A demo track recorded by Amy Winehouse when she was 17 years old has been released by a London record producer.

Gil Cang, a composer and musician, has uploaded a recording of My Own Way – which he co-wrote with James McMillan for the Jewish singer – to YouTube.

Mr Cang told the Camden New Journal that the demo had been “knocking about for so long”, before he rediscovered it last week and that he had decided to release it “so people could hear it”.

It was recorded when Winehouse was trying to attract the attention of record labels, before she eventually signed for Island Records in 2003.

Mr Cang said: “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.

“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.”

Winehouse died in 2011 aged 27.

A posthumous album of her B-sides and covers, Lioness: Hidden Treasures, released by Universal, was poorly received, prompting the company’s UK CEO to destroy all her remaining unfinished tracks.