Keith Richards shares regret about Amy Winehouse: “You expect things to happen, and unfortunately no”
The Rolling Stones have opened up about the devastating loss of Amy Winehouse in a new interview.
On their new album, Foreign Tongues, which is set to be released on July 10th, The Stones pay tribute to the late British icon by covering her classic track, ‘You Know I’m No Good’.
Winehouse, who tragically died 15 years ago this month due to alcohol poisoning, aged just 27, was particularly close with The Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood.
On The Ronnie Wood Show in 2013, the guitarist said of their bond, “She’d hold you tight like a little girl really hanging on for some help, and I tried to give her what help I could. I knew it was a losing task, but I knew it was something worth trying for. Some of us make it, and some of us don’t.”
Now, in a new interview with The Sunday Times, Wood remembered his late friend and discussed her battle with alcoholism, “She would go, ‘Oh Ronnie, what am I going to do?’ I said, ‘Look, everyone knows you’ve got vodka in the water bottle. Get it together and get on stage.’”
However, despite her personal issues, Wood said it never affected her performance skills, adding, “But if you could get her up there and she stayed there, it’d be great.”
He also heartbreaking compared her death to another musical icon who was gone too soon, sharing, “I’m sad because she didn’t do her full span. It was like saying goodbye to Billie Holiday again.”
In 2007, The Rolling Stones had the honour of sharing the stage with Winehouse at the Isle of Wight Festival, which remains a special memory for Keith Richards; however, he did express regret that it was only a one-off.
He sadly shared, “I was always sort of, ‘Well, I’m bound to meet her down the road’. You expect things to happen, and unfortunately no. But that’s what records are for. I’m just very glad and honoured to have played with her at least once.”
Meanwhile, earlier this week, during an appearance on the Argentinian news channel La Nación, Jagger revealed why The Stones chose to cover ‘You Know I’m No Good‘.
The rock icon explained, “We thought we’d do a cover version, we were thinking about women and what women we would like to do the cover version of. So, we looked through a catalogue of different women, like Aretha Franklin and other singers, then we were in England, so we thought what about doing an English woman cover version?”
Jagger added, “So, we came to listen to Amy Winehouse, and we thought that’s a song we could really embrace that one, and it was really fun to do.”
He then highlighted how “it’s different to do a cover version than your own song”, noting that “all you’re doing is putting your own stamp on someone else’s song without ruining the song and not changing it too much, but changing it enough”.
The Stones’ cover of ‘You Know I’m No Good’ will be released on July 10th.
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