I feel it is as good a tribute as any to the late Amy Winehouse, that when the news of her death broke on July 23 of this year, the day after my birthday, my thoughts did not suddenly rush to the shaky YouTube clips of her shambolic final show in Serbia five weeks before, or her enjoyable but vacuous performance at Oxegen three years previous. Instead, I immediately thought of a good friend of mine, for whom Amy’s seminal Back To Black acted as a kind of musical pacifier during a particularly rotten break-up. The record came along at just the right time, when she was feeling at her lowest and would take any opportunity to pile us all into her Ford Ka, the other purchase she had made to sooth her heartache, and drive around the city until her arms were sore, with Amy’s voice perpetually blaring from the stereo.
To this girl, and doubtless many others, Amy Winehouse was more than just a singer of retro-styled soul anthems. She was someone with whom to share the pain.
It is now just over four months since the troubled 27 year-old died from alcohol poisoning, and Island Records, along with Amy’s family and long-time musical partners Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, have compiled a career-hopping selection of demos, unreleased originals, covers and alternative versions into the first posthumous Amy Winehouse album, titled Lioness: The Hidden Treasures. The collection comprises 12 songs, recorded between May 2002 and March 2011, most of which have been resurrected from the ashes, remixed and remastered since her death.
“It’s not the album she would have made,” Remi admitted to the press last week. “But these are things I would like people to know that she did.”
As expected, Lioness: The Hidden Treasures is a disjointed record, taking in jazz, doo-wop, reggae and hip hop and bouncing from Frank-era tracks to more recent recordings and back again. Her 2004 version of Carol King’s ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ is a million miles away from the doe-eyed Shirelles version, complete with theatrical string arrangements, Latin-tinged percussion, and a cameo from someone who’s mighty handy with a pair of castanets. ‘Between The Cheats’ is much more Shirelles-esque, although the 2008 composition will probably be remembered as a taunt at ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil rather than a brilliant, piano-driven, Ronettes-brand pop ditty. Beginning with the lines, “I would die for the boy/ I’d take a thousand thumps for my love”, it’s far from the razor-tongued outburst the title hints at.
If anything sums up Amy’s turbulent relationship with ex-jailbird Fielder-Civil, it’s Nas collaboration ‘Like Smoke’ from the same session, which swirls around the heartbreaking refrain of “I never wanted you to be my man/ I just need your company”. Forthright, serene and honest, it’s a timeless duet and certainly a more sincere one than her pairing with Ghostface Killah a few years back (Amy sampled Nas’ ‘Made You Look’ on her 2003 debut, and the pair had been friends since).
It’s important to note that Lioness: Hidden Treasures is not what many Amy fans will be hoping for, that is, a peek at what album number three might have sounded like. You have to question whether Amy would have wanted the world to hear tracks like the original, rough-around-the-edges version of ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’ or a drowsy early recording of ‘Valerie’, almost identical to the one that topped the charts in 2007. Equally, I doubt the perfectionist in Amy would have allowed her prose to be masked over with horns, or her spectacular money notes (see the final moments of ‘Best Friends’) to be muffled in the fizz. Of course, the perfect take of these tracks simply does not exist, but to make up for the hazy production, it would have been nice to hear one stripped-down number, like the stunning acoustic version of Phil Spector’s ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ that appeared on the deluxe edition of Back To Black.
Lacking this, the album’s most sensational moment is Amy’s version of ‘The Girl From Ipanema’, recorded in May 2002 when she was 18, vibrant and scatting for her life. Not only did the teenager have the gall to change the classic line to “When she passes each one she passes goes, ‘ah boo di di dow’’, she happily reconstructed the entire melody in true Anita O’Day style. Of course, that was 2002, and this is 2011. We now know that the playful spirit that helped create that track was long gone when it came time to record a third album, almost a decade later.
If Lioness… proves anything, it’s that even a few months ago, Winehouse still operated with the greatest respect for the musicians who went before her, and with hope that she could carry on in their shadows. Her version of Donny Hathaway’s ‘A Song For You’ starts with torrential rain, and ends with Amy chatting to Remi from her couch in her London home in 2009. “Like Marvin Gaye, great,” she muses, “but Donny Hathaway, he couldn’t contain himself… he had somefink in him, you know?”
Amy sounds equally empowered on ‘Halftime’ as she belts, “When Frank Sinatra sings, it’s too much to take/ So I sing the same… and he pacifies my ache’” It’s not possible for Winehouse to leave as great a legacy as Sinatra, who lived to be 82 and sang professionally for 60 years, but it’s comforting to know that at one point in her career, she had the same healing affect on listeners that Ol’ Blue Eyes had on her.