuelling the lyrics of Fuck Me Pumps or Stronger Than Me. In truth, it was more interesting than that billing suggested. There was a debut album, 2003's Frank, but it was part of a glut of MOR-ish female singer-songwriter albums that appeared in the early noughties: a bit jazzy, a bit neo-soul, a touch of hip-hop about the beats, the songs bolstered by the attentions of writers for hire who had worked with the Sugababes and Kylie Minogue.
Her posthumous reputation ultimately rests on even less than that: one 11-track album, and a scattering of covers – The Zutons' Valerie, a reggae take on Sam Cooke's Cupid, a handful of songs made famous by The Specials – all of them released in barely 12 months, between 20. You can listen to literally everything she recorded in a couple of hours. At the most cynical level, perhaps her death came as a surprise because people thought that someone, somewhere would do anything to protect their investment and succeed.Īlmost as startling is how much impact she made with so little music. She was a global superstar who sold millions and millions of albums at a time when album sales were apparently in terminal decline, whose celebrity hadn't waned despite the fact that she hadn't released anything new for five years. Her records got played on Radio 2 and tangoed to on Strictly Come Dancing. She was a mainstream pop star, stage-school educated and discovered by Simon Fuller of S Club 7 and Pop Idol fame. Or perhaps it's because, despite all the talk of her "rock'n'roll" lifestyle, Amy Winehouse wasn't rock'n'roll. Perhaps it's because she had already turned an excess of drink and drugs and emotional devastation into a remarkable album: in the back of your mind lurks the belief that she would somehow do that again, that her talent was such that it couldn't actually be overwhelmed by her excesses, however much horrible evidence there was to the contrary.
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Perhaps it's because the chaos of her life had been lived in full public view: it was hardly the first time that an ambulance had been called to her flat because of an overdose, but she'd always somehow survived. It's the kind of story that usually only ends one way, and yet the reaction to her death, my own included, was one of shocked disbelief. And, as she frequently pointed out, she "didn't give a fuck". She was a drinker who, by her own admission, "didn't know when to stop".
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She was a drug addict whose crack use had, her father claimed, given her emphysema. P erhaps the most startling thing about Amy Winehouse's death was how startled people were by it.
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