Winehouse (Amy)

Soul singer/Agreed for her hit Back to Black to be used for the Baby in the Sky advert for the Born HIV Free Campaign

Since her album Back to Black in 2006, Amy Winehouse has been one of the music industry’s most bankable artists. Not that this is a criterion in itself. The fact is that this was a talented musician, able to combine the emotion of a Billie Holiday with a spirit of a Dinah Washington, while totally avoiding the synthetic product seen all too often today. A songwriter and singer, the young Englishwoman, born in 1983 in London, had a soulful voice at which her first album, Frank (2003), had already hinted. From the age of 18, she wrote songs to play in pubs, alongside odd jobs as a receptionist in tattoo parlours and freelancing as a music journalist. But it was her collaboration with producer Mark Ronson which unveiled the full extent of the singer’s range on the album Back to Black (2007). The two years following the release of the album have confirmed its stature as one of the greatest commercial successes of the young 21st century: more than 11 million copies sold worldwide. One can therefore easily imagine that requests for use of the track in exchange for a fee to illustrate an advertisement or a film) are legion. Amy Winehouse has not accepted any of them. It is therefore an honour that she has given permission for the use of her hit Back to Black (with its Motown feel reminiscent of the soul sister groups of the 1960s, the only song on the album of the same name co-written with producer Mark Ronson) for a campaign against AIDS, so that the power of her music can help to transmit the message even further… The singer was found dead, in the afternoon of 23 July 2011, at her house in London.