Amy Winehouse.

[Margaret Pilkington]

G....you have made me cry with laughing.
Welcome back!

[walkinman221]

I am saying nothing got shouted at on the last thread on this subject for winding someones handle and being a bit mischievous

[garinda]

Originally Posted by garinda

She was definitely 'Marmite', having more threads on Accy Web, than any other performer. The number being seven.

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...ion-33126.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-31638.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-35901.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-40600.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-40726.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-58646.html

Nearly as many threads as there are about Cllr. Britcliffe.

[jaysay]

Originally Posted by garinda

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...ion-33126.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-31638.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-35901.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-40600.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-40726.html

http://www.accringtonweb.com/forum/f...use-58646.html

Nearly as many threads as there are about Cllr. Britcliffe.

Nice to see you back G

[kestrelx]

Originally Posted by garinda

Disagree. Frank her first album was ok, even though it won an Ivor Novello award. Fairly tame and poppy. She's come back with an amazing new album Back to Black, and her voice is geniunely blusey. She could hold her own with the great Bessie Smith in a sing off of the red hot Mommas.

Her new skanky ho image is bang on the nail, and gets 10/10 from me for not being remotely like anybody else.

She had a belting voice that ranks up with the top singers of all time, easily, and she sang about things others wouldn't even consider. Shame she's gone.

[kestrelx]

Originally Posted by garinda

Amy Winehouse didn't really enter my musical radar when she first achieved success a couple of years ago. Pleasant enough voice. Your typical North London Jewish Princess, who'd been to stage school. A bit mouthy when she slagged off Madonna, but certainly not very unique.

Cut to a few years later. A battle with drink and drugs, and a major restyle, and she's back. Wow.

A three foot high beehive hair do, complete with flowers, little dolls and birds, a major weight loss, and tattooed arms and breasts. Dusty Springfield meets punk Barbie.

As for her bluesy voice, it's amazing. She sounds like she's singing through a broken Bourbon bottle that's been used to give her a tracheotomy.

I think in a world of formular based music, she's a real talent and I love her.

Where did you pinch this quote from out the NME?


Clive James on Amy Winehouse:

"When the American rap star Snoop Dogg gets into trouble, he goes from strength to strength. When the British singer songwriter Amy Winehouse gets into trouble, she goes from weakness to weakness. This is especially sad because, whereas you might think that Snoop Dogg has a talent from Hell, Amy Winehouse clearly has a talent from heaven. Already it has earned her millions of pounds, so you might say that her worries are working in her favour. But even the press is by now realising that it’s callous to say so.
Last weekend a voluntary visit to the police turned into an overnight stay and the story was instantly in all the papers, but there was a new note detectable, as of a farce finally being recognized as an incipient tragedy. If there was ever any fun to be had from reading about her troubles, the point has been reached where there is no fun left even in writing about them. Probably the best we can all do for her is not to mention her name except when buying one of her albums, so perhaps I am making a bad start. But I remember too well the first time I heard her sing and was so moved that my heart hurt.
And I also remember the first time that I saw her in real life. It was last year, in downtown New York. We happened to be staying in the same hotel, and I passed her in the foyer. She looked so frail that my heart hurt again, but in a different way. When that young woman sings, it’s the revelation of a divine gift. But when she behaves as if the gift were hers to destroy if she feels like it, you can’t help thinking of divine wrath. Can’t the same force that made her so brilliant give her strength?
Which brings us to the aforementioned Snoop Dogg, who has all the strength in the world. Whether he is brilliant is another question, which I don’t presume to answer. As a lyricist who has made no more than a few hundred pounds over the course of a whole career, I try not to speak ill of any lyricist who makes thousands of pounds a week, even when I can’t understand what he is talking about. In Snoop Dogg’s case I’m not sure that I’m meant to. At about the same time that Amy Winehouse was emerging from a police station again to be greeted by demands from her own father that she be sectioned as a soon as possible, Snoop Dogg was being cleared by a British judge from a no-visa order imposed on him in 2006 when there was a dust-up at Heathrow, that venue where so many memorable performances take place.
You will notice that I continue to refer to him as Snoop Dogg. It’s easier than calling him by his real name, Cordozar Calvin Broadus. I hope I have pronounced it correctly. I’m not one to point the finger, because I myself found it convenient to abandon my unpronounceable original name, Balthazar Wickerwork Bruce-Barrymore. Nor do I hold against him his self-confessed earlier career as a pimp. As any female sex-worker will tell you when she has a knife to her throat, pimps perform a useful function.
Anyway, he grew out of it, and became famous as a rap star. You can see, however, that the rapper’s reputation might have been against him when he and his entourage were told that they were to be demoted from the Heathrow VIP lounge to life among the ordinary people, whereupon a fracas ensued and Snoop Dogg found himself face down on the carpet, an audience unresponsive to his charm. Subsequently he was denied a visa, despite his assurances that his purpose in this country would be to warn against private firearms, and not to glorify them. The rapper took the rap.

But recently a senior immigration judge overturned the decision, after viewing a tape of the incident. Those of us who don’t like to be videotaped wherever we go might reflect that in this case a video tape served justice. Upon close inspection, the tape revealed, according to the court, that some of the staff involved might have been at fault. One can’t help feeling that a rapper’s reputation for condoning violence might recently have been overtaken, on the scale of notoriety, by the reputation of Heathrow staff for doing the wrong thing on a massive scale at every opportunity.
Nevertheless, Snoop Dogg deserved a hearing for his contention that one of his reasons for wanting to be free to enter Britain would be to counsel this country’s disaffected youth against guns. Snoop Dogg’s argument is that he has seen a lot of people blown away and that the use of guns by ordinary citizens should therefore be discouraged. There is no reason for thinking that he does not feel this now just because some of his lyrics previously seemed to say the opposite. When I listen carefully to one of his songs – a lot more carefully than I would like to, if the truth be told – I seem to hear him say that he’s from the streets and he hangs with killers, by which I think that he means that he hangs out with killers, not that he suffers capital punishment in their company.
In the next line he seems to be saying that if he and his killer friends got problems then they’re gon’ bust them triggers. I think that means that they are going to fire so many shots that they wear their guns out, but it could just mean that they intend to voluntarily decommission their weapons. Or it could mean anything, it’s hard to tell. I’d be surprised if it meant anything conspicuously non-violent, but we must remember the artist’s right to invent a character. It might be just the narrator talking, while the man who invented the narrator is a philanthropist. Charles Dickens, after all, invented Bill Sykes. Dickens wasn’t himself a psychopath, and Snoop Dogg could easily argue that he is fundamentally a businessman.
He’s certainly got the money to prove it, and if people are going to be shut out of this country for once having seemed to condone violence, I can think of a long list of candidates that I would put ahead of Snoop Dogg. Whatever his street-smart origins, he has become a prosperous taxpayer manufacturing a legitimate product people want. It isn’t a product I want. Watching someone making gang-signs at me with his fingers while his snarling mouth confuses loquacity with eloquence was tough enough when Ice T did it. But Ice T turned into one of the best actors on television, and Snoop Dogg, if he manages to dodge all the drive-by shooters who were stupid enough to take his lyrics literally, will probably end up with his face on Mount Rushmore.
And then there’s Amy Winehouse, whose best songs really are works of art, no question. And she can actually sing them to you, in a way you would rather remember than forget. And yet she looks as if she can’t wait until it’s all over. Billie Holiday, by the end, had reasons to feel like that. But at the start, she guarded her gift. And Ella Fitzgerald sang on into old age as if her gift belonged to the world, which indeed it did. Amy Winehouse, if she wished, might build up an achievement that could be mentioned in the same breath as those two: perhaps not as varied, perhaps not as abundant, but just as unmistakeably individual, and even more so because some of the songs would be composed by her, and not just handed to her on a piece of paper.
It could be that she does wish to fulfil her vast potential, but she has another wish that conflicts: the wish for oblivion. It’s hard to speak against that wish without sounding like an advertisement for a package holiday. As this world goes, there are ample reasons for wanting to be out of it even if your personal history is a comfort, and I imagine hers has been the opposite. But she knows all this. The proof is in some of her songs. The proof is in her voice. You don’t get to sing like that unless you can give a shape to grief.
Not long before he died last week, Humphrey Lyttleton said that he admired the way Amy Winehouse sang and would have liked to meet her. Some commentators have wondered what he would have said. There’s no telling. He was the prince of joy, and he might have told her that he was glad to have lived out a long life in music. The old Etonian would surely have admitted that he had begun his career in conditions of privilege, as she had not, and that he had always had the gift of happiness, which she plainly hasn’t, or anyway does not have yet.
But he could have added that he only had to listen to a few bars of her singing to realise that she had been given the greatest gift a musician of any kind can have, and that a gift on that scale is not possessed by its owner, but does all the possessing. Maybe that’s what she’s afraid of. When people say that you have a duty to your talent, they all too often mean that you have a duty to them. But they’re misstating the case. The duty of the greatly talented is to life itself, because what they do is the consecration of life. I could end with something that Pavarotti once told me in his dressing room before I interviewed him. He wouldn’t say it on air, for fear of sounding immodest. He said he knew his gift was from God. But perhaps a better ending would be what Philip Larkin said to the ghost of Sidney Bechet. “On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes”. Come on, kiddo. Give us a song."

Snoop and Amy | clivejames.com

[steeljack]

Originally Posted by kestrelx

Where did you pinch this quote from out the NME?


Clive James on Amy Winehouse:


Snoop and Amy | clivejames.com

biggest load of tripe I've ever read in a long time , methinks Clive James belongs to the same anti British/pro Israeli cabal as Rupert Murdoch, guess it's no coincidence that he spent his Cambridge years with Germaine Greer

[kestrelx]

Originally Posted by steeljack

biggest load of tripe I've ever read in a long time , methinks Clive James belongs to the same anti British/pro Israeli cabal as Rupert Murdoch, guess it's no coincidence that he spent his Cambridge years with Germaine Greer

So how does that tie in with Amy Winehouse? Don't tell me she was part of some Jewish Conspiracy

[mobertol]

6 months after her death Amy Winehouse's style has been celebrated at Paris Fashion week by Jean-Paul Gaultier.

See link below for some of his creations and the way his models were made to look like her.

Jean Paul Gaultier Pays Tribute to Amy Winehouse at Paris Fashion Week - Yahoo! omg!

Would love the big hair but I haven't got the patience to grow it any more - could do the eye-liner though.

Comparing the original Amy in her Red creation -I think I prefer her original version of the Style!

[jaysay]

Originally Posted by mobertol

6 months after her death Amy Winehouse style has been celebrated at Paris Fashion week by Jean-Paul Gaultier.

See link below for some of his creations and the way his models were made to look like her.

Jean Paul Gaultier Pays Tribute to Amy Winehouse at Paris Fashion Week - Yahoo! omg!

Would love the big hair but I haven't got the patience to grow it any more - could do the eye-liner though.

Comparing the original Amy in her Red creation -I think I prefer her original version of the Style!

I just preferred to listen to her

[garinda]

Originally Posted by kestrelx

Where did you pinch this quote from out the NME?

Only just seen this.

No need to plagiarise.

All my own work.

Plenty of vitriolic bile of my own.

Don't need to reproduce anyone else's.

[kestrelx]

Originally Posted by mobertol

6 months after her death Amy Winehouse's style has been celebrated at Paris Fashion week by Jean-Paul Gaultier.

See link below for some of his creations and the way his models were made to look like her.

Jean Paul Gaultier Pays Tribute to Amy Winehouse at Paris Fashion Week - Yahoo! omg!

Would love the big hair but I haven't got the patience to grow it any more - could do the eye-liner though.

Comparing the original Amy in her Red creation -I think I prefer her original version of the Style!

Mitch, her father doesn't like it!

Amy Winehouse news: dad Mitch angry at catwalk copycats | The Sun |Showbiz|Bizarre

It's probably because JPG has ignored the foundation and not offered to contribute to that foundation! Other than that I don't see what the fuss is all about.

[garinda]

Originally Posted by kestrelx

Mitch, her father doesn't like it!

Amy Winehouse news: dad Mitch angry at catwalk copycats | The Sun |Showbiz|Bizarre

It's probably because JPG has ignored the foundation and not offered to contribute to that foundation! Other than that I don't see what the fuss is all about.

Bit rich. Her father complaining of someone using her image.

He's used her ever since she first achieved success, to further his grubby little career, as some second rate crooner.

[kestrelx]

Originally Posted by garinda

Bit rich. Her father complaining of someone using her image.

He's used her ever since she first achieved success, to further his grubby little career, as some second rate crooner.

1+ Perhaps might sell a few more records for her!

[mobertol]

I like the way the article describes her father as "grieving" -I've seen him interviewed several times since her death and he looked like he was enjoying every minute while basking in her reflected limelight!

Whether JPG really was making a tribute to her style or was just trying to cash in on her image I can't tell. I don't know if they were friends or if he ever did any work for her. Only his conscience can give an answer to that question.