Twenty years after Amy Winehouse released “Back to Black,” the musicians who made it remember the work in unusually small details. Paul O’Duffy recalls a complete take of “Wake Up Alone” in his home studio. The Dap-Kings remember building arrangements around her demos. Their accounts describe a singer who gave collaborators room to experiment and knew exactly when an idea had stopped serving the song.
When Amy Winehouse met Paul O’Duffy to talk about making music, he found himself listening to her plans for a living room. She was at his kitchen table, sketching how she wanted to arrange her home. Her manager eventually brought the conversation round to the song. O’Duffy remembered the scene years later, when the record they made was already the sort of thing people expected to have begun with a grander plan.
They worked on “Wake Up Alone” in O’Duffy’s home studio in north London. He thought the setting would take some pressure off. Winehouse sang the song from beginning to end in one take. O’Duffy recalled being tempted to ask her to do it again for the pleasure of hearing it a second time. The performance they already had gave him little practical reason to interrupt her.
“Back to Black” arrived in October 2006, three years after “Frank.” On that first album Amy Winehouse had made her affection for jazz and R&B plain. For the second she listened closely to the Ronettes and the Shangri-Las, whose records could make a small turn in a love story sound like the most consequential thing that had happened all week. O’Duffy remembers her responding to the directness of that emotional language.
You can hear why that vocabulary suited her in “Wake Up Alone.” The song gives its narrator company through the day and a room to herself at night. Winehouse sings her way into that change of space with the timing of somebody who has lived through it enough times to know when it is coming. The older pop records offered a language for that intensity. The details of how she passed the hours were hers.
Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi produced much of the album. Neal Sugarman, the Dap-Kings saxophonist, remembered meeting Ronson through other sessions involving the group’s horns. Ronson brought the musicians demos for the project with Amy Winehouse. At Daptone’s Brooklyn studio the band could work with analogue equipment and with players who were used to shaping a groove together in the room. They had a sound of their own to bring to the sketches.
John Harrison, who works as P*Nut, had a different experience making “He Can Only Hold Her.” He remembers Amy Winehouse seeming shy at first. She listened while he tried guitar parts and kept adding possibilities over the course of a week. He came to think that she was working through a melody as those pieces accumulated. The vocal that eventually arrived had a stretch of quiet preparation behind it.
Dale Davis, her bassist and musical director, remembers how quickly she could sing a musical idea back after hearing it. At rehearsals she knew what she wanted to change. On stage there was room for her to vary the phrasing from one night to the next. Players had to know the arrangement thoroughly enough to stay with her when she chose a different way into a phrase.
Sugarman remembers one moment onstage when Amy Winehouse needed a note to get her bearings. A guitarist supplied a chord with more colour than she needed. She asked him to simplify it. The request made sense in the middle of a performance, where a clear reference point was more useful than an elaborate answer. Her colleagues recall that kind of practical ear as readily as they remember the voice.
It could be equally clear when a session was getting nowhere. O’Duffy remembers Winehouse drawing or suggesting a game of pool when an idea had run out of momentum. At his home she sometimes found her way to his children’s room, where they were playing “The Sims.” These were ordinary interruptions in a record that people now tend to meet as a finished object with every entrance and pause in place.
After the album came out, the Dap-Kings saw the audience grow through shows in New York, a stop at South by Southwest and Coachella in 2007. Davis also remembers how much the schedule asked of Amy Winehouse, who still wanted to give an audience everything she could each night. The album reached No. 2 on the US album chart, and Winehouse won five Grammys at the 2008 ceremony.
For the twentieth anniversary in October 2026, Ronson, Remi and Davis reunited with the Amy Winehouse Band at the Roundhouse in Camden. O’Duffy and Harrison were part of the celebration, where guest vocalists took turns singing through the album. Back in O’Duffy’s memory of the original session, there is a quieter version of that urge to hear the material again. The song is over, the tape has what it needs, and he is still considering whether to ask her for another take.
