Amy Winehouse’s friends reveal what her time in NYC was really like

nypost.com:

Marisa Abela as the doomed singer — opens in the US, after earning eyebrow-raising reviews in the UK. A critic for the Evening Standard called it “so bad it made me gasp in horror” and wrote that it “does not paint a nice or fair picture of [Winehouse] as a human.”Her friends and colleagues in New York City, like saxophonist Ian Hendrickson-Smith, remember her as “wonderful.” They knew a fun-loving, mischievous and incredibly talented woman prior to the tragedy that later played out before paparazzi cameras: the smeared mascara and ratty beehive and body visibly ravaged by drugs and drink and bulimia.Winehouse came to the city in March 2006 to record what would be her career-making second album, “Back to Black.” Produced by Mark Ronson, the record was made at the now defunct Chung King Studios near Sohoas well as at the stripped-down Daptone Studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with musical accompaniment provided by a crack local jazz/soul outfit called the Dap-Kings.“I was struck by how big her sound was, coming out of a small physique,” Ian Hendrickson-Smith, who played baritone sax with the group, recalled to The Post. “Her rhythm and pitch were impeccable.

It’s not the norm for a singer to be as in tune as she was. We did the whole album in two days.”Amazingly, the songs — now-classics like “Back to Black,” “You Know I’m No Good” and “Rehab” — were skeletal only days before the recording sessions, when she first met with Ronson. “I picture her sitting in my old studio on Mercer Street,” Ronson reminisced in the 2018 documentary “Amy Winehouse – Back to Black.” He recalls her working out the material “on her nylon string guitar, playing these songs for me and barely opening her lips.