Pat Kane: Amy Winehouse wasn’t lost in the music, she was lost to the music – The National

YESTERDAY was the 10th anniversary of the death of Amy Winehouse. Ive just sat through another documentary that spins your head and heart around, making you wonder who (and what) was to blame for the singers terrible, sorrowful demise.

But before I re-enter that maelstrom, I am happy to begin in a more grounded place. In the London leg of my life, I do my vocal rehearsal days in a complex called Mill Hill Studios. There is an iconic stencil of Winehouse on the wall outside one of the rooms. Turns out, this was the place she started putting her bands together, and did so till the very end.

It is a lovely, well-kept environment, run by a variety of diamond-hearted geezers. They have their careful, tactful stories about Amy.

One of them tells how, just before her death, she was planning a very stripped back, jazz-tinted album, but as a four piece, drums, vox, bass and keys/guitar, with some sax or clarinet as appropriate. Basically, a step away from the big wall-of-sound production on Back in Black

And the talk is like that: all about musicianship, no psychodrama. As if the most respectful thing to do is to concentrate on the compositions and performances that came from her mouth, fingers, body and soul, for as long as we had her. And as for the rest Well, to be honest, it seems like theres a battle of blame narratives going on. Last nights BBC documentary Reclaiming Amy is primarily narrated by Amys mum, Janice Winehouse-Collins. It explicitly sets out to place the singer in circles of care, whether close family or friends, who were ultimately unable to handle her addictive condition.

Its clearly an attempt to answer the Oscar-winning 2016 documentary Amy. This film indicts the celebrity press, an exploitative and parasitic music business and to some degree her father, Mitch, as among those who failed to properly look after her.

I resist going much deeper into these minefields. It is undoubtedly the case that the absurd shock of her 27-year-old demise, and the size of the talent that was extinguished, sends out a spray of fragments (and protagonists). Kaleidoscopes will shuffle these testimonies around for decades. The potential patterns of responsibility (and evasions of it) are endless.

But the truth is also that Winehouses own art proceeded on the basis of cheeky, flirty but also shocking self-revelation. When her blockbuster album Back To Black came out in 2006, the rise of confessional culture and reality TV content (amplified by social media) was beginning its inexorable rise.

Big Brother was regnant on Channel 4, libido and drunkenness tumbling through each days programming. The music critic Alexis Petridis recently noted that Facebook opened to everyone over thirteen with a valid email address four weeks before Back to Blacks release; Twitters tipping point came five months later.

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So the world was ready for Winehouses artistic candour about her barely held-together lifestyle. (A final zeitgeist point might well be that these frothy jets of hedonism and confessionalism were being fuelled by oceans of credit all to come crashing down in the following 18 months).

But you maybe have to live inside some of her songs for a while, to realise how powerfully she conducts this open-heart surgery. For some of the festival sets were playing this year, Hue And Cry is putting a cover of Back To Black in the full-band songlist, graduating from a piano-vocal version.

Great pop songs can take you to another harsh world, but so beautifully that you can cope being there. What a world in Back To Black. We know, biographically, that Winehouse was in a dangerously co-dependent, half-open relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, inspiring all of these songs.

The lineaments of that relationship are brutally laid out in the first lines: He left no time to regret/Kept his dick wet/With his same old safe bet. The second verse, like some kind of Camden Town John Donne, uses drug paraphernalia (the penny is a fragment of crack) as a metaphor for their blasted relationship: I love you much, its not enough You love blow and I love puff Life is like a pipe and Im a tiny penny Rolling up the walls inside How can you sing this as a man?

There are precedents. Sinatra was notorious for hanging out at Billie Holliday gigs, imagining himself taking the suffering role in her songs. Though if you shift the lyrics of Back To Black around and rewrite for the male role, the song goes even darker: a story of male power setting the parameters, observing the ruins, even amidst mutual brokenness.

Last nights BBC documentary certainly wants to reclaim Amy from any victim framing. Her excesses and appetites are mostly rendered as intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically triggered. Her closest male schoolfriend recalls her in escapades involving mooning bare bums and raised middle fingers.

Winehouses often tearful coterie speak of her physical fragility, but also her strong willpower, impervious to advice or intervention.

Her parents strongly assert that she was in the grip of addiction, as a disease and condition. They have even set up a foundation to assist the recovery of young addicts. When asked at an interview in her full bee-hived and flick-mascarad splendour about her fears, Amy answers: What am I scared of? Myself.

THOUGH I tend towards Winehouse not being the victim of her circumstances, there are some formative elements which most performers will recognise. The much criticised father, Mitch, himself a wanna-be wedding-band Sinatra working as a cab driver, was clearly a template for his performing daughter.

I enjoyed the limelight, I cant deny it, he says in the BBC doc. But Mitch also reveals that he tried, at the height of his daughters self-destruction, to have Amy sectioned (her charm sent the examining doctors away). The death of a beloved grandmother is also cited as a destabilising influence, as much as the standard explanation of drugs and drink. There was so much more, says her mum Janice. She resonated at a different frequency to anyone else. It often feels like the Amy we know has been lost.

Reclaiming Amy does enough of the necessary job of putting her performances and songwriting front and centre. In retrospect, shes an odd mix: cartoonish in her fashion choices, wriggling awkwardly like a teenager on a school dancefloor, but with a voice that erupts from her like lava, Aretha and Dinah and Ella and god knows who else comprising the flow. Yet the verbal scenes she paints come from bad romance, North-London style.

READ MORE:Pat Kane: Amy Winehouse wasnt lost in the music, she was lost to the music

Its obviously intriguing to envision a less fissile Winehouse, what she would have settled into. Adele-like serenity? One of the saddest moments in the BBC doc is when Amy sees her own future as a mother with a few kids, which her friends tearfully corroborate. One idly imagines that these might have been her next most beloved creations.

But theres a line from Rehab, that spookily defiant megahit about her resistance to all helpers, which I cant forget. Fleeing from the hands of experts and doctors, she trills: Theres nothing you can teach me/That I cant learn from Mr Hathaway. That, I presume, is the soul titan Donny Hathaway, whose covers she often took to entirely new levels in her performances.

Maybe this girl wasnt just lost in music, but lost to music. The business of show supports the flaming arcs of the mercurial and the unique. But often without a net. And often with the net being deliberately evaded. Rest in process, Amy Winehouse.

Reclaiming Amy is available now on BBC iPlayer

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Pat Kane: Amy Winehouse wasn't lost in the music, she was lost to the music - The National