Amy Winehouse

Born into an English-Jewish family with a history of jazz musicians, she grew up in the suburb of Southgate, North London, and attended Ashmole School. At around age 10, Winehouse founded a short-lived amateur rap group called Sweet 'n' Sour, as Sour. She described the group as "the little white Jewish Salt-N-Pepa". She attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School aged 12 but was expelled at 13 for "not applying herself" and piercing her own nose. She later attended the BRIT School in Selhurst, Croydon.She grew up listening to a diverse range of music from Salt 'n' Pepa to Sarah Vaughan and received her first guitar aged 13.After her friend, soul singer Tyler James, gave her demo tape to an A&R person, she was discovered and began singing professionally at age 16.

More about Amy

On a good day in London you might actually hear the sound of the melting pot. In a cafe there could be jazz. As the cars go by, hip hop beats and basslines. Some old reggae booming from the neighbourhood vinyl shop. Home, and your noisy flat mate's blaring TV on the R'n'B channel. It's not going to happen every day, but over a lifetime, even a short one of nineteen years, the history of sweet, strong urban sounds might rub into a person's blood, and that person might grow up musically wise before their years. It could be a girl, white or black. She could be funny, tough, smart, idealistic and devoted to musicianship. If she had a voice that was timeless and salaciously textured and capable of melting concrete even on low heat, that would be too good to wish for.

Amy Winehouse, daughter of the city and pupil of the wide musical universe of "stuff that has soul" is just such a walking, emoting miracle. Born and raised in North London, she spent her teenage years balancing school and boyfriends with hours locked in her bedroom, ears glued to classic song chord changes. Her voice however was clearly living a secret life, staying out, getting high, breaking down, going to prison and violating parole by leaving the country with a gun toting maniac gangster. At least it sounds that way. She has the vocal prodigy bit covered. If words have already worn themselves out trying to describe the horny, sleazy, salty spiritual, worldly wise, late night, tired of bullshit, downtown, flirty velvet resonance that makes for a great soul-jazz singer they're going to fall apart entirely over Amy. That vocal ability would be something in itself, but Camden Girl Sings The Blues is only half the headline here. Amy is not the kind of girl to accept the gift of vocal skills, sit back and replicate what others have done before her. Without making it into a grand plan, and proceeding as if it was the most natural thing in the world because it is she has taken her love of jazz and soul and added an infusion of seriously fresh perspective. She might sound like a 40s jazz singer, but she's using forefront beats and lyrics. A one woman guerrilla force reclaiming gritty urban music from r'n'b and hip hop annexation, she's letting her voice go where its meant to go. Her style is not for the candlelit basement. It's out there living in the real world of Gucci bags, Diesel underwear, high heels, breast implants, weed after school, cheating airhead honeys, runaway crushes, and the multiple complexities of male-female relations in the 2000s. Forget about torch themes from yesteryear. "I wasn't there, so I can't write that," says Amy. "I'm young, man, and I'm a city girl. I can only write about what I've gone through. I couldn't write something that I haven't been through, because its not fair and just the experience of having gone through it, that's the whole song. To me there's no point in doing a song unless it's a challenge in every area. I don't tend to do anything unless it's a challenge. That's why I started writing songs, really - to challenge myself."

Amy got her first guitar at 13. Her Brooklyn born, London raised mum was into folk and the natural thing was for Amy to start strumming an acoustic guitar. Carole King and James Taylor made their presence felt on the family stereo, but Amy was more drawn to her dad's jazzier taste. Under her father's tutelage, she picked up serious exposure to Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington "my dad always claimed he discovered her!". Thanks to her grandmother, she was also imbibing a measure of Frank Sinatra. Like any inquisitive, talented city kid, she went through phases. There was a grunge phase. And a deviation into Hendrix. Her investigation of the boundaries of music received an interruption while attending the Sylvia Young stage school in North London. She was expelled for 'not applying herself' and wearing a nose piercing. A move to an all girls school in South London didn't help to endear the educational system to her, but it did accidentally further her technique as an instrumentalist. "I was like 'Where's the men, what is going on?'" she recalls. "So I used to lock myself away from the time of 15 and just do music, because I hated the school. Every lunch time every break I'd be up in the music room playing a guitar or piano." Having escaped the clutches of musical theatre and found a man-free place to explore her own interests as a player and vocalist, Amy started to investigate jazz more closely. The classic song 'standards' she'd known at stage school sounded stiff compared to the jazz versions. Moving through Ella to Dinah she felt her way forward though the old greats. Ella was "technically faultless" but Dinah "could do jazz, and then she could knock the shit out of a blues... when she was 12 she was directing the church choir! "I think it was the freeness of jazz that appealed to me," she says. "Not necessarily the avant garde - Coltrane, where he took that - but I could really relate to a simple trio. I could just hear it all in there, just drums, bass, a trumpet or piano, that's it for me. Four such simple elements, and brought together they would just fly. I just thought it was the purest form or real beautiful music. I think music now is very watered down and I think it's not even music, a lot of it."

At 16 Amy was well caught up in the rapture, studying the history and pushing her voice. Sunday morning gigs were coming her way and she was starting to appear with a Youth Jazz Orchestra. But at the same time, a broader musical osmosis from the urban sprawl was taking place. There was a flatmate into serious R'n'B - Jodeci and Jagged Edge. Inevitably hip hop leaked into her headphones, checking for Mos Def for his positive message and by extension making room for Talib Kweli, The Roots, Erykah Badu. For a while there was a boyfriend with a heavy reggae habit. Gradually, subconsciously, the smoking grooves, jazz enunciation and feisty attitude were coming together to form Amy's own thing. "The way it all gets mixed up though, that's just me trying to manifest what's in myself, in song," says Amy. "Its not a pretence, its just soul - stuff that has soul. It's like, I listened to Ray Charles for a year, just Ray Charles. He is such an inspiration. Musicians like that, and people like Roy Ayers, who'll go out and play a gig every night of his life still, because that's his life, they're the inspiration. I'd like to get to that point where I can just pick up my instrument and go out with this tonight, like pick up my trumpet and go."

With word around town about Amy's unique abilities getting louder she found herself a management company and started to work with producers. Island Records got to hear the works in progress and swiftly signed her to the label. Now Amy really could pick up her guitar and go. In London she worked with producerwriters, Felix Howard, Matt Rowe and Stefan Scarbek and Stateside got together with Commissioner Gordon and Salaam Remi. The debut album from Amy has not been force-fed. It has grown naturally out of her teenage passions, innate skills and on-going curiosity. Perhaps that's why it has such a healthy balance of old and new, smoky ballads and beats, summer and autumn. Its an album that fits as well alongside The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as it does Dinah's After Hours with Miss D. There are beats that lope and grooves that swing. A Wurlitzer organ swings low on a sorrowful lament. Smiling horn samples pull up in to the sunshine. There are interludes where flute and acoustic guitars take over. Then vinyl static from a sampled beat leads into a lazy groove. The bass lines get jiggy again. And consistently Amy 'knocks the shit' out of the songs, whether sultry, teasing, grieving or soulfully communing. "If you're coming from a place where you feel it naturally, it comes out," she says. "You don't even have to think 'I'm going to do this sexy', it just comes out. It's just a feeling that you can't even think, you just sing."

Crucially Amy's debut collection reveals a singer who can sing from the heart but also find light and shade in the city turbulence. There is mischief amongst Missy Amy's confessions. In Fuck Me Pumps co-written with Salaam Remy she pokes fun at "girls who genuinely think they have to go out and meet an athlete, and then their life will be perfect". I Heard Love Is Blind is a mock admission of love-cheating with a lookalike. close to the front deals with the three infatuations of Amy's life, starting of with her science teacher. And an update on the old standard Mr Magic finds Amy serenading a somewhat combustible, stress relieving, metaphorical 'lover'. On a straighter note, the album also catalogues her trials and tribulations in the jungle of love. What Is It About Men? is as hard on herself as it is about the un-fairer sex. Stronger Than Me tries to make a man out of a passive paramour. The beautiful blue-black ballad Take the Box was written right after the 'returning belongings 'moment in a break up. Meanwhile, the incendiary, chandelier -shaking vocal on the piano and voice piece You Sent Me Flying graphically captures the intensity of new love. Amy Winehouse does not leave much of a gap between herself and the tape. She comes at you straight from life. Its another miracle that she's been caught at that point where passions burn, and fun is fierce fun. Urban beats from an old soul teenager are not going to get any more alive for a long time. It's not just jazzy-hip-hop-r'n'b-soul. All genres are going to have to be worried about her kind of vivacity. There's a track on the album called October Song which transposes the real life passing away of her pet canary into a delicious dreamy elegy. Maybe the poor creature couldn't bear to be out sung. "I just hope that people won't hear my stuff and go, this is that white girl from London," concludes Amy. "I hope they'll go 'this is a girl who's actually got some soul, and she's young but she's had some experiences, and she's relating to them and I can relate to that'. I assume I will get pigeon holed, it's inevitable, but my music is pure, and when I write I don't have any preconceptions, I just write what I feel and I just hope that people will receive it as purely as I write it." Three letters; two syllables; one stellar voice and an uncaged future: Amy.