In partnership with STUDIOCANAL
The Amy Winehouse Band, made up of the singer’s original sidemen and women, are keeping her flame burning live, and its bassist and director Dale Davis is a musical supervisor on Back to Black. Here, Davis talks us through his favourite memories of playing with Winehouse – who once hailed him as “my favourite person to go anywhere with”.
When I realised Amy was special…
“It was my third gig with Amy, at Powis Square, London [during The Notting Hill Carnival in August 2003]. I thought this would be a difficult gig for her – a young white girl in a predominantly Black environment, but within half of her set, the square had completely filled up. I thought she didn’t need a band because her voice was so powerful. She was on fire.”
How she kept us on our toes…
“After four nights of singing the same song, she would introduce new melodies and change things around so everything was different. That ended up being one of her downfalls because she improvised every night and gave so much performing that it left her tired.”
Where she got her love of jazz from…
“We played Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London at the beginning, which was the right place for her because her nan, Cynthia, dated Ronnie and she was steeped in the history of great singers.”
What made her exciting…
“Amy crossed over because she had a jazz voice but then she was the most rebellious spirit I’ve come across and had a punk mentality. That’s why she could handle rowdy Arctic Monkeys fans when she played their Old Trafford gig at Lancashire County Cricket Club [in July 2007]. In the bar afterwards was the first time she could afford a round of drinks for everyone – which cost around £300.”
My favourite song of hers…
Recommended
“‘Moody’s Mood For Love’. It’s a cover of a ‘50s tune, but the way Amy sang the song on her debut album, ‘Frank’, in 2003, gave me goosebumps. Its producer Salaam Remi said she’d only learned the song a week before recording it and it’s incredible. I remember asking her: ‘Amy, why don’t you play ‘Moody’s Mood…’?’ and she replied: ‘Well, it’s a hard song!’ When we did our next rehearsal, she’d nailed it straight away and it became our thing.”
The best way to experience her live majesty…
“The ‘I Told You I Was Trouble – Amy Winehouse Live in London’ DVD was filmed over two nights at the Clapham Grand [in London] and it’s great because there aren’t many live DVDs of Amy, and everybody got lucky with that great performance. I look at her as the first star of this millennium, and liken her to Kurt Cobain – a very short career but massively impactful.”
My final phone conversation with her…
“If Amy was here now and saw they’d made a [film] of her, she wouldn’t understand what all the fuss was about! She was humble. She never talked about herself. Our last conversation involved her phoning me up and saying: ‘Dale, I’ve been watching YouTube videos of myself. I can sing, can’t I?’. I responded: ‘Of course you can Amy, you’re the best!’. I’m glad she thought that the night before she died, because she’d never talked about anything like that before.”
How I keep her music alive…
“When we first started doing The Amy Winehouse Band, I was reluctant because it felt emotional and strange. Within the first few gigs, an audience member said: ‘I was supposed to be here with my recently-passed mother, and this is one of the few things she wanted to do’. I realised it was about the crowd – not me. We do it out of the love and respect Amy gave us over the years and try to honour that as closely as we can.”
The Amy Winehouse Band will play two shows in December 2024 at Koko in Winehouse’s old stomping ground of Camden
‘Back to Black’ is in cinemas from April 12 – get tickets here