Amy Winehouse

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• Genre: Retro Soul
• Hometown: London
• Amy Winehouse Website

About

If you like your chanteuses liberally doused in Chartreuse, Amy Winehouse is someone to raise a salutatory snifter to. As renowned for her boozing exploits and plunging dress sizes as for her marked musical abilities, the Londoner has risen to prominence on the back of gritty, often bleak autobiographical work. Winehouse readily admits that she writes from direct experience, and with songs that revolve around doomed relationships ("Stronger than Me"), drink ("Rehab") and recreational drugs ("Addicted"), you soon get the picture. But that aside, it's Winehouse's voice -- which saw her welcomed with open arms by Britain's two premier performance schools -- that forms the foundation of her appeal. By turns as knowing and vulnerable as Billie Holiday's and as streetwise as Ms Dynamite's, it reflects her fluctuating musical fixations (jazz, hip-hop and latterly Motown) and is a perfect tool to deliver her wry and affecting observations on the pratfalls and pain inherent in the pursuit of love. As Winehouse puts it: "I told you I was trouble/ You know that I'm no good" ("You Know I'm No Good").

- Jamie Dolling