I didn't want them sitting on a hard drive, wilting away," Salaam Remi, Amy Winehouse's producer, said, explaining to a room of music journalists in October why he decided to begin work on an album of her songs. Next week, a little over four months after the untimely death of the singer, Lioness: Hidden Treasures, will be released.
By necessity, it is a collection of early recordings, out-takes, and just two unfinished tracks from her planned third album. "She appears to have recorded almost nothing in the last two years of her life," noted Alexis Petridis, the Guardian's music critic, this week. Anyone who followed the tabloids over the last few years will be painfully aware of the reasons for that, but Remi hoped the album would be a fitting reminder of Winehouse's talent. "Going through her music was like going through a photo album," he says. "There was a lot of stuff that I had forgotten about, and that nobody else knew existed. When I shared that with her manager and her family, we thought maybe we should share this with the rest of the world."
Will there be any more releases? "That's her family's decision. If there was something later, it wouldn't be full-fledged the way this is." What does he think she would she have made of this album? "She'd be fine with it," he says. This work won't be the third album Winehouse would have released had she lived, but it will be a poignant reminder of what we have lost.
There is, of course, a darker side to posthumous releases, where words such as "legacy" are bandied about and sales are guaranteed as long as there are enough voracious fans who can be relied on to will buy anything connected to their late idol. (In fairness to those behind Winehouse's album, a proportion of profits are to go to the foundation set up in her name). Tupac Shakur, the American rapper who was shot in 1996, has released more albums in death than he did in life, the richness of his music appearing more diluted with each one. Jimi Hendrix, who released just four albums before he died in 1970, has had his name on more than 50 posthumously, with most years seeing a new release of live recordings or a compilation, most recently in September.
Michael Jackson's posthumous album, Michael, was released last year, 18 months after his death, amid accusations from the singer's family that he wasn't even singing on some of the tracks. Quincy Jones, his former producer, told Us magazine. "It should have stayed in the vault. It seems everybody is trying to put everything out that they can with him. It's all to make money. He wouldn't have wanted it to come out this way." Another album, Immortal, has been released, and Howard Weitzman, who co-manages Jackson's estate, says more releases are planned. "It's a pretty vibrant estate in the sense that it continues to generate not just catalogue opportunities, but plenty of other ideas," he told Billboard in October.
"Reissue, repackage," was how Morrissey described the "sickening greed" of record companies on the Smiths track Paint a Vulgar Picture, and there is no doubt that a celebrity's earning power doesn't stop with their death. In Forbes magazine's recent list of the top-earning dead celebrities, Jackson was at the top for the second year running, earning $170m this year (£110m; the previous year, he earned $275, or £175m).
The man in second place – Elvis Presley – earned $55m (£35m) last year. If you want to see how we might treat deceased stars in future, look to the US company Authentic Brands, which bought the rights to Marilyn Monroe this year (they already market products under Bob Marley's name). CEO Jamie Salter told a Canadian newspaper that, thanks to digital technology, he expects Monroe to be starring in a new film "in the next couple of years".
"The entertainment industry is not renowned for its philanthropy or its taste. There is money to be made," says the pop historian and author Jon Savage. Record company balance sheets depend on their artists delivering an album, "and if they suddenly die, then you want to get something out. But there is definitely a law of diminishing returns, and protection of legacy is actually really important for a star's longevity. You don't need dozens of half-arsed compilations on cheap labels, you need it done properly."
It isn't just about the money, he says – there is often a genuine desire to provide something for fans, and a posthumous album can be a way to "treat the music with the respect it deserves".
Posthumous album releases go back to the 1950s, with Buddy Holly, says Savage. "Holly had a No 1 hit after his death. It's kind of like the James Dean syndrome – if a star dies in his or her prime, it's a very romantic idea, it goes back to the 'live fast, die young' ideal." The posthumous release, whether a film or album, "has been a staple of the 20th-century entertainment industry".
The obvious problem is that many are a patchwork of unfinished songs, grainy demos and out-takes. "The top musicians really work on what they do," says Savage. "The attraction [for fans] is that the out-takes and stuff that wasn't released is new to them, even if it's old – but the problem is, out-takes are outtakes because they're not very good."
Literary figures experience the same indignity when "lost" or unpublished works are printed. Last week, Penguin published Jack Kerouac's first novel, The Sea Is My Brother, describing it as "a unique insight into the young Kerouac [he wrote it at 20] and the formation of his genius", but the reviews have not been kind. In this paper, Sarah Churchwell wrote, "sadly it would take another 15 years and colossal amounts of Benzedrine for the genius to emerge; there's certainly none here." The Telegraph called it "sketchy and clumsy". They wouldn't have been telling Kerouac anything he didn't know: years later, the writer who made his mark with On the Road is said to have noted of this first effort "it's a crock [of shit] as literature".
Unfinished, newly discovered works rarely reveal themselves to have been the writer's lost masterpiece, so the question is whether they might have been better left at the bottom of a suitcase, only to be opened occasionally by a researcher. In September, the British Library printed the first novel Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, The Narrative of John Smith, an unpublished work about a 50-year-old man who has to take to his bed with gout for a week. It is made up of conversations about science, art, religion and ideas with a selection of visitors. The title – and description – hardly conjures up the gripping nature of Conan Doyle's later work.
It had gone missing in the post to the publishers, and although Conan Doyle later partially recreated it from memory, he never sent it off again. "My shock at its disappearance," he is said to have joked, "would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again – in print." Its editors admit that it "is not successful fiction, but offers a remarkable insight into the thinking and views of a raw young writer". Fascinating to Conan Doyle scholars; less interesting to readers hoping for an exciting new novel along the lines of The Adventure of the Speckled Band.
For years, literary debate raged about whether Dmitri Nabokov should ignore his father's wishes that his unfinished work The Original of Laura should be burnt. "Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it," the playwright Tom Stoppard told the Times in 2008. "The argument about saving it for the 'greater good' of the literary world is null … Our desire to possess [lost works] is just a neurosis, a completeness complex, as though we must have everything that's going and it's a tragedy if we don't." He called it "an impossible desire for absoluteness".
For decades, Vladimir Nabokov's son kept it in a Swiss bank vault, clearly torn between respecting his father's wishes and giving the world his final, if incomplete, work. When it was published in 2009 as a reproduction of the 138 index cards on which Nabokov had written, anybody harbouring fantasies that they were in possession of the writer's masterpiece were disappointed.
"Readers will wonder if the Lolita author is laughing or turning over in his grave," ran one of the first reviews in the US trade magazine Publishers Weekly. Martin Amis wrote, "there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind".
"It got a very mixed response," says John Sutherland, emeritus professor of English at University College London. "[The book] is quite interesting, it's a bit like looking through the keyhole at the writer working, and there is a great curiosity. But I daresay quite a few writers now include in their will 'bury my hard drive with me'." He acknowledges the excitement caused by the discovery of new work from a long-dead writer. "We don't want to let go of great authors."
The writer and literary critic DJ Taylor agrees. "If you're a fan of a particular writer, you want to see every last fragment." Does it not diminish their body of work to release something they didn't think was worth putting out in their lifetime? "It is so dependent on the individual circumstances. Take what the Beatles did in 1995, when they were making the Anthology series, and Yoko Ono gave McCartney unreleased vocals recorded by John Lennon." The songs – Free as a Bird and Real Love – the first original Beatles recordings for more than two decades, received much hype, but a mixed critical response.
"Certainly [those songs] added nothing to the achievements of John Lennon during his lifetime," says Taylor.
Artists' wishes, he says, are not sacrosanct. "If you are a writer, and you have work you do not want attributed to you, destroy it. If you have a trunk full of stuff, including juvenilia that would make you blush, do something about it." If you don't, he adds, "it's fair game". He points to Philip Larkin, whose secretary followed his wishes that his diaries be destroyed. "Andrew Motion talked to her – she had burned them but had the occasional look – and they were the most ghastly, dreary, pornographic maunderings, but in some ways are we not entitled to know about them? If he had really wanted them to have been destroyed, why didn't he destroy them? These are such grey areas."
These days, the death of an artist is rarely the end of the line. You can't feel anything but excitement at the knowledge that boxes in vaults in Zurich and Tel Aviv still contain unpublished Kafka works (the writer didn't publish anything in his lifetime, but his executor Max Brod ignored his wishes to destroy his work; imagine if he hadn't). Over the last months, researchers at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester have been rediscovering works in the archive of the Clockwork Orange writer who died in 1993, including an opera about Leon Trotsky, a TV series about Attila the Hun and letters to Benny Hill. It goes to show that the long-departed can still surprise us from beyond the grave.
