Amy Winehouse inspired me to quit a soul-crushing job
I was driving to work feeling miserable when Rehab came on – and I realised there’s more to life than a steady wage in a job you despise At 6am on a bleak October morning in 2006, I was driving down the North Circular in London to a job I hated. I usually kept the radio low, a background murmur to keep me focused on the road. But that morning I turned up the volume allowing the buoyant bassline from Amy Winehouse’s…
Key points
- Emily Phillips says hearing Amy Winehouse's Rehab in 2006 prompted her to leave a job she hated.
- She worked in a windowless Docklands office monitoring stock exchanges on four screens.
- She enrolled in night school for journalism and later moved into paid newspaper work.
Emily Phillips, writing for The Guardian, describes how hearing Amy Winehouse's Rehab on the radio during a 6am drive to work in October 2006 led her to rethink her career. She was driving down the North Circular in London to a job she hated, in a windowless office in London's Docklands where she monitored four screens for faults on world stock exchanges.
Phillips writes that she had taken the job two years after university for better money than a previous admin role, but had not seen her friends in more than six months. She also describes a male colleague who monitored her and sent her inappropriate messages on Myspace.
The album and its effect
Phillips bought Winehouse's album Back to Black on CD at HMV the weekend after first hearing the song. She notes that she and Winehouse grew up on parallel tracks, and that as a teenager Winehouse played pool with her brother at a local pub in Whetstone, north London.
She writes that Winehouse's lyrics and vocals shook her out of her stupor, and that if Winehouse could get through her pain, she could stop writing herself off.
If she could wade through all of this pain, all of this addiction, then I could surely stop writing myself off and get back out there.
— Emily Phillips
Changes she made
Phillips signed up for night school to study journalism, paid for with money from the job she disliked. She reconnected with friends and told her female manager about the colleague's behaviour, which she says warned him off.
She later took night shifts at newspapers while still making the 6am drives to Docklands, and eventually left the role for paid work in journalism. She has now written a book, I Hate You So Much Right Now, published by Blink, about female singer-songwriters.
