Extra New List:: Best Male Rock Voices
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www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk
My novel, Kindness is a City:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1
LATEST ESSAY
Brief Encounter with a Comet: Amy Winehouse
Our twins were stillborn at twenty weeks and their ashes scattered in the Children's Garden at Golders Green cemetery. The coffin was a tiny white box for two. There was mist and drizzle that day—it was February 2011—and later, on Tottenham Court Road, some species of confidence trickster got in our faces and there was a scene. It is the nearest I have ever come to attacking a stranger in the street. My wife Kaye pleaded with the man to go away. 'We've lost our children,' she said and he disappeared.
Six months later, the ashes of another child—a much older child, a famous child, a comet—were on the ground in that same place. We had followed the path of that comet over the previous seven years from a fairly close place. It burnt brightly, and briefly, and was extinguished too soon. Our lives had moved on so little in the time it was in the sky.
The comet was a singer. We encountered the singer on the way up. The first impression left by the singer lasted, despite all that followed.
The singer was Amy Winehouse.
September 2004 at the Cross Keys pub on Endell Street, the quiet thoroughfare that gets ignored on the way to Drury Lane, and is sometimes mistaken for it. The Cross Keys nearly burnt to the ground a few years later, survived, has maintained its impressive mane of creeping ivy and hanging baskets. Kaye and I were on the way in when I spotted the girl, the singer, the one I'd been reading about and listening to, the one whose surprising voice and illicit lyrics and muscular jazz sensibility had so recently grabbed me. She was standing by the road and clearly waiting for somebody. Looked a little anxious—maybe even great talents have people not turn up. And I swear I liked her immediately, warmed to her, took to her just standing there looking vulnerable in a way that was beyond the feeling you get for celebrities spotted in public--that gratitude because they have briefly entered your life.
Her hair was only part of the way to being heaped then. Her cheeks still had that ruddiness that was later vanquished. She had curves too, edging indeed towards voluptuousness on a tiny frame, and despite the famous bird-like legs. Trainers, so no tottering on high-heals, a then limited catalogue of body illustrations, the facial hair she unusually (and pleasingly) never eradicated, a hard-to-judge balance of hazel and olive in eyes that seemed to reveal constantly shifting things, certainly shyness, some cheek, maybe the realisation that she was an ordinary girl already plunged beyond expectations and not sure how best to enjoy it. A slightly larger jaw than her face deserved already prevented her being beautiful, but it was the most beautiful she was ever going to be.
Amy's friends arrived—all young men, music industry types of various stamps I guess; it was clear Amy was romantically inclined towards one of these chaps, and this chap bore all the signs of a the young cad who has been there, done that, is with his mates, is not going to show affection even for a starlet—and the drinking began in earnest. The pub was small and seating was limited. Amy chose at one point to sit on a radiator with a wooden cover which acted as a little resting place for beer. My left hand was on the radiator cover and Amy sat on my hand. I have been apologised to before by relatively famous people. Peter Hooton From the Liverpool band The Farm knocked my kebab to the floor in a Sheffield takeaway just after I'd assured him his band would never have a hit (All Together Now broke a couple of years later). He apologised but we were two pissed blokes in a kebab house, and both from Merseyside, so sarcasm ruled. And Zoe Wanamaker collided with me in the polling station on the Bermerton estate in Islington a year or so ago and said 'sorry'. Her strangely pretty pug dog face was a mask of quiet alarm at the time; the Bemerton is not a place where the Islington glitterati will feel comfortable, being very much on the wrong side of the Caledonian Road, our side. But when Amy Winehouse apologised to me it felt like a real apology—sincere, embarrassed, amused at herself and the situation.
My left hand has been famous at school ever since. 'Sir is it really true Amy Winehouse sat on your hand?' has become a mantra there.
Amy did different stuff over those same years.
And the devil did have his day.
Frank is a better album than Back to Black. There, it's down on the page. I know you won't agree. Most people discovered Winehouse through her second—huge, influential, vaunted—album, so I'm on pretty safe ground in asserting this. And tuneful, retro sixties girl group pop-soul trumps sometimes discordant pop-jazz, right? Singing about the central failings of your adult life—addiction, the causes of addiction---trumps sometimes flippant late teenage sexual discovery, yes? Even if Back to Back is only thirty-five minutes long (the artistic output was clearly already waning) it's got Love is a Losing Game, see, and everybody knows that's like the best sad love song written since Yesterday. Plus there's all the Grammies, and the iconic new image, yeah—all those tattoos, the little dresses, the hair, the awkward performance ticks, the slow living death—that seared her into the collective consciousness. It's the biggest album of the Noughties, man!
You make very good points, but you are wrong. Please indulge me: let me take you through the highlights of that first album. When indeed was the last time you listened to it?
She basically says 'I'm different, aren't I?' in Intro. It is a bold move. She is right. Then there's Stronger Than Me, in which she slips for the first time into her career theme: the fatal attraction to weak men, but does it with the scathing humour we have never encountered before, not like this. For the first time we hear those weird phrasings and singular transitions in You Sent Me Flying, a gorgeous echo of Sarah Vaughan. Listen to this track, and then listen again if you don't get it, for God's sake! No British female performing artist has ever sounded like this—so good, so aware of what her voice is about, so accomplished so young. Plus we've got Fuck Me Pumps, in which new things are expressed in new ways. The observation, the sarcasm, the sheer unalloyed bitchiness she brings to the work is breathtaking (no contrived little rich girl Lily Allen bullshit here). In My Bed was the first single, the first sound, with that sinister muffled percussion, and the cynical weariness that became the mantra of an artist finding her direction. Amy was 'so fucking angry' in Take the Box that she kicked him out. Beyonce would never cuss like that (certainly not in church, but maybe a bit, with Mr Carter, after martinis) but the tenet of her break-up song On the Left seems remarkably similar, similar but incredibly anodyne in comparison, at least to my jaundiced ear. And there is What is it About Men?, where the Winehouse whore tells Amy the girl about the repeated disappointments to come, but does not tell her to stop.
It is an album about others; it is not just about Amy. Her life was not yet the self-indulgent sideshow to the music. Her unhappiness was not yet her muse. It is as good a British debut album--in any popular music genre at any time--by a solo artist writing most of the songs, and sounds all the better today because we know that so much silence was to follow.
By the time the Beatles split in 1969 George Harrison had thirteen albums under his belt. He was twenty eight years-old. When Amy Winehouse died in July 2011 she was the same age. Albums: two. It is a comparison that some find unkind, but it is nonetheless necessary to make it. Her beloved Camden, and her beloved Blakey, and her million pound performances for Russian oligarchs, and her bloodstained deck shoes, and the emphysema, and those final dreadful, destructive live performances, and the weaknesses that we shouldn't seek to blame those around her for--not really, not when the girl was so wilful--are both testament to and explanation for this shortfall. Lioness I do not listen to. The later recordings on it remind me of playing hack-about five-a-side football with an ageing former football pro many years ago. The evidence of his failing powers was only too obvious to me, his opponent, so I can but imagine how it screamed out to him and spat in his eye. At least the girl never got to hear her final album as it comes out through the speakers. At least she has that.
And the title, this 'Lioness'. What the fuck is that? Am I alone in believing the girl would have hated that?
From October Song:
With dread I woke in my bed
To shooting pains up in my head
Lovebird, my beautiful bird
Spoke until one day she couldn't be heard
She just stopped singing
On the morning Amy died I was alone at home. It was the first day of my long summer break. I thought of the twins and lay on the bed wrapped in brief sadness. It simply came and went, as is the way with me.
The news came through late in the afternoon. We had lived just a mile or so apart, but separated by whole worlds. My niece Shannon came down from Southport for a visit on the Monday that followed and we visited the shrine that had sprung up opposite Amy's home. Shannon ended up on Sky and I on CNN. People actually texted to say they had spotted us.
I have found myself upset. It's not like me. People have grand lives—the lives of comets—and then they don't. My life is a pale grey shuffle in comparison but I do not ask for what these others have.
But we shared space and time, Amy and Kaye and I, and she lies on the ground with those closest to us. I will return to the Cross Keys one day soon, and see if she is still standing on the pavement there waiting: anxious, lustrous hair, safe yet from our awful attention and from herself.
William Ruby
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