Amy Winehouse Band Plays Belgrade on September 11
A band that shared the stage and studio with Amy Winehouse plays the yard of Dorcol Plac, in the city where she gave her final concert. Fronted by bassist Dale Davis, with Beth Morris on vocals.
When musicians who spent years playing behind a singer take the stage without her, audiences tend to ask two things of them: carry the missing voice as faithfully as you can, and confirm that what people remember actually existed. Belgrade gets to test both on September 11. In the garden of Dorcol Plac, starting at 8:30 p.m., The Amy Winehouse Band takes the stage, a group of musicians who toured, recorded, and, in their own words, helped build her sound from the ground up.
The show lands in a year that folds together two anniversaries: twenty years since the release of “Back to Black” and fifteen years since the singer’s death. The set list draws from all three of her studio albums, “Frank,” “Back to Black,” and “Lioness,” and runs through “Rehab,” “You Know I’m No Good,” “Back to Black,” “Love Is a Losing Game,” “Tears Dry on Their Own,” and “Valerie.” Organizers note that Amy Winehouse’s very last concert took place in Belgrade, which gives the Dorcol Plac date a weight no ordinary tour stop carries, even if that weight sits a little uneasily.
The band is fronted by Dale Davis, bassist and longtime musical director for Amy Winehouse, who stood beside her on nearly every stage she played. Vocals for the Belgrade show go to Beth Morris. The rest of the lineup is filled out by musicians from her original band, people who didn’t learn the sound of “Back to Black” off a record, but built it in the rehearsal room.
That is the real difference between a project like this and an ordinary tribute act. A tribute band reconstructs something it never heard live, working from love of the material and from recordings. Here it runs the other way: the people on stage remember how these songs sounded before they were ever recorded, and their job isn’t imitation, it’s recollection through an instrument. That is the distinction the ticket price is buying, and it’s what should set this show apart from the usual skepticism toward performances sold under someone else’s name.
There is, of course, another side to it. Every show like this lives on the line between tribute and the nostalgia industry, and that line doesn’t move on its own, it’s moved by the choices made on stage, the tone the songs are played in, and how much the concert leans on memory rather than performance. Announcing the show, Dale Davis draws that line clearly, on the side of memory:
“Amy was incredible. She had a huge heart and gave everything to her music and to the people she loved. Her musical legacy is of extraordinary significance, and with this project we want to keep it alive around the world.”
It’s a more honest line than the usual promotional pitch, since it promises no new reading of the songs, only the preservation of the old one.
That leaves Belgrade with a question only the night itself can answer: does a city that, according to organizers, saw Amy Winehouse’s last show now get closure, or just another run through the same set list at a different address. The answer depends on how much of the evening the band plays for an audience that remembers, and how much for one that only met these songs through streaming, twenty years after “Back to Black.”
Tickets are on sale through tickets.rs and at Ticket Vision outlets, at a promotional price of 3,900 dinars, with the regular price at 4,500 dinars. For anyone who knows the songs by heart, this is a chance to hear them from people who were in the room when they were written. For anyone who only knows them from the record, it’s a show best heard without expecting Amy Winehouse herself, just the people closest to her, keeping what she left behind.
