They’re all sleepy figures. Matt Greenhalgh, screenwriter of the biopic, Back to Black (2024), being interviewed on the red carpet. Mark Ronson, producer, in his studio with his waxed quiff, running through how Amy Winehouse’s acclaimed song came to fruition. Slurred, dreamy, not as intentionally drowsy as Amy, but embodying that non-mainstream beat, filter and dusty 60s vibe; We never said goodbye with words becoming We only said goodbye with words; I died a hundred deaths becoming I died a hundred times.

Ronson gets it wrong. He notices the switch from deaths to times, but he thinks it’s a thousand times on the album, not a hundred. Such vital changes though – simplifying things; only, a 180, less definitive, pleading for more, a rounded, physical finale, a slapping of bodies and recognition that this is as high as it gets; times, softer, less graphic, yet filled with anguish, absence and excruciating torment.

Without the fevered piano and marching band drums intro laced throughout ‘Back to Black’, Amy takes a different route in life. The jaunty brilliance of Ronson’s spring reverb – particularly if we imagine the shifting and swaying, suited up black men that were to accompany her – supersedes the acoustic version of the song and propels it onto a stage. Almost any stage.

“I made this thing last night. Let me know what you think,” Ronson tells her. “Yeh, I love it,” Amy responds, not knowing what was to come, not knowing how her life would tumble after the majesty, fame and bruised exorcism of ‘Back to Black’ (single and album 2006). ‘He left no time to regret,’ its opening line, its miasma of difficulty, imparts. Gloom. Speed. Moving on. Security away from the limelight. Her boyfriend wanted out. But, oh, how ordinary drama turns into something that people ache over, relate to, play their own lives through.

Instrumentals. Lyrics. Vocals. In the case of ‘Back to Black’, Ronson slept only two hours in order to prepare the groundwork. Amy came in, listened to it, put a burned CD into her Discman and took an hour in the back room of the studio to come up with the lyrics. Looking at those lyrics now, and hearing that first version of the song with its different pauses and slightly more flinched and recoiled vocal atmosphere, makes you not disappointed but rather marvel at the scenes created.

What happened to her shifts to us, the avid listeners. And in our heads and through our eyes we see Blake’s ‘same old safe bet’, Amy’s ‘head high’ (exclusion of the word ‘held’ symptomatic of that North London slang, vibe, reduction and shortening of what once was). We then move on to ‘So far removed from all that we went through’. Comparison. Uniqueness. Special times. They weren’t at the opera. But that’s the point. Togetherness exemplified that heat between two people, that rapport, that instant bond, that joy and fun and metaphorical swinging from the trees.

Amy’s ‘troubled track’ and ‘back to black’ is everyone; anyone who has ever lost something … someone, the core of their existence. And dying ‘a hundred times’ – through its hyperbole, its exaggeration, its embellishment – is actually a modest total given the magnitude of love. Three and half months, once a day, and you’re probably still mourning if it meant something.

“She had to feel what [Blake] felt,” director of Amy (2015), Asif Kapadia, tells us a decade on, courtesy of Blake’s friend who shot the Miami wedding footage in May 2007. Cocaine and heroin were her form of love therefore, doing what he did, being on the same level, not missing out, sharing – even in harrowing circumstances beyond those first few laughs, flirtations and highs.

Amy did warn us. Even at a young age. In Kapadia’s documentary, in front of a fish tank, interviewed by an industry kid, she says: “The more people see of me, the more they’ll realise that all I’m good for is making music.” It’s a clear statement, a frank admittance. I’m just a Camden girl. Nothing to see here. No insights. Just tunes.

But the media create insights. They hound and break you. “Her downfall took place under callously voyeuristic circumstances.”

Release of the Sam Taylor-Johnson directed film, Back to Black, is meant to reclaim some of that early innocence, some of that young Jewish girl (pre-paparazzi and beehive) who was inspired by Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and many other jazz/Motown/gospel greats.

The contralto vocals, the “glottal-stopped London accent eerily [combining] with a Motown swing … to make a smooth-rough-smooth sound” and the smart, dishevelled grammar. They all project her. The snarling, radiant energy. The sweet, four-syllable ‘re-un-i-on’ of ‘You Know I’m No Good’. And her best line by far – the scruffy, altered, wayward genius of ‘I love you muuuuuuch’. It is slow and hesitant, yet assertive – the silent, understated cry and core of ‘Back to Black’, her revered, mesmeric track.

“What d’you call it then, the … Winehouse style?” Jack O’Connell (playing Blake Fielder-Civil) asks in the film. “Dunno. It’s a bit vintage, innit,” Marisa Abela (Amy) replies, infatuated. “Bit of an anachronism, aren’t I.” The conversation, whether real or not, leant against the bar in The Good Mixer pub, is pithy and playful. It’s a wonderful, respectful take on a soon-to-be-couple who ultimately fall into drugs and darkness.

Vintage. Admired. The best of your posse. Amy was certainly that for a while. Her appearances on Later… with Jools Holland exemplify this. They are priceless and tragic in that they seem to transport Amy to a different environment, a safer place, a simple musical universe where stars are not slavered over, but greeted and shown warmheartedness.

Her first performance, singing ‘Stronger Than Me’, in November 2003 – just a month after the release of her debut album, Frank, and two months after her 20^th birthday – is heavenly in its naivety, its pureness, its depiction of a seemingly uncomplicated Amy without tattoos or cuts; Amy looking healthy, fascinated by the vibe around her, half-gooning at the camera within seconds of strumming her guitar.

And that voice! She mumbles the first line (‘You should be stronger than me’) through nerves or design, but then it’s the customary lift-off, the blast from nowhere, lips barely parted, mood and sultriness entering the fray. In many ways, this is her single most impressive live performance – better than the sluggish daytime or swarthy evening of Glastonbury, 2007 and 2008; the latter part inelegant gob of gum, part punching a member of the crowd.

Jazz is best contained. Kept small. The towering beehive and lack of intimacy crumple Amy a little. Too many photographers. Too much equipment. Everything a bit hollow and inattentive. Her authenticity on the wane. Her lung capacity diminished. Some of the tunes tinny when away from a club or studio. The “curious mash-up of vulnerability and strength” – to quote Jools – now just unseen vulnerability, addiction and woe.

Quite appropriately, she starts her 2008 set with ‘Addicted’, the final track on her second album. Her timing is off. We can’t hear her. The on-stage horns initially drown her out. The movement of Amy, always neat and nimble – originally with her guitar as a shield – now resembles the drunk at a family party; her power impaired, her opening choice of songs including ‘Just Friends’ a little flat. Sure, it’s the ditty jazz routine inflected with snaky limbs, the touching of her hair and the hem of her dress, but her self-belief and direction have been shorn. Through the loutish, bitter, world-weary veneer, we see struggle. Nobody wants to say it, but she’s a mess – a tumbling, former orchid.

Back to Black, the latest artistic attempt to find solace or meaning in Amy’s life, has been described as “syrupy” and “bankrupt”. What such posturing misses – aside from the film’s eloquent portrayal of a life gone wrong – is the timeline of Amy’s demise: meeting Blake (2005); the death of her grandmother, Cynthia (2006); marriage (May 2007), abandoning the recording of the theme to the latest James Bond film (May 2008); her husband going to prison (July 2008); divorce (August 2009); misadventure (July 2011).

How best to show or hint at these? Through the ugly scrum of a frame-by-frame apocalypse – booze, bulimia and breast implants – or through love? Taylor-Johnson, Greenhalgh, Alison Owen (producer), Nina Gold (casting director) and Marisa Abela chose love. They chose celebration. Not in a wanton, unjust, too unrealistic manner, but in a way which harnessed the unsurpassable Amy, the preeminent Amy, the Amy from humble beginnings who simply didn’t know how to handle loss.

A third studio album would have been something, as would being remembered alongside the lustrous Shirley Bassey. The covers of ‘Valerie’ and ‘It’s My Party’ offered hope, promise and the tingling re-emergence of an ebbing talent; Amy nonchalantly shifting through the scales. It was not to be though. Instead, we got the corporeal form of her early words: “I fell in love with someone who I would have died for. And that’s like a real drug, isn’t it.”

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By Jeff Weston (author of Wagenknecht)