The 1980s hip-hop group who inspired Amy Winehouse: “I’ve got my music now”
Amy Winehouse wore so many of her musical influences on her sleeve. Her two studio albums were plainly shaped by her passion for soul, Motown and jazz, but there were flashes, too, of another of her musical loves: hip-hop.
Amy was born into a family of jazz aficionados, who imbued her with a love for genre from a young age. She later discovered soul and Motown, before hip-hop entered her life in a big way. As a musician in her own right, she later drew from each of these influences to create her own sound. Her music, as she put it in a 2006 interview published by The Guardian in 2012, fell somewhere “in the middle.”
Amy spoke in that interview of how significantly her brother shaped her musical sensibility as a kid. He was about four years older than she was, so, naturally, she inherited a lot of her taste from his record collection. She took from him a love of what she called “I-want-to-die bands,” such as Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam and Therapy, but that was just a “brief flirtation.”
At the age of nine, she came across a sound that she truly felt was her own. She “discovered Salt-n-Pepa,” and that left a lasting impression on her. “I was like, ‘I’ve got my music now,” she said of the hip-hop pioneers.
In another interview with John Marrs, conducted in 2004 but published later by HuffPost in 2014, Amy noted how she had “wanted to be in Salt-n-Pepa so much” as a kid, leading her and her childhood friend, Juliette Ashby, to set up their own rap duo. Just so the inspiration behind the project was entirely apparent, they called themselves Sweet ’n’ Sour.
“I was Sour,” Amy recalled fondly. “We had some funny songs.”
Juliette’s father was apparently very supportive of the young rappers, and he took them to a studio to record some of their songs. These were numbers such as ‘Glam Chicks,’ ‘Boys…Who Needs Them,’ and ‘Spinderella,’ which was a tribute to Salt-N-Pepa’s DJ Spinderella.
The girls used to perform their songs at school, which caused quite a stir during assembly. Bearing in mind that they were about nine years of age themselves, the girls’ performances could be quite something. In Amy’s words, they involved a “dance routine where we’d be grinding.”
“The tiny kids in reception would be like, ‘Yuk, what are they doing?’” she recalled. “But we were too short to see if the older boys at the back could see us.”