How should Amy Winehouse be remembered? The most gifted breakthrough British pop star of the 2000s would have been 40 next week. Instead, she died in 2011 aged 27. Her downfall took place under callously voyeuristic circumstances. The media turned her ruination with drink and drugs into entertainment. She was scrutinised minutely but wrongly, as if in a distorting mirror. Meanwhile, the songs that she wrote about her suffering were not cathartic in that they failed to alleviate it.
She only made two albums, yet her musical legacy is immense. Her songs move like a free spirit through different eras of popular music, stretching back to jazz and reaching into rap. Her singing is immediately recognisable, needling, cajoling, emphatic, greedy, tender, sorrowful — a voice that demands attention and lavishly rewards it. She is both motive and challenge to the singers who have followed her. “Because of her, I picked up a guitar, and because of her, I write my own songs,” Adele said in 2016.
If her decline was the essence of tragedy, then in her short life of extremes she also embodied the spirit of comedy. The comic side of her character was as forthright as her loud peal of laughter. Her image was larger-than-life, a beehived composite of Betty Boop and Ronnie Spector magicked into being with a mascara wand and singular imagination. She was witty, clever, ribald and charismatic.