Amy Winehouse is similar to musical icons Ella Fitzgerald & Edith Piaf and needs to be nurtured, according to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The successful musical composer was at her gig in Birmingham on Wednesday night where she was booed by fans but said he could not “work out why the crowd turned on her - it just happened in one moment.”

“I didn’t notice her doing anything peculiar. I thought her voice was toned and she was handling material you would not expect a girl of her age to cope with.”

“It was strange what happened. Suddenly, way into the show, the audience suddenly turned on her and she wasn’t equipped to handle it. She made the mistake of haranguing the audience instead of letting it go.”

“If she hadn’t abused the crowd everybody would have gone home saying ‘Gosh she’s right back. Terrific concert.’”

Andrew added that she had an “Ella Fitzgerald quality” to her voice and added “there’s an Edith Piaf quality to her [too] which is very rare. She lives those lyrics.”

“She talks about her husband but in her situation you might expect that. There were moments during the show where she was up there with the A-list. Amy showed flashes of genius.”

“She is a big star and the awful thing about it is she’s going to be crushed like a butterfly and it’s not right. That girl needs to be nurtured and helped through all of these problems because she is a major, major talent.”