Everybody wants a new Amy Winehouse album as good as Back to Black. It would be nice if, for instance, it turned out that the British soul revivalist had completed or at least sketched out another jewel of a record during the turbulent last four years of her life. But she didn't: there was her collaboration with Mark Ronson on "Valerie", and the new song-and-a-half that turned up on last year's Lioness: Hidden Treasures, which was otherwise stocked with alternate versions, earlier outtakes, and covers. A live album that lived up to what she could do at her best would be welcome, too. But her post-Back to Black gigs were relatively few and, by all accounts, mostly pretty dodgy.
So-- perhaps a set of radio recordings, then? That's something, right? At the BBC cherrypicks 48 minutes' worth of tracks from live-on-stage and live-in-the-studio broadcasts. It adds two otherwise unreleased titles to the Winehouse discography: covers of the standards "I Should Care" and "Lullaby of Birdland", from the latter of which Winehouse borrowed a bit for her own "October Song". And it's sequenced in order of her albums' original release rather than in order of the performances-- all the Frank songs, then all the Back to Black songs, then the other stuff. That covers up for the fact that only two tracks here were recorded in the rocky 2007-2011 period: a blaring "Just Friends" and a stripped-down "Love Is a Losing Game", both from 2009. It also provides an excuse to lead the album with a 2004 take of "Know You Now" that's a marked improvement on the Frank recording.
Winehouse always had a tendency to over sing on stage, though. Especially when she had a big audience to project toward, it was too easy for her to overindulge in the vocal tics-- the slurred consonants, the hyper-articulated melisma, the extravagant ornaments, the imitations of Billie Holiday's timbre-- that she could restrain on her better studio recordings, and it often led her to mangle her own lyrics. (She pronounces the final word of "F%#k Me Pumps" here as "pwuuuups.") The most effective performances here are the most intimate ones, especially on the attached DVD-- an hour-long documentary built around a 22-minute set filmed shortly after the release of Back to Black, just Winehouse, a guitarist and a bassist playing inside a little Irish church.
The versions of Winehouse's repertoire that turn up on At the BBC's audio disc, though, are almost all sloppier than their studio counterparts, and she rarely manages to reveal anything we didn't already know about her songs. And every time she garbles a phrase or pointedly mentions her vices, it's a stinging reminder that she spent the better part of her too-brief career making her audience complicit in her self-destruction. This set isn't devoid of interest, but it's not in any way another great Amy Winehouse album, or even another good one. We're never going to get that.
