The internet broadcast by The Sun on Tuesday of Amy Winehouse at home apparently smoking crack made for depressing viewing. The grainy footage features the singer looking suitably out of it as she discusses having just taken six valium to counterbalance the cocktail of other drugs she’d consumed earlier in the evening. Then she lights up some crack and becomes further glassy-eyed and incomprehensible. Her thoughts are scattered and her mood increasingly skittish throughout the 19-minute-long footage – typical drug-diminished behaviour – but it’s not nearly as disturbing to behold as that grotesque photograph of Winehouse taken just last month, staggering around barefoot in the London streets wearing only jeans and a red bra and looking like a stricken extra from a low-budget remake of The Day of the Triffids.

The only genuinely shocking aspect to this latest lurid dispatch from the ongoing Winehouse meltdown industry resides more in the fact that the images under discussion were filmed by a supposed friend of the 23-year-old apprentice diva. This same “friend” is even quoted with undisguised glee masquerading as concern: “Here is proof that she has pressed the self-destruct button,” he/she all but gloats. With friends like this, who need enemies?

It also gives rise to the slight suspicion that Winehouse might be somehow colluding with her tormentors, getting her druggy entourage to feed them with further evidence of her seedy burnout as a way to stay in the spotlight. If this is so, then she really is in deep trouble. Drug addiction is hard enough to shake off, but it’s possible to come out the other side. Getting in bed with the tabloids is far more fatal.

Today’s media commentators like to pretend that all this media coverage of music celebrities losing the plot on drugs and alcohol began appearing only in the past ten years or so, but ’twas ever thus. In the Fifties Winehouse’s spiritual forebear Billie Holiday was hounded to an early grave by reporters determined to make her heroin addiction a public concern. A booze-and-barbiturate-addled Judy Garland inherited Holiday’s star-crossed media mantle, becoming a sort of sacrificial victim in the process. During the same decade, the News of the World was on the scene for a drug bust of the Rolling Stones that came close to sending both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to jail.

Like Winehouse and her dodgy entourage, the Stones sometimes found themselves being sold out by dubious druggy acquaintances in need of ready cash. The process was repeated in the Seventies, when individuals in the Sex Pistols’ cheesy retinue started selling photographs of Sid Vicious injecting himself. In the Eighties it went into a higher gear with the advent of Boy George and his heroin problem.

Since then the media has been unstoppable in its obsessive pursuit of falling music idols. There is one obvious reason for this: the general public has developed an insatiable desire for watching its favourite stars debase themselves further and further in the public forum.

Back in the Sixties and Seventies people were certainly interested in hearing unflattering gossip about their pop icons, but they weren’t nearly as emotionally involved in the process. Keith Richards’s much-publicised drug problems in the Seventies were noted by the general public, but never became a matter of great national debate. People either felt sorry for the guitarist or believed he deserved his predicament and then went on with their daily lives. Drug addiction was less common in those days and more frowned upon.

But over the past 20 or so years this has changed markedly throughout the Western World. In Britain – with its healthy black market drug trade in every town and city and thousands of office workers merrily binge-drinking away their weekends – substance abuse is becoming more pronounced by the day. Ordinary people are now struggling with their own drug and drink issues, but have also tended to become increasingly fixated on studying the lives of those supposedly more fortunate than themselves – or at any rate more famous – who are nonetheless trapped in a self-destructive addictive downward spiral.

Nobody has taken greater advantage of this cultural predicament than Pete Doherty, who has allowed himself to get dragged into some unholy pact with the tabloids in order to become fêted as the most infamous rock star of the millennium. In Doherty’s case, though, it’s understandable. He simply doesn’t have the musical talent to make it any other way.

But this is not so with Winehouse. Indeed, she’s one of the most gifted individuals to have broken into the global pop mainstream in more than 30 years. The genuinely tragic aspects of her flame-out are the way it has damaged her magical singing voice and blurred all sense of creative focus.

This became apparent to me when I caught her live show in Paris last November. It wasn’t the train-wreck showcase that her performance in Birmingham was during the same month, but it was unsettling to witness nonetheless. She seemed to keep losing focus on what she was doing, suddenly abandoning a song in mid-verse and looking vacantly at her backing band. She also kept leaving the stage at inappropriate moments.

When she fleetingly connected with the repertoire, her voice conveyed a wounded majesty that was genuinely beautiful to hear, but these moments were few and far between, frustrating glimpses into a bigger picture. I felt sorry for her and wasn’t alone in doing so.

Unlike Doherty and his trusty indie-out-cast fanbase, Amy Winehouse has a much larger and more varied demographic buying her records. At the Paris show I was expecting to see an audience mainly comprised of late-teenaged big-haired binge-drinking rebel girls and so was somewhat taken aback to find myself amid some 6,000 mostly middle-aged music lovers who had probably turned out to see Dido play the same venue three years earlier. These well-mannered souls lapped up the adept jazz-ska inflections of her support players and cheered her when she managed to stay in sync with the song, but soon grew restless with her abrupt exits and groaned audibly when she returned to the microphone cradling an alcoholic beverage.

We all knew we weren’t watching a great talent take flight, we were watching a promising young artist unravel before us. It was an unattractive vision that many present that night won’t bother to repeat again.

Does Amy Winehouse actually know what she’s doing to her career? Possibly not. Media profiles of the singer have always painted her as a wilful and undisciplined individual whose key aim in life is to play the loving housewife to her adored husband, Blake Fielder-Civil. It’s quite possible that she lacks the ego and ambition to carry the demanding role of global superstar. In the meantime, all these pressures have burst into her life – along with all the attention – and her first reaction is to self-medicate herself. It’s not entirely unexpected. People who get into hard drugs inevitably start out searching for some sort of inner illumination, only to wind up confronting oblivion. This, it seems, is where she is right now.

Is there a way out for her? Only if she genuinely wants to stop drinking and drugging. But that is a realisation that Winehouse can only come to in strictly private circumstances, without the rest of the world staring at her and passing comment. If she manages to summon the presence of mind to combat her situation in the next few months she’ll have a career to redeem and build on. If she doesn’t, she will condemn herself to becoming a freakish joke-magnet, that skinny Rehabgirl who kept saying nonono to detoxification until she polluted herself into the grave.

Meanwhile, her life continues to hang in the most precarious of balances, drug dealers on one side, tabloid turncoats on the other. She is caught between a rock and a hard place.

Amy, vodka and me

Even back in October 2006, when I spent a day with Amy, there were rumours that she was using crack, though all she demanded during our interview was vodka. She kept interrupting our conversation to send an assistant to get it, laughing that “inside his head there’s two monkeys rubbing a stick together” when he bumbled around and failed. Yet he was only pretending to be inept, since keeping Amy away from her poisons is a thankless task.

Behind her wit lies a will of steel – and behind that, a scared little girl who’s been in the public eye since her teens and doesn’t believe that she deserves good things to happen to her.

She told me she had tried rehab and decided it wasn’t for her, so I asked her why she thought people went to the Priory. “To get crack, obviously!” she beamed. We were backstage at Sharon Osbourne’s TV show, on which Amy would perform, but her whole day was distracted by the need for the vodka. “’Appy times!” she announced when the vodka finally arrived, and poured herself and Blake [Fielder-Civil] a large one. Later, back in her garrulous mode, she told me that she was a violent, terrible drunk, that since meeting Blake she had drunk every day, that she was living a double life by cheating on her boyfriend at the time with Blake. She admitted to eating disorders and an addictive personality, that she was even addicted to the rowing machine at the gym.

— SOPHIE HEAWOOD

From Grammys to grams

September 14, 1983 Born in Southgate, London, her father a London cabbie and her mother a pharmacist. Family had a history of jazz musicians.

1992 Parents divorce.

1993 Forms a rap group, Sweet ’n Sour, with a school friend.

1995 Attends the Sylvia Young Theatre School.

1997 Expelled for piercing her nose. Goes to the BRIT school in Croydon. She starts writing music, experimenting with drugs and working part-time as a showbiz journalist.

2000 Her on/off boyfriend, soul singer Tyler James, plays her tape to his manager and she secures a record deal with Island/Universal.

October 2003 Releases debut album, Frank.

2004 Nominated for two Brit awards. Winehouse is nominated for a Mercury Music prize and wins an Ivor Novello award.

October 2006 Her second album, Back to Black, is released in the UK and goes to No 1 in the UK album chart numerous times, and enters at No 7 on the Billboard 200 in the US, the highest debut entry for an album by a British female solo artist.

October 2006 Winehouse admits previous problems with drink and eating disorders.

May 2007 Winehouse’s single Rehab wins an Ivor Novello. She marries her on/off boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil six weeks after reuniting, in Miami, Florida.

August 2007 Winehouse drops out of European tour. She and her husband are photographed looking battered and bloody, allegedly after a row spiralled out of control.

October 2007 The couple spend a night in a Norway jail after being arrested for marijuana possession. They are released the next day and fined about £350.

November 2007 Winehouse’s husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, is charged with perverting the course of justice and GBH in relation to an incident in a pub.

December 2007 She’s arrested over an alleged £200,000 bribery plot involving her husband’s case. She’s later cleared.

January 2008 Nominated for six Grammy awards.

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