"She was this moody, chubby, Jewish-looking teenager,” says Annabel Williams, her singing coach with the NYJO. “She seemed fairly quiet and uninterested. Amy first stood out to me when she was in the centre of all the musicians and started singing. I was just like, Woah, she’s amazing. She absolutely nailed it and I was so impressed.”

From here, Winehouse began performing back room pub sets, facing a crowd with just her voice and acoustic guitar. At the same time, she began guesting with a loose north London collective called The Bolsha Band, through which she met her long-term live keyboard-player Sam Beste.

“She said to me, ‘Do you like Thelonius Monk?’” Beste recalls. “People like Dinah Washington and Ray Charles and Donny Hathaway, she really connected with those musicians on a very deep, emotional, raw level. There was a strange awkwardness about Amy. Even in those early days when we were playing the small clubs, she wasn’t really engaging with an audience in the way that an entertainer would. She was a bit in her own world.”

Mark Ronson still marvels at the memory of watching Winehouse in the moments when she lost herself in songwriting. “The thunderbolt strikes the head, the pen scribbles furiously and that’s the song,” he says. “When she wrote, there was no editing. It came out, like, this is the truth and this is how it’s gonna stay. She never second-guessed that and that’s why those lyrics are from another place.”

by Tom Doyle / Mojo

21 years without you…💔

In loving memory of the beautiful Aaliyah Dana Haughton ❤️

January 16th 1979 - August 25th, 2001 ✨