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Miami’s music scene is much more club-orientated, more Pitbull than Piaf, but Salaam had amassed a huge amount of equipment in order to figure out the vintage sound for Amy – they called his studio the “instrument zoo”. It seems funny to think of these heart-rending tracks being created in sunny Florida – the tragic, funereal air completely at odds with Bermuda shorts, spring breakers and retirees chasing the winter sun. Quite a departure from cosmopolitan New York, Amy went back down to his home in Miami to work on the songs. Ronson wasn’t the only producer on Back To Black – Amy’s old friend and collaborator on Frank, Salaam Remi, was also involved in some of the tracks. They spent three weeks recording in New York, mostly with live instruments to capture that Motown feel, and then Ronson was left to slot everything else into place. She often had a drink in the booth with her – a rum and coke or a Southern Comfort and lemonade – but she was turning up to work every day and the vocals she was laying down were nothing short of astonishing. To access the part of her that was fragile, only a bottle of wine away from completely falling apart again. It must have been hard for Amy to relive those songs day after day in the sound-proof booth where she laid down her vocals. Over eleven short songs she painstakingly dissected the feelings and actions that had led to this point. ‘Mark said, “It would be so cool if you had a whole song about rehab”’ Let’s go to the studio.’ And that was it.” I was just joking.’ And he said, ‘It would be so cool if you had a whole song about rehab.’ I said, ‘Well, I could write it right now. Whose song is that, man?’ I told him, ‘I just wrote it off the top of my head. “Mark started laughing and saying, ‘That’s so funny. I sang it as a joke,” Amy told Paper magazine in February 2007.

They wrote “Rehab” together almost instinctively – “I sang the hook. “We… just started talking the way music geeks do when they get together,” Amy told Rolling Stone in 2007. They exchanged songs by countless artists: Motown records, The Angels, Leonard Cohen, Earl Carroll and the Cadillacs.

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She and Ronson worked to polish them up together – Amy would play him a bit of a song she’d been working on, or send him a song she couldn’t stop listening to, and he’d mull it over, then come back to her with ideas of how to incorporate it into the record they were making. The songs Amy had written were all about her relationship and break-up with Blake.

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