Bibek Acharya
One artist she repeatedly made her disdain known for was Dido, a British singer enjoying the height of her success around the same time as the release of Winehouse’s debut album Frank in 2003. Due to the press continually attempting to group the two of them together as part of a greater movement of female singer-songwriters from the UK, Winehouse instantly fought back against these parallels being drawn between the two artists, vehemently disagreeing that the two had anything in common.
Dido’s music has probably been called many things by the harshest critics, with the words beige, bland and inoffensive often springing to mind as insults that are regularly levelled at her Radio 2-friendly pop, but in a 2007 interview with former UK publication The Word, Winehouse would take things to a greater extreme, saying that Dido was responsible for creating “background music, the background to death”.
This was far from the only time that Winehouse would publicise her dislike for her adversary, with a 2004 interview with Associated Press showing the singer barely able to contain her disinterest when the interview begins to explain Dido’s ability to write music from a personal perspective.
There will always be stars who will be described as ‘opinionated’ or ‘gobby’, but nobody did it with quite as much humour and candour as Amy Winehouse did, and her harsh reactions towards Dido and others are proof that she had absolutely no interest in brown-nosing her peers if she didn’t think they deserved it.
