Amy Winehouse, Dido, and the background music “to death”
Some musicians are just endlessly quotable and have a knack for producing sound bites that will be repeated over and over throughout their careers. The Gallagher brothers and their very public bickering has generated a number of lines over the years that will be immortalised forever, and John Lennon was never shy of being opinionated in interviews, whether to his detriment or not. There are plenty of other acts who have either had a marvellous way with words or simply had no filter when it comes to speaking their mind, and often this is what can endear the public to an artist, simply because their stark honesty and decision to not save face by sucking up to others around them makes them seem all the more human.
Amy Winehouse, while only around on this earth for a tragically short amount of time, was a master of this. Her interviews were as real as they could possibly get, with her no-fucks-given attitude always fully on display. No amount of PR training could get in the way of her bluntly ripping into other artists who she had a burning dislike for, and while everyone else around her dished out sycophantic praise, she would refuse to keep her true feelings in check.
From calling Kylie Minogue “a pony” to using a decidedly more savage four-letter word to describe Kanye West, Winehouse was no stranger to sparking feuds with other notable acts, and it never seemed to bother her that this could have caused any backlash at all. Everyone’s got an opinion, and Amy didn’t mind if everyone was able to hear hers.
In her own words, when asked about fashion during an interview with Elle in 2004, the British singer would respond: “When it comes to fashion, I’m a bitch. You know what’s attractive on a girl? A girl being herself. Don’t be one of the crowd.” There haven’t been many others who have ever lived more closely to these words, and it’s part of the reason why she was a breath of fresh air in a world where falseness was in vogue.
One artist she repeatedly made her disdain known for was Dido, a British singer enjoying the height of her success around the same time as the release of Winehouse’s debut album Frank in 2003. Due to the press continually attempting to group the two of them together as part of a greater movement of female singer-songwriters from the UK, Winehouse instantly fought back against these parallels being drawn between the two artists, vehemently disagreeing that the two had anything in common.
Dido’s music has probably been called many things by the harshest critics, with the words beige, bland and inoffensive often springing to mind as insults that are regularly levelled at her Radio 2-friendly pop, but in a 2007 interview with former UK publication The Word, Winehouse would take things to a greater extreme, saying that Dido was responsible for creating “background music, the background to death”.
This was far from the only time that Winehouse would publicise her dislike for her adversary, with a 2004 interview with Associated Press showing the singer barely able to contain her disinterest when the interview begins to explain Dido’s ability to write music from a personal perspective.
There will always be stars who will be described as ‘opinionated’ or ‘gobby’, but nobody did it with quite as much humour and candour as Amy Winehouse did, and her harsh reactions towards Dido and others are proof that she had absolutely no interest in brown-nosing her peers if she didn’t think they deserved it.
