When Amy Winehouse released her 2003 debut, Frank, the country was in the grasp of Parkinson-pop, acts that had found a spiritual home on cosy late-night chat shows and went on to become as popular and soporific as a nice cup of bedtime Ovaltine. Katie Melua, Norah Jones, Jamie Cullum, Michael Bublé — they all promised finger- clicking maturity and well crafted songwriting but had as much to do with youth culture as a tartan shopping trolley. The confrontational Winehouse, on the other hand, actually gave the impression that she understood the raw sexual etymology of the word jazz and wasn’t just using it as a tasteful adornment to ensure maximum wine-bar airplay.

Her second album, Back to Black, is another record redolent with the tang of modern bohemia, building on the platinum-selling Frank’s witty exploration of sex and self-realisation. It cuts itself on the corners of a love triangle (the gripping confessional You Know I‘m No Good), enforces its own drug etiquette (Addicted) and displays a devastating facility for swearing that would leave the likes of Melua in tears (Me & Mr Jones).

Yet while Winehouse’s new tabloid-friendly tattoos and piercings might match the defiance of the opening single, Rehab (an old-school spiritual transplanted into a profane modern setting), her tough-girl stance and scabrous wit is tempered with real vulnerability. The hormonal fizz of the best girl-group pop drives the beautifully maudlin Love is a Losing Game and the title track (“You go back to her and I go back to black”), while Wake Up Alone offers another knife to the heart (“It’s OK in the day/ I’m staying busy/ Tied up enough so I don’t have to wonder where is he”).

Unlike her predecessors, however, Winehouse doesn’t have to be coy when it comes to asking her man if he’ll still love her tomorrow — these are explicit, honest songs made all the more compelling by a voice so dense and smoky you need a nicotine patch after the record finishes. For all the old-fashioned warmth of the arrangements, this is an album from a thoroughly modern milieu. “I’m my own man,” sings Winehouse on Addicted — and you don‘t doubt it for a second.

(Island)

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