Amy is bookended by two striking performances. The first, in which a 14 year old Amy sings ‘Happy Birthday’ at a party with friends, the second, a studio duet with Tony Bennett. The first, while just teenage fooling around, reveals someone with a special voice who loves to use it, the second, someone using that voice in tandem with one of the great song stylists, with risk, range and artistry. A voice which four months later would be no more.
But what happens in the intervening two hours or so of Asif Kapadia’s documentary is an engaging visual kaleidoscope in which her voice is not always to the fore. It’s a painstakingly researched and meticulously edited collage of moments, highspots, lowspots, mobile phone footage, tv footage, helicopter shots, back of car shots, voicemail messages, voiceover interviews which works, by telling a story without imposing a viewpoint. It’s all more or less interesting stuff. But when that voice sings or those eyes reveal or betray or hint at something it sparkles. Watch the eyes disdain as they diss an interviewer comparing her to Dido.
The voice – and the eyes – are at the core of this. The rest is just more or less interesting packaging, the sharp but ordinary girl from Southgate or the paparazzi-hounded celeb from Camden, caught up, willingly or inescapably in the claws of the twin bitch goddesses of success and excess. She charms and frustrates and teases and repels like any clever adolescent or addict will. Nothing new.
And the eyes have it, wide eyed at high times, at low times dead, a half look, a shamed look, a detached look. She was clearly stressed and confused by her family situation, hopelessly co-dependent on a similarly confused loser, uncomfortably unable to please the returned dad, wild child both tormented by and, by turns, triumphing in and wasting her talent.
Perhaps not much of it was her fault, perhaps none at all. Any would-be or nonentity with a fraction of her ability can make it nowadays if making it implies signing up unprotected to the sad circus or mad parade. I don’t think she even thought about making some accommodation with it, or finding some space outside it. It all just happened.
You get a glimpse of what might have been in that final session with Bennett. In awe of her idol, she’s nervous, unsure, feels she can’t get it right. Bennett’s stories of Dinah Washington are the trigger she needs, she takes off and does the job, an adventurous descant to his very straight take on ‘Body and Soul’. And then she says to Bennett something about it was sad Washington died really young.
Watch it. I can’t be objective really, having known her briefly when she was a teenager, being familiar with her haunts and hangouts. She was the out of time jazz singer. This is the modern world. And sometimes modern life is rubbish.