I’m dedicating a post today to a late British icon who arguable changed music for us forever. I love everything about Amy Winehouse, she has really influenced my taste in music. I bought the documentary movie about her life ‘AMY’ and it was so nice to watch because they told her story in a good light instead of all the negative things she was known for like her battle with drugs and alcohol.
I have always loved her look, because she was so different to other celebrities who all go for the same look. Her beehive hair style was iconic and was what she was known for, the crazy height it was and the messy style made everyone fall in love with it. Lets not forget those tattoo’s too. She was the one who made them cool again.She had endless hits that were constantly in the charts and her attitude towards people was like no other, in TV interviews and chat shows she was uninterested because in her mind she was still the London girl who just wanted to have fun and not be bored.
Amy Winehouse was born in Chase Farm Hospital in north London, to Jewish parents. Her father, Mitchell “Mitch” Winehouse, was a window panel installer then a taxi driver; her mother, Janis Winehouse (née Seaton), a pharmacist. The Winehouse ancestors were Russian and Polish immigrants to London. Amy had an older brother, Alex (born 1979), and the family lived in London’s Southgate area, where she attended Osidge Primary School.
After toying around with her brother Alex’s guitar, Winehouse bought her own when she was 14 and began writing music a year later. Soon after, she began working for a living, including, at one time, as an entertainment journalist for the World Entertainment News Network, in addition to singing with local group the Bolsha Band. In July 2000, she became the featured female vocalist with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra; her influences were to include Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, the latter whom she was already listening to at home. Amy’s best friend, soul singer Tyler James, sent her demo tape to an A&R person. Winehouse signed to Simon Fuller’s 19 Management in 2002 and was paid £250 a week against future earnings. While being developed by the management company, she was kept as a recording industry secret although she was a regular jazz standards singer at the Cobden Club. Her future A&R representative at Island (Universal), Darcus Beese, heard of her by accident when the manager of The Lewinson Brothers showed him some productions of his clients, which featured Winehouse as key vocalist. When he asked who the singer was, the manager told him he was not allowed to say. Having decided that he wanted to sign her, it took several months of asking around for Beese to eventually discover who the singer was. However, Winehouse had already recorded a number of songs and signed a publishing deal with EMI by this time. Incidentally, she formed a working relationship with producer Salaam Remi through these record publishers.
Winehouse’s greatest love was 1960s girl groups. Her stylist, Alex Foden, borrowed her “instantly recognisable” beehive hairdo (a weave) and she borrowed her Cleopatra makeup from The Ronettes. Her imitation was so successful, as The Village Voice reports: “Ronnie Spector—who, it could be argued, all but invented Winehouse’s style in the first place when she took the stage at the Brooklyn Fox Theater with her fellow Ronettes more than 40 years ago—was so taken aback at a picture of Winehouse in the New York Post that she exclaimed, “I don’t know her, I never met her, and when I saw that pic, I thought, ‘That’s me!’ But then I found out, no, it’s Amy! I didn’t have on my glasses.”
Winehouse’s dichotomous public image of critical and commercial success versus personal turmoil proved to be controversial. The New Statesman called Winehouse “a filthy-mouthed, down-to-earth diva,” while Newsweek called her “a perfect storm of sex kitten, raw talent and poor impulse control.”Karen Heller with The Philadelphia Inquirer summarised the maelstrom this way:
She’s only 24 with six Grammy nominations, crashing headfirst into success and despair, with a codependent husband in jail, exhibitionist parents with questionable judgement, and the paparazzi documenting her emotional and physical distress. Meanwhile, a haute designer Karl Lagerfeld appropriates her dishevelled style and eating issues to market to the elite while proclaiming her the new Bardot.
GLORIEUX 