We only said goodbye with words
A love letter to the lyrics of Back To Black by Amy Winehouse
Listen to the way she traces the shape of her hurt.
He
Left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
Anger, accusation. The betrayal expressed crudely so it keeps the self-pity away. She knows who her rival is even if we don’t, leaving her dismissed, devalued, unnamed.
Listening to Back To Black reminds me of Morrissey. On Smiths record sleeves he would be credited not with vocals but ‘voice’, in the literary sense, a unique signature, his contribution was so much more than the mere singing and writing of words. You hear and read Morrissey’s words and it is undeniably him, impossibly anyone else. So of his time, yet outside of time completely.
And I’m reminded of this because Amy Winehouse had a voice. A definitive one. See how it reveals the pain her words won’t admit to.
Me
And my head high
And my tears dry
Get on without my guy
To wipe away tears is to acknowledge them, and she doesn’t want to do that. That’s her crooner’s stiff upper lip talking, and it often masked her needy, vulnerable modernity, her impulse to over share. Hers is the voice of an old soul, incarnated in contemporary music she hoped would inspire her the way her beloved old-time jazz records did. The songs she wrote are now standards, too, imbued as they are with that voice, the one people loved her for. Her diction, phrasing, and impeccable sense of timing were all ultra-classy. It made her seem old-fashioned, stable. But those qualities blinded us to how she really felt. She made us swoon so much we sometimes forgot to wince.
You
Went back to what you knew
So far removed
From all that we went through
She was 23 when she wrote Back To Black. T-w-e-n-t-y t-h-r-e-e. Worth spelling that out, like they do for freak football results (EIGHT-1). It’s a reminder that talent doesn’t recognise age, and while she turned her precocious youthful power to make the Zutons swing, what she really dreamed of was being Dinah Washington. She nearly did, too. She was a jazz singer first, and the greats knew it. Watch her singing with Tony Bennett, they are peers. Validation like this reinforced her talent, I think. Bennett told her that for a jazz singer honesty is everything, that you have to feel it every time you sing it, that if you’re not feeling it you push hard enough that you can. That search for honesty in her art, for something real, is where she was could make sense of her life. But it might also be where she lost control of it.
And I
Tread a troubled track
My odds are stacked
I’ll go back to black
If you doubt your talent, or you doubt that you’ll ever feel the certainty you have of your talent in your life, then maybe temptation is the quickest way to quieten it. It’s only a short crawl from the stage to the Hawley — a troubled track, indeed. Ultimately she couldn’t face it anymore. There was that time she sat on a stage and refused to sing, refused to share her art any more because no one seemed to care about it as much as she did. Everyone was distracted by the “bollocks,” as she called it. Fame. Celebrity. Whatever.
And in the end everyone let her down, cheated on her. Romantically, yes, though Back To Black isn’t really about that. It’s based on an infidelity, but listen to the voice, not the words. The voice says, Life is precarious, and so is my idea of myself; the end of an affair is the end of me. Betrayal doesn’t deny her love, it denies her life.
And so she fades to black, to nothing, a void where the stinging truth — that no one will ever love her as much as she loves them — cannot be avoided. When people cheated on her it was out of selfishness. They refused, or were unable, to give something up. With her Dad, it was fame. With Blake, drugs. And in the relationship between Amy and her art, well, you can’t help but think it was she herself who got in the way. Everyone else loved her — it was hard not to, since she made everyone feel so good. But you wonder if she ever really loved herself, and whether in the end nothing else was ever quite enough to overcome that.
Me
I love you much
But it’s not enough
That you like blow and I like puff
And life
Is like a pipe
And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside
Asif Kapadia’s Amy is a film that vividly shows us just how smart and likeable she was. Superficially she seems one of us, the sharp humour and playfulness of the home movies cutting through the screen to paint her as that mate you’d always want around in the pub. But the film also reminds us that she was special, that she had it, even if that it never made her content. There was still a blank that needed filling in, a blank that seems bigger the longer the film goes on. The film reminds us that whatever’s on the surface, whatever is superficially said, we never really know what’s happening inside.
We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to…Black…
Black…
Black…
Black…
Black…
Black…
Black…………
Kapadia cleverly lets the words of her songs run on screen whenever she’s singing. It means Amy gets to speak for herself in a film where everyone else tells their own story better than they do hers. Her voice — the words and delivery together — reveals itself in the end, and it’s what will remain. In a bitter irony, words were the one thing with which she never said ‘goodbye’. Her death seemed grimly inevitable by the end. Looking back, her life only pointed in one direction. A direction that fades to black. To nothing. A void.
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