15 Dec 2009 by Chris     No Comments    Posted under: Entertainment

Albums of the Decade: No.6

Frank by Amy Winehouse

“Cos your dream in life, is to be a footballers wife”

Every artist who makes it big seems to be in the middle of a tour when it happens, playing venues which are suddenly too small, to people who bought their tickets without knowing what they’d let themselves in for. That’s how I caught Amy Winehouse live, when she played Cambridge Corn Exchange for the last time. But it was doubly lucky because it wasn’t long after that gig when she really started to go off the rails. Frank was her first album, from 2003, and it launched an extraordinary talent onto the scene who sounded a lot older than just 19. It’s hugely jazz-influenced, but contemporary, and I wonder if this might make it the album which will still get played in fifty years’ time more than any other in this list.

As the tabloids delighted in the state Amy Winehouse got herself in, she became increasingly the spiritual successor of so many self-destructing jazz greats. Maybe like them, she wouldn’t have made this music if she’d been a level-headed mainstream pop product, but I do hope it doesn’t mean that her meagre output to date is all we ever get to hear from her. Anyone who samples Grover Washington Jr., and improves on the original, is alright by me.

• Albums of the Decade: No.7
• Albums of the Decade: No.8
• Albums of the Decade: No.9
• Albums of the Decade: No.10
• Albums of the Decade: No.11
• Albums of the Decade: No.12
• Albums of the Decade: No.13
• Albums of the Decade: No.14
• Albums of the Decade: No.15
• Albums of the Decade: No.16
• Albums of the Decade: No.17
• Albums of the Decade: No.18
• Albums of the Decade: No.19
• Albums of the Decade: No.20

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