“When she was here, she was a blast” – the making of “Back To Black” by Amy Winehouse

Originally published in Uncut Take 291 (August 2021 issue)…

We remember Amy Winehouse now as a towering icon of popular culture, a tragic totem of natural talent in an unfeeling world – but back in 2005 she was just another young singer flitting in and out of the public eye.

Those eyeliner swooshes were mere wingettes, her beehive in larval form. She’d released Frank two years earlier and enjoyed the first flushes of fame in the UK but was little known in America, where Frank would not even get a release until 2007.

When she wasn’t contractually obliged to be on stage, Amy would be holding court in Camden pubs, revelling in the attention and falling hard, fast and very publicly for Blake Fielder-Civil. What she wasn’t doing much of was writing. She’d gained a bit of a reputation for procrastinating at this point. “We heard from Salaam [Remi, who produced most of Frank] saying that she just always took so long to write,” says assistant engineer Mike Makowski, dragging out his O’s for dramatic effect.

But two things happened that sped the creative process along. First, she had her heart broken by Fielder-Civil. Second, she met Mark Ronson. Winehouse realised a musical kinship with the young producer; she knew that she wanted a ’60s girlgroup sound, while Ronson had an ear for a hook and an affection for vintage studio equipment.

The pair famously came up with “Rehab” while wandering down a New York street. But the devastating, funereal “Back To Black” would come together bit by bit. Binky Griptite, former guitarist with the Dap-Kings, remembers Ronson turning up to the studio with a CD packed with “little recordings of the tunes and the chords and whatnot”, and a vision for the song developed throughout the sessions: the first was in the Daptone Studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn, before Amy laid down her vocals at Chung King Studios in Manhattan. Finally, the orchestration was added at Metropolis in London.

The result was spectacular. There’s something quietly majestic in the song’s melodrama. The video, directed by Phil Griffin, feels eerily prophetic: Amy leads a funeral procession to a headstone that reads “RIP The Heart of Amy Winehouse”. The album Back To Black launched Amy into the stratosphere. She became a household name on both sides of the Atlantic and was forced to contend with all the unwanted press attention that brought.

Though no-one knew it at the time, it was to be her swansong: Back To Black stands as a classic, a song and album that continue to strike chords with fans who were too young to be aware of Amy herself. “Even though I didn’t really know,” Homer Steinweiss says of the song, “I kind of felt it.”

BINKY GRIPTITE [guitar]: Amy working with Mark seemed like a last-minute, surprise thing. He was working on his own record and put it aside to do hers, it seemed.

HOMER STEINWEISS [drums]: Mark had been working with the Dap-Kings’ horn section for a Robbie Williams album, I think, or something like that. Then when Mark started working with Amy, he was like, “Man, I could use like a whole band on this kind of sound.”

GRIPTITE: We said OK but we didn’t really think much of it. I mean, nobody knew that it was gonna be so huge. I was actually convinced that she would never make it. I couldn’t imagine somebody with a name like Wine…house? Not a rock-star name to me. I was just like, “She’s never gonna make it.”

MIKE MAKOWSKI [assistant engineer]: I worked at Chung King studios in New York. I started interning there – you had to pretty much work eight months for free, four 12-hour shifts a week. I’d just started getting in on all the sessions at the time when Mark started working with Amy.

GRIPTITE: I noticed that she was really into kids. She would always have to ask me about my daughter. “How’s your likkie-one?” I brought my daughter to soundcheck once, and even though Amy was tired of singing “Rehab”, when I requested it for my daughter she just smiled, said “No problem” and went right into it. That was cool.

MAKOWSKI: Between her and Mark, they’re so laid-back. He would literally come in a white undershirt that looked like he just woke up in it. “Hey, what’s up?” Amy, the only thing she was always saying was, “I can’t wait to get home to my Blakey.”

“AMY SAID VERY, VERY BLUNTLY TO MARK, ‘I DON’T WANT ANY FACKING STRINGS ON THE RECORD.’”

STEINWEISS: She was really sweet and really great. When she was here she was a blast. She was the life of the party and just funny as hell.

GRIPTITE: There were no secrets with her though – she was deadly honest in that way. You knew what mood she was in.

MAKOWSKI: Oh, I got to be honest with you, I thought maybe she was a new artist because she literally looked like… well, I looked at her shoes. I was like, “Man, you gotta get this girl some shoes or something?” They were busted out – what the hell! She was probably just like, “Who cares?” Her and Mark were just so chill.

STEINWEISS: We recorded at Daptone Studios – it’s a house in Bushwick turned into a recording studio. The back room was a live room and in the middle there was a drum booth. If you want to really isolate your drums, the only actual way to do that is to have a room that is completely floated. Usually that’s done with specific types of rubber and you need specific types of weight. But Gabe [Roth, co-founder of Daptone Records] was just like, “Yeah, but tyres would work even better.” And he went down the block and found a bunch of tyres and put them in.

GRIPTITE: Mark had said it was on that girl-group vibe, Shangri-Las, and all that. We didn’t do the whole Phil Spector thing, it wasn’t like a giant wall of sound. It’s the intersection between soul music and girl-group style.

STEINWEISS: On “Back To Black”, I think it was all pretty much in the demo. The drum beat was there and the sections were kind of there. The input we had was more in providing the feeling and the sound to complete the parts.

GRIPTITE: When we started tracking “Back To Black”, there wasn’t much space for me, sonically. So I was at a bit of a loss for what to play. I just wound up improvising for the whole song. I didn’t know how it was gonna get used or if I was playing too much. Mark left me off of the front half of the song and then brought me in towards the middle through to the end. So I was the one playing all this surfy, single-note guitar stuff.

CHRIS ELLIOTT [orchestral arrangement]: The guitar part had made me think of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti westerns – he’s one of my biggest heroes and there was just something of that in the middle section. Lots of latitude and this atmospheric, passionate, filmic feel.

STEINWEISS: It’s a very simple drum pattern but it’s actually one of the hardest things for me to do in a session. It’s like a shuffle and I don’t really do a lot of those, so I was happy that it was so simple. The simpler it is, the easier it is for me to keep the shuffle going.

GRIPTITE: Mark has good instincts in the studio. He knows what he’s looking for. Or even if he doesn’t necessarily know what he’s looking for, he always knows when it’s not it. We don’t waste a lot of time going in the wrong direction. He is really good at knowing when to guide us versus when to just let us do our own thing.

MAKOWSKI: All the music the Dap-Kings recorded was at a different studio. But it was recorded on one-inch 16-track reel-to-reel tape. So at Chung King, we would have to rent whatever that tape machine was and then Mark would bring in the tapes and I would basically run the tapes through the big Neve board and then into Pro Tools. It was a stylistic decision, I guess, getting that type of old-school Motown sound off the tape.

All the songs were written in this way that you literally could hit record, she would sing the song all the way through, done. Mark would say, “OK, that was amazing.” Amy would reply, “Mark, I’ll sing it through one more time because I know you’d like to have a comp.” But it was the first take, every time. With Amy, I don’t even think we tuned any of her vocals maybe the tiniest little bit.

GRIPTITE: I didn’t necessarily get the impression that the subject matter or anything was hard for her to sing. The only thing I noticed was she was pretty bored of singing “Rehab”.

“MARK’S ROLE IN MAKING THAT RECORD WAS PUTTING THE RIGHT PEOPLE TOGETHER.”

MAKOWSKI: We recorded “Back To Black” last out of the five songs we did – just so she wasn’t upset. I wouldn’t say she was ever visibly upset, but you want to start off with the happier songs. I remember we turned the lights way down for that and “Love Is A Losing Game”.

ELLIOTT: Mark Ronson, Darcus [Beese, from Island Records] and Tom [Elmhirst] heard the mixes and felt there could be another colour in the tracks. They didn’t want it to come from the same sound world as Frank. Tom mentioned strings. Amy wasn’t really a fan of the idea of strings. In fact she said very, very bluntly to Mark, “I don’t want any fucking strings on the record.”

I had no idea or expectation about Mark. I threw down some quick ideas. Mark breezed in, really charming. We went through each song, twice. I had them in Logic and he just literally edited out a few notes. When Mark was leaving, he said, “Oh, by the way, before I forget – Amy really hates strings.” I said, “We’ll keep it low and treme.” So low as in pitch and treme as in tremolando, which is where the strings are almost shaking or shivering. It’s a spooky kind of sound. The strings went really high in the middle section of “Back To Black”.

I’m very much a film-centric composer and love getting all the atmosphere in. When I say the strings went higher at that point, they just went to a tension – soft, but they’re there. Say if it was in a movie, it would be – “What’s going to happen now, who’s going to come in the door?” We recorded the strings at Metropolis, which is a slightly unusual place to record something like this. There are quite hard surfaces. You wouldn’t get many producers wanting to do strings in there, because the sounds are quite hard and the reflections are really strong and difficult. But it’s not unlike some of the studios that would have been around in the ’60s. I think it was probably part of Mark’s genius that he did that, he knew that would work.

STEINWEISS: I feel like Mark’s role in making that record, whether or not he came up with a sound or anything, was putting the right people together. By putting Amy with the Dap-Kings and using her songs, then finding that sound with the band, I think that was a very big contribution to the success of the record and how good the record ended up being.

ELLIOTT: We did a big percussion session after the strings – just filled the studio with all these different percussion instruments. The percussion guy we used was called Frank, who was quite a workmanlike chap, a little cockney. We were using the timpani, so I said, “Can you just play the bass part?” He found he could tune the timps to be the five notes in the bass part. It dawned on him that we were going to do the whole song.

He said to me, “This isn’t what you do with timps – they’re just for punctuation. It’s not the whole thing!” It would be just in the background, behind the real bass. So you wouldn’t really even hear it fully, it would just be like an aura. It was lovely, because when you hit those drums, softly I mean, it’s a lovely wide sound. It adds a sort of majesty to it.

I really wanted to put a tubular bell in there, which I did. And when it came back, the producer was really excited, kept saying to me, “They absolutely love it. They love that it sounds like a film score, but they really loved the bells of death!” When I heard it for the very first time I thought, ‘It feels like it’s telling this story, like a movie or something.’ So I’m sure she would’ve thought, ‘These aren’t the strings I thought I was gonna get.’ I don’t think the strings would be on the record if she hadn’t liked it.

STEINWEISS: I’ve worked on a lot of records and a lot of records that I’m really proud of. But that record holds like a special place: I think it is one of the best records I’ve ever worked on. Any other session, no matter how good it is, we’ll compare it to that.