Amy Winehouse cut her second album in 2006 with a Brooklyn soul band, a beehive and a heart freshly broken — eleven songs, thirty-five minutes, the whole catastrophe set to a 1960s girl-group beat. It made her the first British woman to win five Grammys in a night, sold in the tens of millions, and was the last record she would ever finish.
Amy Winehouse cut her second album in 2006 with a Brooklyn soul band, a beehive and a heart freshly broken — eleven songs, thirty-five minutes, the whole catastrophe set to a 1960s girl-group beat. It made her the first British woman to win five Grammys in a night, sold in the tens of millions, and was the last record she would ever finish.
Amy Winehouse's second and final studio album, released in October 2006 — eleven autobiographical songs about a love affair coming apart, recorded in New York and Miami with Mark Ronson, Salaam Remi and the Brooklyn soul band the Dap-Kings, and dressed in the sound of early-1960s girl groups and Motown. It made her the biggest British star in the world and won five Grammys. She died less than five years later, at twenty-seven.
Amy Winehouse was twenty-two and effectively between record deals when the songs that became Back to Black arrived. Her 2003 debut Frank — a jazz-inflected, sharp-tongued record made when she was a teenager — had earned critical praise, a Mercury nomination and modest sales, but she had fallen out with her management and spent much of 2005 drinking, not writing, and falling hard for a former music-video production assistant named Blake Fielder-Civil. When Fielder-Civil left her to return to an ex-girlfriend, the heartbreak became the engine of a second album. She later said the songs poured out of the wreckage of that relationship — and they came whole, in a voice that had stopped performing jazz sophistication and started telling the unvarnished truth.
The sound was the work of two producers pulling in the same direction from different cities. In New York, the young DJ-turned-producer Mark Ronson heard Winehouse's demos and her offhand love of 1960s girl groups — the Shangri-Las above all — and made the decision that defined the record: rather than sample old soul, he would build it new, live, with a real band. He brought in the Dap-Kings, the crack analog soul outfit who backed Sharon Jones on the Brooklyn label Daptone, and cut his six tracks to tape in a way that sounded unearthed from 1963. In Miami, Salaam Remi — who had produced much of Frank — worked the same seam on his own five, playing most of the instruments himself. The result is one of the most convincing acts of historical ventriloquism in pop: a record that sounds like vintage Motown and Phil Spector and yet is unmistakably about a specific woman's specific 2006.
What keeps Back to Black from being mere pastiche is that every song is autobiography, delivered without flinching. "Rehab" — the song that opened the album and made her famous — was not a metaphor: when the people around her urged her toward rehab, she refused, and turned the refusal into a defiant, horn-driven hook. Her ex-manager later called the lyric pretty much verbatim. The title track is a funeral march for the affair with Fielder-Civil ("we only said goodbye with words"). "Love Is a Losing Game" is two and a half minutes of devastating economy, a torch song stripped to its filament. "You Know I'm No Good" is a confession of infidelity that refuses to ask forgiveness. Winehouse wrote or co-wrote all of it — sole author on seven of the eleven — and she sang it in a contralto that could move from Dinah Washington phrasing to raw North London vowels inside a single line.
Released in the UK on 27 October 2006, the album entered at number three and climbed to number one in January 2007, going on to become the UK's best-selling album of that year; in the US, after the Grammys, it reached number two. The awards came in a flood. At the 50th Grammy Awards in February 2008 she won five — Record of the Year and Song of the Year (both for "Rehab"), Best New Artist, Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance — the most ever won in a single night by a British woman, while Ronson took Producer of the Year. Denied a US visa in time for the ceremony, she performed by satellite from a studio in London, and the image of her staring down a camera an ocean away from her own coronation became one of the defining pop moments of the decade.
The same tabloids that crowned her then turned on her. Back to Black's success collided with an addiction it had, in part, described, and the last years of Winehouse's life were lived in public and in decline — cancelled shows, a disastrous 2011 comeback tour, the constant flashbulbs of Camden. On 23 July 2011 she was found dead at her home in Camden Town; the medical cause was alcohol toxicity, and she was twenty-seven, joining the grim roll-call — Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain — that the culture files under that age. Back to Black returned to number one in the UK the week after her death and surged on charts around the world. It is impossible now to hear the record without that ending pressing on it, and yet the album resists being reduced to a prophecy: it is too funny, too defiant, too alive.
Back to Black is not in our hundred, and the reason is simply that the hundred is closed. By any other measure it is one of the most important albums of its century — in Britain, the second-best-selling album of the entire century so far, behind only Adele's 21. It rescued an entire idea: that a mainstream pop record could be built on live, vintage soul instrumentation and adult, unsanitised lyrics. In doing so it opened the door for a British wave that followed almost immediately — Adele, Duffy, Paloma Faith and a decade of retro-soul revival all walk through the gap Winehouse made, and Mark Ronson built a career and the Dap-Kings a second life on its sound. It remains the rarest thing in pop: a perfect second record by an artist who only ever finished two, which told you exactly who she was and then left before she could tell you anything else.
Here is the thing most sellers get wrong: there is no 2006 UK vinyl pressing of Back to Black. The October 2006 UK release was CD and cassette only, so the record collectors should chase as the 'original' on vinyl is the 2006 US LP on Universal Republic (catalogue B0008994-01), its lacquers cut at Sterling Sound — identifiable by the etched 'STERLING' in the runout (a sister 2006 US variant was cut at The Mastering Lab). The first vinyl LP made for the UK/EU market is the 2007 Universal/Island 180g pressing (catalogue 173 412 8) — the one most British buyers think of as the 'original,' though it is a year younger than the album. For sound, the 2018 Abbey Road half-speed remaster (cut by Miles Showell, 'MILES. ABBEY ROAD 1/2 SPEED' etched in the deadwax) is the audiophile reference. The trap is paying first-press money for one of the many later black-vinyl repressings — the sleeve barely changed across a decade of editions, so the catalogue number and runout, not the cover, are what tell you what you've got.
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