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Kids - booze, drugs and eating disorders can be bad bad things. Fact. But sometimes they can do wonders for your music career (far too many examples to list). Also a fact. And although the title of her new single ‘You Know I’m No Good’ suggests otherwise, literally fighting her way out of tabloid stories of binge drinking, heavy narcotic sessions, and not eating much at all, Miss Amy ‘Wino’ Winehouse has shocked a lot of folks with her latest offerings, and injected a much needed bit of soul into a soulless year.
The single charts Amy’s protestations to her lover after being a bit adulterously naughty with another chap. She’s a complete wrong ‘un, but refreshingly honest about it. And to go with this self-deprecating sentiment, Winehouse employs her now trademark grainy, delicate backing melodies and husky voice combined with a bluesy horn section, punchy drum beat, and a killer bassline. Lovely. She might talk and act like Rod Stewart and Pat Butcher’s tourettes inflicted love-child, but she’s got a proper belting pair of lungs, and the voice of a fallen angel. And like ‘Rehab’, the lyrics and subject-matter successfully take relatively contemporary language and concepts, and pour them beautifully into the melancholy musical domain of so many beautiful old singers such as Nina Simone and Bessie Smith.
Check out the impeccably brilliant Ghostface Killah remix on the flip-side, with a couple of verses from the big man himself literally shoehorned into the beat as if they were there all along.
