What Darcus Beese saw in Amy Winehouse before anyone else

When Darcus Beese first heard Amy Winehouse sing – way before her Grammy-winning 2006 album Back to Black and long before her battles with addiction became tabloid fodder – he immediately saw her potential.

He was the executive responsible for signing artists to Island Records and hers was a signature he needed.

“When Amy came along and I heard that voice, I could tie it back to the voices of yesteryear,” he says. “I felt like I was listening to a throwback record, whether it was Billie Holiday or Dinah Washington.

“But she had an infusion of hip-hop, and she had a lyrical take that was very modern and reflective of that time.”

He sighs.

“She was ahead of her time.”

As executive responsible for signing artists to Island Records, Darcus Beese knew Amy Winehouse was “ahead of her time”.

Sitting in his London home, 14 years to the day since Winehouse died aged 27, Beese, who includes Jessie J, Mumford & Sons and Dizzee Rascal among his signings, can draw a line from the turmoil and tragedy of her final years to the way he works with artists today.

“Mental health is at the forefront of the conversation. And you ask questions that you never used to ask, and that people would have been afraid to answer because they’d have thought, I’ll lose my job. It’s given people the ability to authentically be themselves.”

Beese was born in 1969 and raised in Fulham, West London. His activist parents – Barbara Beese and Darcus Howe – were prominent in the British Black Panthers movement.

By the age of six he was by their side as they led demonstrations through the streets.

“It was the making of me in terms of what I saw and how that impacted me as a young person of colour growing up in the 1970s and 1980s London,” he says. “I understood about injustice from a very young age.”

Beese knew he had to sign Amy Winehouse as soon as he heard her.

Beese began his career in the music industry in the late ’80s, making tea in the Island Records UK promotion department.

He was “probably on the defensive as a young black man”.

“You think the world’s against you. I had to learn to socialise and be around people that didn’t look like me.”

As he moved into Island’s A&R (Artist & Repertoire) department and started signing artists, he was drawn to those who reflected his world view.

“I doubt that a white A&R person would have signed the way I signed. I made sure I signed black women.

“As well as accountability, I had a responsibility. Other people don’t wake up in the morning with that. They just wake up to have hits.”

He had plenty of those too, signing and working with artists that also include Sugababes, Taio Cruz, Florence + The Machine and Sabrina Carpenter.

In 2013 he was appointed president of Island Records UK – the first person of colour to lead a UK major label – before moving to New York in 2018 to run Island Records US.

These days the OBE-decorated exec is focused on his own company, Darco Artist Partnerships.

‘I doubt that a white A&R person would have signed the way I signed.’

Darcus Beese

His new endeavour seeks to rethink the major label business model.

“It’s the same way of working, but I use [the term] partnership rather than record deal,” he says.

“What does trust look like in a deal? How do I resource an artist to stay developing in an age where data pulls a lot of artists to the fore, even before they’ve developed?”

That last point is, he says, one of the major impacts of streaming.

“It’s digital data before the live ticket,” he says. “On Spotify when you release, you release globally. Let’s break the whole world!

“No. Break your own garden [first]. What does that look like? What’s the strategy?”

As with so many industries, the music business is currently grappling with the implications of AI.

Litigation is under way in the US between the major labels and generative AI music creation platforms Suno and Udio, which are accused of training their models on copyrighted music without authorisation.

Then there’s the controversy surrounding The Velvet Sundown, a fictional band whose AI-generated music has attracted more than 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Beese seems relatively nonplussed.

“When the landscape has a seismic shift, everybody goes on the defensive,” he says. “And everybody’s scared that art will be infiltrated and dumbed down.

“I came up in the age of sampling, and that went from something that was exploiting other people’s art to being an artform in itself and a way of making records, and people got remunerated.

“The biggest artists are probably the ones that are most terrified of AI, and the infringement on image and their song. New artists are probably like, ‘Give me that!’”

Darcus Beese will be In Conversation at this year’s Bigsound festival in Brisbane, September 2-5. His memoir, Rebel With a Cause, is out now.