Asif Kapadia’s Amy packs a punch. It is a wrenching, clear-eyed portait of a supremely talented, charismatic young woman being whittled away by voracious, relentless 21st century celebrity, exacerbated by her own demons. At the UK box office it’s become the second most successful documentary feature film of all time (after Farenheit 9/11). Part of its power is, of course, the raw, soulful singing of its central protagonist. Now a soundtrack arrives, a collage of Winehouse favourites, demos and live takes interspersed with the instrumental music of Brazilian film composer Antônio Pinto.
Where 2011’s Lioness: Hidden Treasures gathered a mixed bag of unreleased posthumous oddments, Amy OST has the luxury of remaining relatively unconcerned by the music’s previous availability, instead creating an impressionist portrait. However, it also contains enough unfamiliar curios to make an impact. Chief among these are an ostensibly throwaway, one-minute-22-second, lazily strummed demo of “Like Smoke”, a striking, piano-accompanied version of Donny Hathaway’s “We’re Still Friends”, recorded at London’s Union Chapel in 2006, an acoustic “Love Is A Losing Game”, delivered achingly at the 2007 Mercury Awards, and a fabulously jazzy and carefree live take of “What Is It About Men” from the 2004 North Sea Jazz Festival, replete with a bawdily cackling intro.
Pinto’s interludes are short and have melancholic weight, with much echoing, haunted piano veering towards the doomed, culminating in the buzzing electronic threat of “Arrested”. William Orbit’s pulsing 1995 electronica, “The Name of the Wave”, pops up halfway through, adding an unexpected moment of cosmic airiness, but it’s the magnetic Winehouse songs that resound, from the cutting “I feel like a lady and you my ladyboy” line of opening number “Stronger Than Me” to a bubbly “Valerie”, live at the BBC, which happily signs off on a joyful rather than bleak note. Understandably, many will regard Amy OST as barrel-scraping but a film of Amy’s stature and success deserves a package such as this and there’s enough here to keep fans interested.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Amy
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