Chasing Amy…

Say what you will about Amy Winehouse, one thing is for certain – she had talent. Amy’s mind might rarely have been in the right place, no thanks due to a diet laden with drinking and drugs, but when the girl sang of her woes, boy could she sing. Her voice has often been compared to the greats of jazz and rock – from Ella Fitzgerald to Janis Joplin – but unfortunately the glory was overshadowed by the misery – with Winehouse’s tragic love affair with one Blake Fielder being the centre of this.

For a rock’n’roll documentary – a genre often depicted as fuzzy and tackily cut-and-pasted – Amy is actually a high-quality production. But then this could be due to the fact that Winehouse grew up in an era where the medium of moving picture was common thanks to consumer digital technology and pocket phones with inbuilt cameras. The archival footage is so abundant that the documentary comes across as more ‘matter-of-fact’ than most we’ve seen in music’s long hall of fame.

That said, there are still moments when things aren’t as clear as they could be. For example when Amy mumbles “I love jazz” early on in the film, it sounds like she’s saying “I love drugs”; and when she utters “I just wanna sing”, I swear it sounds like “I just wanna drink”. But that’s probably due to all the noise of the hangers-on around her…

Speaking of which, it’s shocking to witness the actions of sycophants who no doubt had a hand in Amy’s downfall including her Svengali-like father who blatantly pimped her out for the sake of a quick buck (ignoring the urgency of her rehabilitation) and of course her fool of a boyfriend Blake Fielder, always there when the Dom Perignon was being poured, but never when the chips were down. Indeed, it was Fielder who Winehouse (sadly) was infatuated by for most of her adult life and who would inspire much of her song-writing. It’s when he callously informs her that he is “too good” for her that the artist really takes a downward turn. Why she was so infatuated with a nobody such as Fielder will remain one of rock’s major mysteries…

Conspiracy theorists might have you believe that Amy Winehouse was encouraged to stay ‘off track’ since, as music history has often shown, artists can deliver their best work in states of substance abuse. Think the Beatles in their acid period; Bowie at his coked-out peak; Kurt Cobain at his metaphoric highest. It’s difficult not to imagine a drugged-out Winehouse cooped up in a recording studio, laying down her woes for future posterity; perhaps delivering enough of them to fill an entire posthumous discography that would please a major record label to no end (or at least her sycophantic father and boyfriend). To give it a cruel analogy: the best foie gras is bound to come from a duck that’s been force-fed the fastest.

But we can’t simply see Amy as a sitting duck, for whoever might have been responsible for introducing her to the tempting but troubling elements of the rock’n’roll lifestyle, ultimately, like any sensible human, she could have exercised a certain level of self-control.

As you watch Winehouse evolve in a few short years from naïve teen to wayward international icon – her eye makeup smudged more and more; her hair piled higher as each year rolls by – you can’t help but view her as a caricature of herself.

It was way easy to take the piss out of Amy when she was alive – all the  clichés were there: the pathetic love affairs that lent themselves to awesome love songs; the Molotov cocktail of endless drink and hard drugs; the sycophantic parents there to make a quick buck; the old-school friends who couldn’t keep up… but most of all, the erratic relationship with the media. Amy clearly was not a fan of the press and she was always candid about her antagonism toward promo campaigning: “I don’t wanna be doing this [interviews]”, she is heard saying, “I just want time to make another record.”

But even comments like that didn’t tell half the truth, for between making records was a heck of a lot of procrastinating on her behalf – mostly filled with late nights, late sleep-ins, and lots of drug-taking in between.

As quality a production as this is – bringing up everything from her battle with bulimia to the distant love-hate relationship she shared with her parents – again, the film doesn’t document the half of it. In July 2008, for instance, Amy overdosed on a reportedly “inhuman” quantity of hash that resulted in hallucinations, uncontrollable vomiting and convulsions so violent, one witness described them as being “like a scene from The Exorcist” yet none of this is caught on camera – perhaps because of the producer’s connection to the artist as an old friend or indeed because the events took place behind proverbial green doors.

Amy, rather, is a kind of cinematic eulogy to the artist best remembered for two things: a great singing voice and a career cut short by the very thing that fuelled her singing – an unreliable boyfriend who failed to live up to the sentiment of her lead track ‘Stronger Than Me’, and that ever-elusive thing called love.

The thing about Amy Winehouse, god bless her soul, is that during her career, you couldn’t help but suspect the entire thing was a setup. Her rise from rags to, well, messier rags. Her wino-connoting surname lending credence to the theory of self-fulfilling prophecy. Her songs about rehabilitation and regret delivered like tongue-in-cheek jokes but always tainted with shades of truth. Even the age of her death was the same as a host of tragic rock icons before her. As for the famous-for-being-famous train-wreck of a celebrity she’d become, still this didn’t stop us from realising that great talent lay within.

Conspiracy theories aside, and sending trashy tabloid images of her into the paper shredder where they belong, let’s hope Winehouse is remembered for at least one great thing: the ability to have taken that bit of angst every one of us has sensed on occasion and turning it into something so epic, its echoes remind us we are not alone in feeling it.  Antonino Tati

‘Amy’ is currently showing in leading independent cinemas (including Dendy and Palace) in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Canberra. The film will screen exclusively at Luna Leederville and Luna SX in Perth from July 16. It also opens at the Gold Coast Arts Centre on July 23. View the trailer above.