A previously-unheard demo recorded when Amy Winehouse was 17 has surfaced online.
The song, titled ‘My Own Way’, has been shared by London musician Gil Cang, who co-wrote the track with James McMillan and Maryanne Morgan.
Cang says Winehouse recorded the song in 2001 while trying to attract the attention of record labels and that it only took three takes.
“We’d been writing quite a lot of pop tunes, doing a lot of pop promos with various artists who would come in, many of various, dubious talent. It was at a particularly dire time in the pop world – lots of terrible, terrible girl bands and boy bands and we had to make something for them,” Cang explains to the Camden New Journal.
“Amy came in to see us, opened her mouth and just blew us all away. We were struck immediately by her talent – it was a real jaw on the floor moment. We were like wow, yes.”
Winehouse’s former label boss at Universal Music, David Joseph previously said that many demos from the star had been destroyed to prevent any possibility of a posthumous release
“It was a moral thing,” Joseph told The Guardian in 2015. “Taking a stem or a vocal is not something that would ever happen on my watch. It now can’t happen on anyone else’s.”
However, Cang has defended his decision to share the demo, saying: “I’ve had it knocking about for so long. I found it again last week and thought – I’ll put it out there so people could hear it.”
Listen to ‘My Own Way’ above.
Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning in July 2011. She was 27.
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