It’s a legacy that rests on very little music. We are still surrounded by echoes of her music: whenever you hear a bluntly confessional female singer-songwriter, or a retro-soul affectation in an arrangement, or a pop singer with a slurred, prematurely aged vocal style – and you hear those things all the time in 2023 – it’s more than likely Back to Black, her 2006 album, is somewhere in their musical DNA.
She certainly achieved that: 12 years after her death, Winehouse is still, by consent, the most influential British pop artist of the 21st century, revered by Lana Del Rey, Sam Smith, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, credited by Adele with “paving the way for artists like me”.
