The great British soul queen Amy Winehouse burned so bright with her extraordinary voice belting out her songs fuelled with so much of her personal anguish and love in an era when most other music was blandly manufactured, and it’s still difficult to take on board that she eventually burned herself out. In Asif Kapadia’s excellent documentary we become voyeurs when he gets up so personal and intimate at the raw and shocking details that led this troubled soul to die at just age 27 years old. It is however balanced with seeing her perform live at different venues all around the world when, apart from a few incidents towards the end, that this tiny figure just gets up there on stage and soared with that voice of hers that never failed to make one’s spine tingle.Kapadia avoided the usual route of using talking heads to tell Amy’s story, and instead, he focused on a treasure trove of archival footage that ranged from childhood home movies to hanging out with her friends in her early adult life to some of her TV performances in concert or on chat shows. One of the best of the latter group was her appearance with Britain’s Jonathan Ross who teased Amy with the fact that she had this rich syrupy voice when she sings but when she talked she had the same brash common North London accent like him.
The story starts with Amy as a teenager when she finds her voice at the same she loses her father when he walks out on the family. She explains how much his desertion really hurt her, and she blames his behavior for the fact that she later adopts a rather laissez-faire to sexual partners and potential boyfriends. It is therefore even more difficult to understand why when the going gets really tough for her, she not only lets him back in her life but allows him to act like a Svengali. It’s a move that will cost her dearly as when she is obviously in a very bad way physically and emotionally from the ravages of her addictions to both alcohol and drugs, he goes against the grain of all her Therapists and insists that there is no need for her to go to re-hab and she should get on the Tour she is contracted to do. She gets a hit song out of it ….They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, ‘No, no, no.’ Yes, I’ve been black but when I come back you’ll know, know, know I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine’. However it turned out to be the beginning of the end for her. Even when she escaped to St Lucia for a few months to desperately try to get ‘clean’ her father showed up trailed by a camera crew on a short-lived TV reality show about his life, even though it caused a fragile Amy even more stress.
Equally sad in this tragedy as it unfolds on the screen is the army of managers, promoters and music industry chiefs who made so much money out of this exceptionally talented young woman and who acted with deaf ears and blind eyes to the terror of her turmoil, and now indecently scramble to try and re-assure us that they were in no-way responsible for her descent and her death. Her charmless waster of a husband Blake Fielder-Civil appeared to be the one who introduce Amy to hard drugs and he bitterly resented his wife’s success when he wasn’t involved in it. She was totally addicted to her dysfunctional relationship with him as she was to the drugs themselves, and in the end this probably did as much harm to her, if not more.
Despite how taken we are with her story with its desperately sad ending, we know that Amy Winehouse may have sung like angel, but she never acted like one. What Kapadia so eloquently captures in this faultless film of his is an exceptional talent of a very young soul that gets squandered as it never ever got to grow up. One of the saddest aspects is that she told us all how very unhappy she was in the fiercely bitter lyrics she wrote but all the world could hear was some Grammy-winning songs without really listening at all.
With her big beehive hair and her figure-hugging skinny sheath dresses Amy Winehouse could electrify an audience as she crooned like an old-fashioned jazz singer. In fact one of the highlights of the film, and probably her life too, was getting to record a duet with the great Tony Bennett. She was so in awe of her idol and insisting on doing more ‘takes’ so that it was good enough. She needn’t have bothered as he had enormous respect for her as a musician and he loved her even more after that session. As we all did too.Kapadia’s movie cannot bring Amy Winehouse but it will help keep her memory and remind us of her exceptional talent.
