July 4, 2015
By Joanna Biggs
There’s an unfashionable bar (click here) I drink in on the edge of Soho – you can always find a table – and what makes it unfashionable isn’t so much the neon lighting, the scant bowls of crisps or the pink straws in the gin and tonic so much as the Amy Winehouse fan art covering the walls. Amy’s five-day-old mussed-up beehive, smudged Cleopatra eyeliner and shy-bold eyes, features as unmistakable as Marilyn’s platinum curls, heavy eyelashes and delighted red-lipped smile, multiply around you in photorealist or more impressionistic oils.
Winehouse, who died four years ago this month, is already a too classical and universal part of pop culture to be fashionable. But we still can’t decide on what we witnessed during her last three years. Asif Kapadia’s new found-footage documentary of her life, Amy, was met with astonishment when it premiered at Cannes and was reviewed on its release on Friday as both “mawkish tabloid fare” and “a tragic masterpiece”. Was she a decent jazz singer made glorious by notoriety or a real musician unfairly cut down in her prime?...
