“When I go onstage and have a guitar, I feel like no-one can touch me”: Why Amy Winehouse's passion for guitar was key to her distinctive songwriting style

Amy Winehouse is praised for her distinctive vocals, and for bringing jazz and blue-eyed soul back into the mainstream. In a 2004 Fender interview, however, she asserted how instrumental her guitar skills were when it came to her songwriting and stage presence at this stage of her career.

"While I'm not even probably an adequate guitarist, I'm still a distinctive guitarist. I sound different," she said. "To me, the guitar is a really warm instrument, that's why I love it, as opposed to the piano. A wicked solo, to me, is not what being a guitarist is about. It's more so I can be all over everything, so I can feel something and just be able to go, 'this is what this feels like.'"

When she spoke about her influences, Winehouse noted how she "never really liked a lot of guitar bands," but was immensely inspired by Hendrix, and how psych-adjacent artists like The Velvet Underground and Rotary Connections used guitars to build the fabric of their songs. 

She also pointed out singer-songwriter Carole King as a source of inspiration. "A lot of chords I write with are quite influenced by the way her [Carole King] and James Taylor would write."

In this Fender interview, which took place just before a performance commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Fender Strat, she duly commented on how powerful “going on stage with a guitar makes her feel”. “When I go onstage and have a guitar, I feel like no-one can touch me. If I don't have a guitar onstage, sometimes I feel a bit like I haven't got as much to give.”

She also mentioned how much she respected “people like PJ Harvey.” “She looks amazing playing guitar," she said. "Not just because there's a 'girl playing guitar... wow' but because she has so much strength. You can see the strength that the guitar gives her.”

Above all, to Amy, “the guitar represents the music that's inside me.”

Amy Winehouse's Strat-heavy Later... with Jools Holland performance of Stronger Than Me ushered the future icon into the limelight. A year later, her performance of Take The Box at Wembley Arena continued to show how multi-faceted she was as an artist.