Amy Winehouse - Tribute page

01/08/2011

This is a tribute page to the amazing singer and songwriter, Amy Winehouse. If you have taken a photo of Amy that you feel should be shown to everyone please email it to stuart@rockarchive.com with the subject AMY WINEHOUSE along with a short description and also a link to your own website.

We will show it here on the tribute page, it is ongoing and hopefully it will grow in to a photographic history of her musical career.

(Please send your images at a size of 700 pixels width, or 1MB in size.)

Top photos of Camden Square and the flower tributes © Jill Furmanovsky

In a 2006 TV interview, Amy Winehouse was asked to describe herself in five words. She chose 'driven', 'motivated', 'easy-going', 'maternal' and 'alcoholic'. These last two words expressed the kind of perverse paradox we came to associate with Winehouse, in particular, the paradox that bonded her brightly illuminated talent with her dark self-destructiveness.

It was perhaps a similar contradiction that drew Winehouse to The Crystals' 1962 classic, He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss). Winehouse reportedly loved this song; she revelled in its bitter sweet refrain, as natural to her as the long shadows cast by a golden sun. Pain, it would seem, was an essential component of her happiness, even her success as an artist.

She could fearlessly stare, Janus-like, into the light and dark aspects of her life. Her obsession with love and her addiction to alcohol and drugs fed into her lyrics and melodies as well as many of her live performances. When she connected with these subjects, a certain thickening would creep into her voice - a wavering, snarling, effusive quality that climbed and conquered every note she sang. Her rich vocals would pour, irresistibly, into the microphone like streams of liquefied stars, a tsunami wave train of luminosity.

And maybe that was the key to her success: for while she would offer up everything she had on a mortician's slab, dissecting her past with deft, unsentimental cuts, she would at the same time do it in a dazzling, exciting and beautiful way. She may well have died a hundred times before her real death aged 27, but her music will certainly live on, occupying the shadows that are borne out of brilliant white light.

by Jon-Paul Banks