Back to Black

Winehouse and Mark Ronson wrote it, and Ronson produced it at Chung King Studios and Daptone in New York and at Metropolis in London. It was inspired by her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, who had left her for an ex-girlfriend, and it is in the key of D minor. Ronson told Mojo in 2010 that he wrote the verse chords as a piano riff the night after they met, backed with a kick drum, a tambourine and tons of reverb. He told The FADER in 2015 that when she sang the line about saying goodbye only in words and dying a hundred times, he objected that it did not rhyme, and she looked at him as if he were crazy. Footage of the two recording the song in March 2006 appears in the 2015 film Amy, and an a cappella version is on its soundtrack.

The video, directed by Phil Griffin in black and white, stages a funeral, with graveyard scenes at Abney Park Cemetery in north-east London. The Official Charts Company's Justin Myers called the song heartbreakingly autobiographical and perhaps the most anguished of all her songs. As a single it reached 25 in the UK in 2007. After her death it re-entered at number 8 on 31 July 2011, a new peak. By September 2014 it had sold 340,000 copies in the UK, her third best-selling single there. She sang it in 115 of the 265 logged setlists that list songs, from Bristol in September 2006 to Belgrade on 18 June 2011.

Covers

Beyoncé and André 3000 recorded it for the soundtrack of the 2013 film The Great Gatsby, after Jay Z suggested it to the director Baz Luhrmann, and the reviews were mixed. Ronnie Spector began singing it in 2008 and released a version in 2011. Elbow, Glasvegas and Sam Fender each did it in the Live Lounge on BBC Radio 1. Ronson played it with Charlie Waller in Ibiza on 29 July 2011 and with Miley Cyrus at Glastonbury in 2019.