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Jump to navigationJump to searchAmy Winehouse: A Losing Game by Mick O'Shea (view source)
Revision as of 09:13, 12 December 2011
, 09:13, 12 December 2011no edit summary
Instead the combination of a wildly self-destructive streak, a wilful refusal to listen to the voices of sanity around her, and a toxic relationship (I’m choosing my words carefully for legal reasons), all led unhappily to membership of what has been called the ""27 Club"". Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Alan ‘Blind Owl’ Wilson, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, who all died at the same age, have been joined by one more.
Born in Enfield in September 1983, Amy was surrounded by music in the home from an early age, and enrolled at the Sylvia Young Theatre School. Not satisfied with singing ""''cheesy show tunes with her more dutiful classmates""'', she was easily bored and dissatisfied, reluctant to apply herself to academic studies, but in a class of her own when it came to singing soulful jazz numbers. Her refusal to toe the line in the discipline department meant that her time at the school was shortlived. Nevertheless she was ambitious, and one thing led to another until she signed to a major record label and released her debut album Frank in October 2003. But the arrogance, the readiness to belittle her rivals and bite the hand that fed her was not long in surfacing.
So many of her faux pas were splashed across the pages of the press as they happened that there is very little new in this book, except for the casual reader. But Mick O’Shea chronicles the increasingly unhappy saga faithfully enough, with the aid of interviews and press cuttings. The inevitability of it all begins, perhaps, with an interview on a chat show hosted by Charlotte Church in October 2006, the month her chart-topping second album Back To Black was released. Having been drinking on an empty stomach much of the day, she disgraced herself with a hopelessly shambolic appearance that culminated in an attempt to sing with Church but found her unable to remember the words of the song.
