Listen to a newly released Amy Winehouse demo recorded when she was 17

27 February 2018, 09:36 | Updated: 10 April 2018, 22:35

An early demo recorded by Amy Winehouse when she was just 17 has been released online for the first time.

London producer Gil Cang - a composer and musician from Camden - has revealed a recording of the singer as a teenager.

Winehouse's demo recordings were all destroyed by her label after her death at the age of 27 in 2011 to prevent any posthumous releases, but Cang has brought out this previously undiscovered gem.

Listen to the song below:

Cang told the Camden New Journal that Winehouse sang the track ‘My Own Way’ – a song he co-wrote with James McMillan – while trying to attract the attention of record labels, before she signed to Island Records in 2003.

Read more: 8 secret songs and albums we'll never get to hear from huge artists

“We’d been writing quite a lot of pop tunes, doing a lot of pop promos with various artists who would come in, many of various, dubious talent," Cang said.

"It was at a particularly dire time in the pop world – lots of terrible, terrible girl bands and boy bands and we had to make something for them. Amy came in to see us, opened her mouth and just blew us all away."

“We were struck immediately by her talent – it was a real jaw on the floor moment. We were like wow, yes,” he added.

Universal did release one posthumous Winehouse album - Lioness: Hidden Treasures - but it was not well received. Universal UK CEO David Joseph later destroyed the remainder of Winehouse’s unfinished demos.

“It was a moral thing,” Joseph told the Guardian in 2015. “Taking a stem or a vocal is not something that would ever happen on my watch. It now can’t happen on anyone else’s.”

On his decision to release this new song, Cang added: “I’ve had it knocking about for so long. I found it again last week and thought – I’ll put it out there so people could hear it.”