TOLD YOU I WAS TROUBLE

A COLLECTOR’S GUIDE TO AMY WINEHOUSE BY JOHN REED

You tried to make me go to rehab/I said, ‘No, no, no’... Everything both good and bad about Amy Winehouse was contained within those first two bars. Good because, as the opening gambit for her second album, she immediately shed her image as something approaching the female Jamie Cullum. Instead, Rehab updated the classic 60s soul/girl group sound so perfectly that Winehouse immediately bridged the generation gap, helped by an image change – to the iconic, decidedly rock’n’roll mix of a beehive hair-do, tattoos and drastic weight loss. Rehab ushered in her Back To Black album, arguably the biggest album by a British artist this century, which has spawned a slew of imitators and won plaudits everywhere, while also shifting the kind of units the record industry only dreams of these days.

Rehab was also that rare thing: people remembered when and where they first heard it. So file it under Firestarter by The Prodigy, Common People by Pulp, The Stone Roses’ Fools Gold, Parklife by Blur, Loaded by Primal Scream or U2’s The Fly. Perhaps with these choices I’m just showing my age, but such an impact is a rare commodity these days.

Northern soul fans’ ears pricked up too, hearing echoes in Rehab of tunes like Soul Time by Shirley Ellis. While Amy’s debut album, Frank, suggested an artist who had been moulded …

by JOHN REED
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