Authors: Chas Newkey-Burden
A concert at Northumbria University followed.
Newcastle Evening Chronicle
reviewer Claire Dupree wrote,
The first thing that strikes you about Amy is how can such a powerful voice come from someone so tiny? Her voice belies her age and her husky North London accent is transformed into a sultry jazzy drawl. The music has an almost big band feel at times and encompasses an excellent brass section. A particular favourite, ‘You Sent Me Flying’, reduced a previously noisy crowd to silence with emotive lyrics about unrequited love. [The lyrics,] which sent shivers down my spine, gave me goosebumps and sent the crowd into frenzied applause.
Not that all reviews were favourable at this point. For instance, Fiona Shepherd, writing in the
Scotsman
about Amy’s performance at the Cottier Theatre in Glasgow, tore strips off her performance in general and vocal accomplishments in particular. She said Amy’s style,
was tedious after five minutes, let alone an hour and five minutes, and her rich, mature tone was poorly served by her favoured vocal style. Winehouse oversang mercilessly like just another competent
Pop Idol
wannabe, mistaking vocal acrobatics for sophisticated soulful interpretation. By the time she had finished mangling each track, any melody which might have asserted itself was totally exterminated.
She soon was to perform in Dublin, where the
Irish Times
reviewer wrote,
There is still less doe-eyed sentimentality, or disingenuous coyness, in Winehouse’s music, a sassy mix of purring jazz and growling hip-hop to match her earthy, booty-shaking sexuality. We are a little taken aback, nonetheless, to find the recent Ivor Novello Award winner on stage this muggy evening, tugging at her neckline and blowing down her dress. Picking up where the venue’s air-conditioning falls short, it’s typical Winehouse: balancing moments of cool relief with music that’s resolutely hot’n’ bothered.
A more eccentric write-up surfaced in
Newsquest
, following her show at the Liverpool Academy. Ian Kelly wrote,
She is an amazingly charismatic live performer and, despite looking like the lovechild of Penelope Cruz and Ruud van Nistelrooy, she is also very sexy. And this girl really knows how to carry a tune. This was a note-perfect display of her unquestionable vocal talents which was absolutely stunning.
Amy’s performance at the 2004 T in the Park festival was not quite so well written up. The
Daily Star
’s Joe Mott wrote, ‘Her mesmerising vocals are spoiled by a crowd that thinks it’s in the theatre and chats throughout.’
She also turned out at Warwick University, University of Northumbria, the Brecon Annual Jazz Festival, the Harrogate International Jazz Festival, Ross-on-Wye International Festival and the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Jordan Zivitz
wrote in the
Montreal Gazette
, ‘Winehouse left her hip-hop beats at home, singing with a trio that left her barbed lyrics and modern-day Billie Holiday vocals plenty of room to move.’
After watching her a second time, Zivitz added,
We did, however, get a powerhouse voice that more than lived up to Winehouse’s promise on the album, and a coolly measured stage presence that made her spiky lyrics seem all the more dangerous. The revised instrumentation gave the material a more traditionally jazzy feel than on the hip-hop-inflected
Frank
CD – more deep indigo than flaming red. Whatever the colour, Winehouse is going places. Among those places, no doubt, is a larger venue than Club Soda next time.
Within days of performing at Montreal, Amy turned out at Cannizaro Park at Merton and in London’s Old Street, where she had trouble remembering the lyrics. ‘She actually said, “I have to try and remember this shit now,”’ says one audience member. ‘That’s not exactly a very good plug for her new material.’ She also put in an appearance at Pizza Express Jazz Club in 2004. The
Guardian
review gave a drenchingly positive write-up:
Amy Winehouse joined for the second half, mixing singles from her album
Frank
with jazz standards including ‘Caravan’ and ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’. Her timing and inflection come from hip-hop, contemporary soul and R&B rather than jazz – but an improviser’s
instincts often made her swim spectacularly upstream against the undercurrents.
However, it was the
Daily Telegraph’
s report that best captured the drama of the evening. Neil McCormick wrote,
Freed from having to concentrate on her own
guitar-playing
, she really shone as a vocalist, while the trio jazzed up her songs (and a sprinkling of classic covers) with genuine brio. Highlight of the evening, however, was when Winehouse’s oft-mentioned dad, singing taxi-driver Mitchell Winehouse, took over for a smooth rendition of a Frank Sinatra song. Confidently demonstrating the genetic root of Amy’s talent, Mitch seemed unimpressed by some of the trio’s experimental trimmings. With all the casual menace of an
EastEnders
villain, he paused his performance to inquire of the fresh faced piano player: ‘Was that the bridge, or are you just doodling about as usual?’
That told him!
Later on while recalling the night, McCormick wrote, ‘I watched her perform in a Pizza Express with her father Mitch, a Sinatra-singing taxi driver, and met a loving family clearly proud of Winehouse’s success.’ Amy was winning a huge reputation as a live act at this point in her career. The
Daily
Mirror
previewed a concert of hers thus:
She has an incredible voice, a great talent and a real knack
for putting her foot in it. But frank comments about fellow performers aside, it is in the live arena that Amy has to be savoured. Madonna may, or may not, mime, but Amy has a voice of such intensity as to make Madge look like a karaoke singer.
Reviewing a concert of hers at the UEA Norwich, John Street wrote in
The Times
,
To begin with, her voice seems almost to take her over, like a headstrong dog dragging its owner across muddy fields and flooded ditches. As the show proceeds, these vocal mannerisms tend to become repetitive, as if trapped in a single emotional and musical register. Her voice is at its best on the more tightly arranged songs, where the attention is on the detail: ‘Stronger Than Me’, ‘What is it About Men?’, or ‘Help Yourself’. The swoops and dives, the half-checked angry bark, populate these numbers with a twisting trail of sensations.
Amy has always said that performing live is what it is ‘all about’ to her. ‘I love being on tour, but I wish I could work off the crowd better; be more of a showman,’ she says. ‘For me, it’s all about the songs, and I’m so busy concentrating on that, I’m not paying as much attention to the audience.’
Meanwhile, her growing reputation domestically was being echoed around the world. A Singapore newspaper wrote of Amy,
Sporting thick black eyeliner and singing songs like ‘F*** Me Pumps’, this London native is surely the genre’s bad girl. Although she sings in typical jazz-blues fashion, the beats reflect mainstream hip-hop and R&B more than scat or even soul.
However, it was at home that Amy’s star was shining brightest. Around this time, the
Observer Music Monthly
dispatched a journalist to pen the first major feature on Amy. Respected music critic Garry Mulholland landed the gig and had several interview sessions with Amy for the feature. During an interview with the author, he recalled the experience fondly. ‘She’s a dream interviewee,’ he says, smiling. ‘Firstly, because she’s an unstoppable quote machine. Secondly because she’s a really lovely girl who is easy to get along with, very warm. I was going through an incredibly difficult period in my personal life at the time. When I turned up to meet Amy I was not in the world’s greatest place so I was quite nervous. I thought, “If she’s difficult in any way, I’m going to find this quite hard.”
‘She was hugely revealing, incredibly honest, fantastic company. She made what could have been a very difficult situation into a very easy one. I was just very grateful to her for that. We sat down in this restaurant in Camden Town and proceeded to get incredibly drunk on sangria. Despite her reputation, I was definitely outdrinking her two to one.’
A journalist who interviewed Amy in Canada remembers a similar atmosphere. When Amy attempted to stretch out
across the seating in the restaurant, a waiter expressed his distaste, prompting Amy to moan loudly, ‘You ever just want to go to McDonald’s?’
She was once also rather frank to a journalist during an interview, often and ostentatiously yawning from the offset. ‘Sorry, but it doesn’t come naturally, talking about myself,’ she said, following another yawn. ‘I don’t see what’s important about it. No offence to you, but I could be at my nan’s house right now. Or I could be waiting at home for the plumber to come and fix the washing machine.’
Even a telephone interviewer was not spared a moment of Amy drama. ‘Sorry, I’ve just been having a wee,’ said the then brazen twenty-year-old. Yes, Amy Winehouse was on the loo. ‘I’m sorry. I do it all the time. Whenever I go to the toilet I take the phone with me.’
Then she asked her telephone interrogator, ‘Have you had sex to my album? Do you know anyone who has? I’d love to know who has,’ she said. ‘That’s the test of a wicked album. Ask all your friends if they’ve ever had sex to my album. That would be cool. It would mean people can totally be themselves with my music.’
Garry Mulholland expands on this theme. ‘She came over to me as completely gauche, someone who just didn’t care,’ he says. ‘She will say exactly what’s on her mind. If it offends you or someone else, tough. At one point she was being so revealing about this guy she’d been out with, who was the subject of the songs on the first album. She started to say his name and talk about him in a lot of detail. I
actually stopped the interview and said, “You know what? I really think you should stop because I could print his name and all these details. You’d really regret it, so I’m actually suggesting you stop.”
‘So I actually had to rein her in, whereas it’s normally the other way round. With Amy I had to stop her because it didn’t seem fair to this guy. She’s similar to Pete Doherty: she doesn’t have a self-censoring button. If I’d asked her the exact length and dimensions of her ex-boyfriend’s penis, she would have told me. It was extraordinary.’
Mulholland has interviewed an entire galaxy of musical stars during his career, so where does Amy fit in to his experiences? ‘She was the most honest interviewee I’ve ever sat down with,’ he says, ‘and it didn’t seem to be contrived shock tactics. She wasn’t bitchy, it was just as if she was sitting talking to her best friend about sex.’
He insists that her honesty and openness is on a different level from that displayed by certain other artists, such as Robbie Williams. ‘Robbie always comes across as someone who’s constantly begging the public for sympathy. There’s no self-pity in Amy’s revelations. Her take on it is, “This happened and that happened and now I get to write great songs about it.” When she’s talking about things like sex, there’s that “London girl” thing: a girl who can’t resist blabbing about sex to everyone. But there’s a tomboy element to it: she neither solicits your sympathy nor flirts with you. She never plays an “I’m a girl” game. She’s bullish, forthright and assertive.’
Although back in 2004, Amy was far from the celebrity she
is today, Mulholland recalls that she already had that elusive quality: the X factor. ‘She got up and went to the loo, it was a Jessica Rabbit moment,’ he says. ‘Literally everyone in this restaurant just turned round and watched her wriggle along this restaurant. It was more than sex: it was charisma. People didn’t know who she was, so it wasn’t to do with fame. It was pure lust and fascination.’
Charisma she had plenty of, and she had just as much eccentricity, says Mulholland. ‘When we did the second interview, she turned up with these pink ballet shoes on. She looked like she’d stolen them off a tramp on the street. They were so worn down, they didn’t even have toes on them any more. Once more, I thought, “This person is really on her own planet.” She’s a genuine eccentric, it’s not contrived “I’m wild and crazy”. Even if she hadn’t got a record deal she would still be this insane girl who completely marches to the beat of her own drum. She was a sweetheart, even though she was quite obviously nuts.’
Even given her relative lack of fame at the time, Mulholland still found her to be enormously trusting. ‘When I met her for the first interview, it was after a concert,’ he recalls. ‘We got in the cab and she said, “Actually, I’ve really got to take the guitar and the amp back home. Would you mind coming round to mine?” So we went back to her flat, in Camden Town, and it was just really sweet. I realised I was climbing the stairs to Amy Winehouse’s home, carrying her guitar and amp. Her flat was perfectly nice, if a bit of a mess, as you might expect. How many other pop stars would invite a journalist to their home? It was just a very sweet gesture.’
In an interview with the author, respected author and cultural commentator Mark Simpson also contrasted Amy with Robbie Williams. ‘She’s the man that Robbie Williams dreams of being,’ he said. ‘Her tattoos are much better than his, and so is her wig. She’d wipe the floor with him in a pub fight. She wrote a song about not going to rehab – all his songs are about going to rehab. With his mum. It goes without saying that the voice is also much better. Even if Williams’s voice actually got around to breaking, it wouldn’t come close.’
Chris Cooke paints a similar portrait of the ‘interviewing Amy’ experience to the one Mulholland outlined: ‘Was she a bit erratic during my interview? Well, yes, a bit – side conversations with her boyfriend and an assistant being sent out with dinner requirements did make the whole thing slightly hard to follow. But, at the same time, I would have been disappointed had it turned out any other way, because that’s why we love Amy. And, while the slight yet harmless chaos made me sound like the dullest person on Earth when I tried to pull the conversation back on topic or sought a clarification or two, in amongst it all I think I managed to get the insight I wanted on the brilliant album that is
Back to Black.
’