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{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=Amy Winehouse: A Losing Game
|author=Mick O'Shea
|borrow=Yes
|isbn=9780859654821
|pages=191
|publisher=Plexus
|date=October 2011
|summary=A well-illustrated biography of the 'Queen of Camden', the singer who died at 27 after a short career curtailed by alcohol and substances abuse.
|cover=0859654826
|aznuk=0859654826
|aznus=0859654826
}}
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a sad book. Writing this review some five months after her death, now the immediate smoke has cleared, it is apparent from this book (as well as other general sources) that she was a gifted performer, with a jazz voice which could have qualified her for a lengthy career long after scores of aspiring X-Factor contestants had given up singing and opted for less glamorous, more steady careers. After all, her idols had been not only near-contemporaries like Michael Jackson and Missy Elliott, but also those of an earlier generation such as the classic 1960s girl groups, as well as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, with whom she was thrilled to record a duet four months before she died.
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.
Our thanks to Plexus for sending a review copy to Bookbag.
For the life of another performer who died tragically young, you may also be interested in reading [[Touching From A Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division by Deborah Curtis]]. You might also appreciate [[Cemetery Gates: Saints and Survivors of the Heavy Metal Scene by Mick O'Shea]].
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[[Category:Entertainment]]
