Amy Winehouse, born in 1983, was an English singer and songwriter. After her second album, Back to Black, Amy achieved international fame.
Known for her powerful voice and her beehive hairstyle, Amy’s personal struggles took a toll on her success and her life.
When she was 9, her parents got divorced, and Amy and her elder brother were raised by their mother. Amy started singing at a young age. At 13, she got her first guitar and began writing her own songs, and by 16 she was performing with jazz groups.
At that time, Tyler James, a schoolmate and close friend, passed her demo tape to his manager, Nick Shymansky, and soon, she became Shymansky’s new client.
With Shymansky, Amy signed a deal with Island Records in 2002; she was 19 at the time.
Amy started as a jazz vocalist, and soon moved into an eclectic mix of jazz, pop, soul, and R&B. A year later, she released her first album, Frank.
In an interview after releasing Frank, Amy talked about her work and how she thought she was difficult to work with. She said, “I probably earned a reputation as a difficult person, because I wrote my own songs and I didn’t need people in the studio with me. Not to be rude, but these people would be trying to write pop songs! And I would say, Who are you writing for? What session are you on? Get out. But then I’d waste a day trying to be nice to the person. I’d waste studio time letting them do what they wanted, because I thought it would be the polite thing to do.”
Amy’s problems with addiction made her company suggest that she’d better enter rehab. Instead, she left the company and released her second album, Back To Black, in 2006. The album became the best-selling album of 2007 in the United Kingdom, with the song “Rehab” as a top 10 hit in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Back to Black earned Amy many awards, including the BRIT Award, the Ivor Novello Award for the song “Rehab,” and five Grammy Awards.
After marrying Fielder-Civil in 2007, Amy began behaving differently and started canceling many tours. Her problems with addiction and relationships were affecting her career and her life. Amy’s relationship went through many ups and downs; she lost weight and went through many attempts at drug rehabilitation, then got a medical diagnosis showing early signs of emphysema.
Her husband, Fielder-Civil, was sentenced to jail for twenty-seven months for assault and perverting justice; they then got divorced in 2009.
After that, Amy tried to return to singing with a comeback tour, but it was canceled after she appeared drunk and in poor condition at the opening concert.
Her Belgrade appearance was her last performance. Amy was found dead in her London apartment on July 23, 2011.
Before her death, Amy recorded a duet, “Body and Soul,” with Tony Bennett, which was her final recording.
In an interview, her bodyguard Andrew Morris talked about how Amy spent her last night. He said, ” She needed to appreciate she could sing because she was very humble. Even at her level, a person can never see it in themselves. They probably think, ‘Is the adulation real or not?’ But to me, Amy is the first star of the millennium.”
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