The bizarre video claiming to show “Amy Winehouse, age 10” performing on Norwegian TV
Like any deceased pop icon, Amy Winehouse has sadly been subject to her fair share of conspiracy theories. None more so than a video that made the rounds in August 2015, which appeared to show her performing at a Norwegian summer festival when she was ten.
The video, originally captioned “Amy Winehouse, age 10. Sad she is gone”, was shared more than 500,000 times, viewed 27 million times, and received over 100,000 reactions online.
Viewers were bowled over by the performance, in which young “Amy” sang María Grever’s jazz standard ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’. Her vocals left some awestruck, while others lamented how drug addiction had cut down Winehouse in her prime.
Even more impressive than her singing, though, was ten-year-old Amy’s appearance. She had apparently already decided to adopt her iconic beehive hairstyle at such a tender age. A bold move, especially for Norwegian television at the time.
The beehive was a feature of her early life and was a remarkable discovery for people with even a passing interest in music history. It had previously been assumed that the beehive arrived during promotion for Winehouse’s Back to Black album as a nod to the 1960s girl-group sound it incorporates. Frank-era Winehouse had never sported such a look.
This fact alone should have set alarm bells ringing. More to the point, how would Amy Winehouse have found herself performing on a Scandinavian TV show as a child (and even speaking a little Norwegian!)?
Was this little girl, in fact, a reincarnation of Winehouse, back from beyond? Thankfully, the initial post claiming the video showed Amy Winehouse in any shape or form was falsified before that particular conspiracy theory could take off.
A week after they’d garnered their 15 minutes of fame, the original poster was forced to retract their claim that the singer in the video was ten-year-old Amy Winehouse.
“OOPS,” their retraction read. “She is NOT Amy Winehouse, but rather Angelina Jordan.”
Angelina Jordan had won Norway’s Got Talent 2014 the previous year. Incredibly, she was just eight years old when the clip of her performance was recorded and broadcast live on the TV show Allsang på grensen in June 2015.
Jordan opened the show’s entire 2015 season with her performance, stunning the crowd with the power of her vocals, her on-stage presence and her honeyed voice evoking jazz greats gone by. She left at least one audience member in tears. And likely quite a few more online, whether or not they believed they were watching a child, Amy Winehouse.
The video had been copied from one published on YouTube by the Norwegian network TV2 two months before the fake Winehouse story spread across social media. The video title opens with: “Wow!” And watching it, you can see why.
The girl in the video might not have been the real Amy Winehouse, but she certainly had the pipes to pull off a pretty good impression, especially with the beehive to boot. A better impression than Maria Abela in the new Back to Black biopic, that’s for sure.