How The Shangri-Las shaped Amy Winehouse

(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

Tue 28 May 2024 10:00, UK

“She was a very old soul in a very young body,” Nick Gatfield, the man who gave Amy Winehouse her first record deal, said of the singer. She was a self-confessed vintage obsessive, both in her style and in her sound, more often than not reaching back into the 1950s and ‘60s for her inspiration. One of the biggest influences she plucked from decades past was the energy of old-school girl bands like The Shangri-Las.

Winehouse’s love for eras past was tied tight to her love for her relatives. As she grew up in a tight-knit family, music was their love language. Her Nan, especially, was instrumental in crafting the artist that she would become. Having spent her youth in London’s music scene, dating the Ronnie Scott and being what Winehouse saw as the ultimate pin-up girl, her grandmother passed on a vital musical education. Her family home was busy with her, her father’s as well as her Nan’s voice, coming together to sing the classics. By 2000, when she joined the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, leaning on a childhood spent singing the standards to become their first female vocalist, she was a staple on the stage performing works by Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and Minnie Ripperton.

“I don’t listen to a lot of new stuff,” she said in an old interview, as her style stayed very much in the realm of the music she was raised on. “I just like the old stuff. It’s all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You’d have an entire story in song,” she added.

When it came to discovering The Shangri-Las, they were an immediate obsession for Winehouse, taking her love for storytelling lyrics and running with it even further. The 1960s girl group didn’t utilise their lyrics to tell the story of a feeling but amped it up into full-scale theatrical productions with character voices, spoken elements and dynamic sounds all crafted to add to the atmosphere. On tracks like ‘The Leader Of The Pack’ or ‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’, the singers use their voices in so many different ways to build a whole world for the song. Naturally, Winehouse was inspired.

“I love the drama, I love the atmosphere, I love the sound effects,” she said of the band, speaking of the influence they had. Especially when it came to making Back To Black, the band were a key inspiration in helping her craft the sonic world of her own heartbreak songs. She thought they’d mastered it as she added, “They wrote the most depressing song ever: ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’. When me and my boyfriend finished, I used to listen to that song on repeat.”

When Mark Ronson met Winehouse, he realised that the girl group were a key part of her personality. “I just thought, ‘Let’s talk about music, see what she likes,’” he recalled in an interview, adding, “She said she liked to go out to bars and clubs and play snooker with her boyfriend and listen to The Shangri-Las.”

The inspiration was so instrumental to her sound that she’d dedicate a moment in her live set to honour them. After the release of ‘Back To Black’, she’d regularly switch out the bridge of her song to instead sing the chorus from The Shangri-Las’ 1965 track, ‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’. It fits perfectly as the entirety of the titular album was crafted with the band’s rhythms and style held close to Winehouse’s artistic heart. From the doo-wop piano of the ‘Back To Black’ intro or the call and response jovialness of ‘Rehab’, through to the melodramatic balladic sound of ‘Wake Up Alone’ or ‘Love Is A Losing’, the girl band’s impact is felt across so many of Winehouse’s most defining hits.

“I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry,” Winehouse said once, always more than content to stay in her nostalgic world, creating music influenced by the jazz acts and girl bands of the past that would become defining anthems for current times and the future.