Amy 27: Amy Winehouse And The 27 Club - Hardcover

Sounes, Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670066966 ISBN 13: 9780670066964

Publisher: Viking, 2013

Synopsis

When singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse died tragically on July, 23, 2011, at the age of twenty-seven, she joined the infamous 27 Club, whose members include Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain. Howard Sounes, author of Fab and Down the Highway, conducted interviews with more than 180 people, and his research yields new insights into the lives of the mem­bers of the 27 Club. Cutting through the record company PR and tabloid gossip to reveal the real Amy Winehouse, and with unprecedented access to friends and family, including Amy’s ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, and her last boyfriend, Reg Traviss, Sounes reveals striking factors in common among Winehouse and the other artists who died so young. Amy, 27 will be published to coincide with the second anniversary of her death and with the lead-up to the twentieth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain.

About this title

About the Author

HOWARD SOUNES is the author of several well-known non-fiction works, including the noted biographies Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, and Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. He is also the author of Seventies, a history of the arts in that decade, and the true-crime bestseller Fred & Rose. His books are also published in the U.K. and the U.S., and in twenty-two foreign languages. Sounes appears regularly on radio and television in connection with his subjects. He lives in London, England.

Review

Fans of Amy and of the host of music stars who met their end too soon will find much to enthrall them here. Stylist Much of the book's power lies in its refusal to pander to the romantic-melancholy notion of the tortured young artist who lives fast and dies young. Instead the squalor and chaos of their everyday existence if exposed in uncompromising detail... This book is not about more rock star mythologizing. It's about skewering the mystery of the 27-connection, by exposing its all-too-tragic reality. Sunday Times Sounes' masterstroke is to unearth forensic levels of detail on his subjects. Jim Morrison's end in a Paris bathtub is well known, but Sounes reveals minutiae explaining the bad luck that caused this unhappy and alcoholic but probably not suicidal man to die when he did... Sounes acknowledges the danger of theorising too heavily on the 27 Club but in the main he has pulled off what could have been a tasteless project with sensitivity. And he's best of all on the subject that clearly fascinates him: the relationship between Amy Winehouse and her father. The Times A meticulously researched corrective that spares none of the often squalid truth and should, if there's any justice, put paid to decades of ill-informed mythologizing. http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/numbered+days+Winehouse+Club/8754647/story.html Montreal Gazette

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0670066966
• ISBN 13: 9780670066964
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368