DVD Special

Amy Winehouse’s I Told You I Was Trouble is an exercise in Pretending Everything’s Fine that works on its simplest principles. It’s a very good concert film of an even concert. The talk might have been of all the no-shows, but there haven’t been many places in Europe or North America this year you could fall over without bumping into an Amy Winehouse show. This concert film of her Shepherd’s Bush Empire date in May is a reminder that it was all worth it. For all the stripped-down nature of ‘Back To Black’, her live show’s the opposite: an old-style revue as lavish as her beehive, with brass bands and backing singers garlanding but never upstaging Amy’s vocal. And we don’t need to say anything more about Amy’s vocal, do we? Tracks from forgotten first album ‘Frank’ are thankfully sparse. But when the best songs from her second include the wonderful ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ (and with her excellent cover of ‘Valerie’ also on show) they can afford to be.

You don’t really need the accompanying self-congratulatory documentary, however. Yes, to its credit, it boasts some brilliant footage of pre-beehive Amy throwing eggs at posters of Dido on Popworld, but it isn’t helped by the head of her record company saying things like, “It is 150 per cent important that she’s successful in the US.”