During this time she met her future husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who worked on the periphery of the music business as an assistant on video shoots. It was when she finished promoting the album and set about writing the follow-up that a remarkable transformation took place. Despite being tipped by critics as a "buzz" act – borne out by two Brits nominations in 2004 – she did not catch the public's fancy, and Frank peaked at No 13 in the charts. Winehouse's disconcerting sultriness meant she was initially classified as a jazz vocalist.
When Frank was released, just after her 20th birthday, the prevailing female pop sound was the manicured slickness epitomised by Girls Aloud. If Winehouse was not entirely singular – Dusty Springfield and Maggie Bell preceded her as white British pop singers whose complicated personal lives yielded unguarded, richly soulful music – she certainly stood out from almost every other artist under 40. When she was accused early on by the press of being one of Fuller's pop puppets, she retorted: "He's clever enough to know he can't fuck with me." However, being in the bosom of the pop establishment turned Winehouse surly and defensive. She signed a deal with the world's largest label, Universal, and was taken on by the management company run by Simon Fuller, the force behind Pop Idol and its television spin-offs. "It was unlike anything that had ever come through my radar," said songwriter Felix Howard, who went on to collaborate with Winehouse on Frank. Her boyfriend of the time passed a cassette of her singing to a record company, which was impressed. "My parents pretty much realised that I would do whatever I wanted, and that was it, really," she said later. Rebellious instincts surfaced in her mid-teens: by 16, she had acquired her first tattoo and was smoking cannabis.
She spent time at three of them, including the Sylvia Young theatre school in central London, from which she was expelled for "not applying herself", and the Brit school in Croydon, south London. He and her pharmacist mother, Janis, later divorced.Īmy caught the performing bug so early that by the age of eight she was attending stage school.
The two sold a total of more than 12m copies worldwide.īorn to a Jewish family in North Finchley, north London, Winehouse grew up listening to the jazz albums of her taxi-driver father, Mitch. Its success spurred sales of her initially overlooked first album, Frank (2003), so titled because of the diary-style lyrics that produced songs such as Stronger Than Me, which railed against a "ladyboy" ex-boyfriend. Winehouse's music spoke to people so persuasively that her second album, Back to Black, became Britain's bestselling record of 2007 and reached No 2 in the US, making her one of only a few British female soloists to achieve that level of transatlantic recognition.
Her husky, soul-steeped voice belied both her youth and her London origins – singing from the gut is not the exclusive preserve of older black American performers. One of the outstanding singers of her generation, she had suffered from drug addiction, and the destruction it causes. Leading a rock'n'roll life has proved fatal to many artists, but few could be considered as much of a loss to music as Amy Winehouse, who has been found dead at the age of 27, the cause not immediately clear.
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