From the mayhem of the past year, if Amy Winehouse has learnt anything it might be the terrible truth contained in the saying “be careful what you wish for, you might just get it”. Since giving up her whimsical teenage plan to become a roller-skating waitress, the 24-year-old Winehouse has reached a summit that few pop stars even dream of; and, as it appears, promptly thrown herself off it.

To recap: her hit Rehab has soundtracked the past 22 months; her second album, Back to Black, was the biggest seller in the UK in 2007 –the album has now sold 9m copies worldwide, making it one of the biggest sellers of the 21st century; at the 2008 Grammys ceremony Winehouse received five awards, including the so-called “big 3” for song, record and pop-vocal album of the year, and she also became the first Brit to win best new artist since the jazz and soul singer Sade in 1986.

She’s been hailed “a style icon” by the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel, who called her beehive hairdo “an inspiration”. She was compared to Edith Piaf, Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. Her doting pop peers include George Michael, who has saluted her as the best singer and songwriter of her generation. In a poll of British under-25-year-old girls – who know her simply as “Amy” the way they know Kate Moss as “Kate” – she was voted “ultimate heroine”. On the home front, in May 2007 she married Blake Fielder-Civil, the love of her life, “my Blake – the handsomest man you will ever meet”, as she called him during a recent performance.

And what has all this brought her? A severe drug habit that may have permanently damaged her lungs. (The picture of Amy sucking on a crack pipe that appeared on the front page of a tabloid in January confirmed, in lurid detail, precisely the nature of a problem that those close to her had been aware of for some time.)

And a drink problem, allied to a proneness to get punchy in public. “If I have 20 units I can get violent, particularly if I am unhappy,” Winehouse said in 2006, and went on to prove it outside a couple of pubs in Camden.

Meanwhile, images portraying her self-harming, her drastic weight loss and her indiscreet sexual liaisons – she once said: “I know so many men I’d rather have sex with for two hours than talk to for two minutes” – have been relayed around the world by bottom-feeding paparazzi and marauding fans with camera phones who have staked out her London homes.

It wasn’t always this way. For the first five years of her career Winehouse was a critically esteemed punk-jazz singer whose debut album, Frank, was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2004. It’s only over the past 15 months that her future has gone on hold.

A notorious no-show, who has cancelled more gigs than she’s played in the past year, the once curvy, self-described “Jewish princess” with the big black voice has shrunk into a stick-thin directory of the demons lying in wait for the careless or careworn young – and not so young – of either sex. The hope is that her hospitalisation in June after fainting at her house in Camden – and the diagnosis of early-stage emphysema – may have provided a wake-up call. But none of her inner circle believes that Amy has “turned a corner” yet.

Winehouse now rates as the anti-Diana, the queen of dark. The “Amy on crack” pictures earned the drug dealer who took them a reported £50,000. In the hierarchy of basket-case pop stars, she’s up there with Britney Spears in that everything she does is news. Bad news. Her blotchy, pockmarked face in court on the first day of Blake’s trial in June earned her more pages of grim, photo-led coverage.

The real sadness is that, unlike Britney Spears, Pete Doherty and many other marginally talented celebrity wasters, Winehouse doesn’t need to work the sleaze angle to get attention. Much as the popular media are drawn to her like rubberneckers to a car crash, she has never courted them. The few music journalists who have met her over the years have found her a reluctant and distracted interviewee. One who took her to dinner after the release of Back to Black reported that she ate nothing, fretted about her boyfriend (at the time, a chef, Alex Claire), and left to look for him after 20 minutes. Though plenty of her associates and the odd family member have told, or sold, their stories, Winehouse herself has only ever talked to the tabloids by way of shouting at them from her doorstep.

So where and why did it all go wrong? There are three main schools of thought. The popular culprit is her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil. According to one of her oldest associates: “Amy likes rough, gangster-ish men.” In an early song, Stronger Than Me, she complained about her then boyfriend Chris’s wimpiness.

“You always put me in control,” she moaned, “Feel like a lady, but you my lady boy.” She can’t have any complaints on that score with Fielder-Civil.

A grammar-school dropout from rural Lincolnshire, he moved to London at 16, where for years he led a rootless, jobless and often homeless existence before entering Winehouse’s world in 2004.

Like Amy, he comes from a broken home. Unlike hers, his divorced parents were distant and apparently unhelpful figures in sorting out his chaotic life. His mother, Georgette Civil, has issued several strident warnings, telling one Sunday tabloid: “If Blake goes back to Amy, she will lead him to an early grave.”

Fielder-Civil may be bad news, but he is no wimp. As we went to press, he was on remand and awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in June to charges of grievous bodily harm (beating up the landlord of a Hoxton pub) and attempting to pervert the course of justice (bribing the victim to throw out the case). Fielder-Civil’s behaviour rivals his wife’s as tabloid fodder; it was recently alleged in court that he offered a fellow prisoner £20,000 to beat up Pete Doherty, one of a string of visitors to his marital home whom he believed to have bedded his wife. Fielder-Civil is a long-term drug-user and, according to some reports, a former dealer set up in a house in north London by a drugs gang. The point at which Winehouse became Mrs Fielder-Civil coincided with the onset of her decline. During a prison visit in May, Fielder-Civil apologised to Amy’s devoted father, and recent flatmate, Mitch Winehouse, for messing up Amy’s life by introducing her to hard drugs.

This is what Winehouse’s first manager, Nick Godwyn, who started looking after her in 2000 when she was 16, believes happened. “Amy changed overnight after she met Blake. She just sounded completely different. Her personality became more distant. And it seemed to me like that was down to the drugs. When I met her she smoked weed but she thought the people who took class-A drugs were stupid. She used to laugh at them.” It was Godwyn’s attempt to encourage Winehouse to seek professional help at a clinic in Guildford, after discovering her in her Camden flat one day, crying inconsolably and skinny as a rake, that inspired her bolshie riposte in Rehab: “I said, no, no, no!” Amy was in and out, Godwyn recalls, in less than half an hour. This incident, which took place during an off phase of her early on-off relationship with Fielder-Civil, presaged the end of Godwyn’s tenure as her manager.

Less quick to lay the blame at Blake’s door are those with longer experience of Amy’s headstrong nature. Her father, Mitch, a London cabbie who made his money from an earlier double-glazing business, hasn’t been able to work much this year for worrying about her. Mitch briefly moved into his daughter’s flat in February to try to steady her boat, and when that didn’t work, he attempted to have her sectioned at the end of April. (As he discovered, the only member of Amy’s family who has the authority to request that is her husband.) Though Mitch reports that Blake is “clean now” and doesn’t think “he’s gonna be one of those people who come out of prison as a career criminal”, he discounts Blake’s apology. “He didn’t coerce her to take drugs in any way. I wish he had. Because if he had she would most likely have said, ‘I don’t wanna do it.’” That said, Mitch does concede that his daughter’s recent compulsion to self-harm “is more to do with Blake. He explained to me that when they’re going into withdrawal, if they cut themselves, it takes away the pain”.

Winehouse’s current manager, a large, dreadlocked Guyanese concert promoter, Raye Cosbert, suspects drugs may be the symptom of a deeper unease. He attributes her current state to the rocketing level of recognition she experienced in spring 2007 after her career took off in America. Cosbert believes this brought her sociable instincts into conflict with a predatory media. “Amy is a public person,” he says. “She’s not like your usual reclusive star. She likes ordinary people. She likes playing pool with the bin men in her local. If she could take the Tube everywhere, she would. She feels deeply uncomfortable in the world of VIP celebrity. It’s unfortunate that you can’t teach somebody how to deal with fame.”

Especially not a complicated oddball like her. Her father recalls her mystification at the vast crowd that came to see her perform at Somerset House in London in the summer of 2007. “She said to me, ‘Dad, what are all these people doing here?’ She didn’t get it. She didn’t understand that she was the No 1 recording star in the world and that everyone wanted to see her.” Winehouse has often spoken to friends about how much she envies the drummer of the Arctic Monkeys, the guy at the back of the stage who can still walk around unnoticed despite the band’s massive acclaim.

The smart money, however, wonders if Winehouse may be willing misfortune on herself in the belief that it fuels her creativity. That unhappiness is Winehouse’s muse (and that she can’t write songs in a positive frame of mind) is an idea she floated in the past. “Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen,” she said in 2006. Her most popular songs, Rehab, Love Is a Losing Game, and Back to Black, support this view, as do those who know Winehouse best. “She only writes songs from her personal experience, and they’re all more or less painful,” says Mitch, from whom she inherited her love of jazz. “It’s a shame. But that’s the way she is. Amy can be creative when most other people would be checking into a hospice. When she can hardly stand up she’s got her books in front of her, scribbling away.” Another old friend marvels at the way Winehouse can “get up in the morning still trashed, hungover, feeling terrible, whatever, and start writing something brilliant”.

To prove that her dissipated routines of the past few months hadn’t disrupted this pattern, Cosbert played me one of the untitled demo recordings Winehouse made in May during a week she spent at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios near Bath with her producer Salaam Remi. It was in the high-energy style of the girl groups of the early 1960s. All things considered, it sounded pretty fresh.

But the persistence of her drug habits is a huge concern. The two-week detox she embarked on in February prior to filming a satellite live performance in London for the Grammys – which she couldn’t attend in person because her druggy associations held up the granting of her visa – has long since worn off. Mitch now calls it “a waste of time”. Despite having told her elder brother Alex that she didn’t miss smoking crack, and that she was looking forward to learning to drive and riding quad bikes with her new friend Kelly Osborne, Winehouse’s increasingly dishevelled and emaciated appearance suggests that brother Alex’s joyful post-Grammys announcement, “Amy is back with us!”, was premature. The reason for the abandonment of the recording sessions at Henley in April at which she and the producer Mark Ronson were supposed to record a theme for the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, is bluntly summarised by one of her inner circle: “Amy wasn’t in any fit state.” Cosbert insists that he knows plenty of male musicians “who do far more drugs than she does” and that a large part of the reason why Winehouse gets the shock-horror treatment is because she’s “a small-framed Jewish lady from north London”. The general view though is that if Amy Winehouse can’t, or won’t, clean up her act, and soon, she may well put more than her career in jeopardy. The doctors who diagnosed her emphysema told Mitch that if the condition had gone untreated for another three months, it would have become irreversible, and that she would have needed a respirator to help her breathing. “Whatever happens, we won’t be where we are now in two years’ time,” Mitch observes, grimly.

) ) ) ) )

Amy Jade Winehouse was born in the north London suburb of Southgate in 1983, and moved to East Finchley with her pharmacist mother, Janis, after her parents divorced amicably when she was 10. Long before the split, Amy had shown form as a handful. “From the age of two she knew how to wind us up,” Mitch says, recalling how his daughter would feign attention-grabbing choking fits, or deliberately go missing on trips to the park or Brent Cross shopping centre, “just to get a laugh out of it”. This kind of manipulative and disruptive behaviour didn’t play well at any of the schools she briefly attended. The last, the Sylvia Young Theatre School, to which she won a scholarship aged 14, and where she befriended Billie Piper, expelled her after two years. Mitch says: “Amy was extremely high maintenance, not because she needed lots of money spent on her. She’s never been like that. What she really likes is for people to worry about her.”

The only member of the family who could curb Amy’s wilfulness was Mitch’s mother, Cynthia, whom she called Nan. A charismatic Jewish matriarch from the East End (the teenage sweetheart of the jazz trumpeter Ronnie Scott), “Cynthia was the one person who could make Amy behave and who she would really listen to,” says Nick Godwyn. When he first met Winehouse, the only tattoo she wore was one of a lady jazz singer on her arm, inscribed Cynthia. Though the Winehouses weren’t particularly religious, every Friday night the family would meet in Nan’s house for the traditional weekly Jewish dinner, complete with chicken soup. According to a family friend who occasionally attended, Nan would usually send Amy off to wash up at the end of the meal. Sometimes she would also get her granddaughter to give her a pedicure: “Amy loved that.” These dinners continued until Nan fell ill in 2005.

It was Cynthia’s idea for Amy to go to stage school, starting her at the age of nine at Susi Earnshaw’s Saturday-morning class in Barnet. She showed some promise as a dancer, but not much, initially, as a singer. In her first pop group, a rap duo called Sweet and Sour, which she formed with her friend Juliette, 11-year-old Amy was the shouty, sour one. Hearing her off-key singing as a 13-year-old in a school play, Mitch recalls saying to her mother, Janis: “Thank God she can dance!” Whether it was her attentive listening to the old jazz records at home, or a simple case of late development, in three years Winehouse had blossomed as a jazz singer, left Sylvia Young, and become a vocalist with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. Janis burst into tears when she first heard her daughter sing the Sinatra standard The Nearness of You. Her boyfriend at the time, the singer Tyler James, took a tape of her songs to his manager, Nick Godwyn, a lynchpin of Simon Fuller’s 19 organisation. Godwyn was impressed, and not just with her voice. “Amy was this very groovy and knowledgeable hip-hop fan who also knew all the jazz greats, from Billie Holiday to Thelonious Monk. She was plump and kind of sassy. She had a unique style.”

Word of Winehouse’s remarkable talent got around the music industry even before she signed a record contract in 2002. When she flew to Miami to meet the top R&B producer Salaam Remi, whose previous clients had included the Fugees, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and Ms Dynamite, he was staggered by the maturity of her 18-year-old voice. “When she walked in and sang The Girl from Ipanema the whole room lit up,” Remi recalls. “She didn’t need a microphone or any production, she had it all within her.” Winehouse later returned to Miami to record her first album, called Frank after Sinatra, whose name she’d embroidered on her ripped jeans. Remi found her “really decisive. She doesn’t need to do a lot of takes. From the jump, she was one of the best singers I have ever worked with in the studio”.

With the six-figure advance she received from Island Records and EMI Publishing, Winehouse bought a flat in Camden, a buzzing magnet for aspirant cool cats that was handily situated, for an East Finchley girl, only five stops away on the Northern line. Winehouse rapidly became a fixture in Camden’s pubs and bars. Godwyn says: “Amy loved the Camden set because they weren’t flash. She loved the earthy, Bohemian feel of the place.” She particularly idolised Camden’s patron saint of pop cool, Pete Doherty. “She thought he was a genius.” You can, as Godwyn puts it, “buy anything walking down that high street”, and the easy availability of drugs was another aspect of Camden that Winehouse liked. According to her father, Amy had been using cannabis from the age of 15; it encouraged her boho, otherworldly leanings. Godwyn says: “Amy had that old jazz notion that you turned up somewhere, played a set for a few drinks in front of some friends, and then went home. She didn’t seem to know what money was.” A typical example of this occurred in March 2004 when she played an impromptu gig in the basement of Pizza Express jazz club in Soho, accompanied by a scratch trio and, for a couple of numbers, her father, Mitch, on vocals.

Around this time she started seeing Fielder-Civil. Having dumped wimpy Chris, she was now sharing her flat with her old flame, Tyler James. It wasn’t an entirely platonic arrangement. “I’ve been in love with T since I was a kid. We keep each other on our toes,” she said. But Blake’s similarly freewheeling, noncommittal attitude bothered her. In an interview she gave in June 2004, she talked about “this man I’ve been involved with who has other commitments. And I do get jealous.” She also admitted that she was on the lookout for some distress to kickstart her songwriting. “It sounds such a wank thing to say, but I need to get some headaches goin’ to write about.”

A year later, Winehouse had headaches and heartaches to spare. The appearance of the name “Blake” tattooed above her left breast coincided with a period of violent mood swings, drink and drug binges, and dramatic weight loss. 2005 turned into her lost year. “Amy was in a dark place,” one associate remembers. “I don’t know whether she was actually anorexic or bulimic, but the drugs were definitely making it easier for her not to eat.” The point at which Godwyn, with the agreement of her parents, tried to get her to seek help in the autumn of 2005 marked a low from which Winehouse promptly rebounded, creatively recharged, to write and record Back to Black.

When she returned to Miami in 2006, the producer Salaam Remi noticed that she had shrunk in size but found her just as switched on as she’d been three years previously. “Amy sat in my back garden with her guitar for 10 days and wrote half the album right there. She basically finished a song a day. And the entire time she was with me, there was no drinking or drugging at all.” And, lest we forget, there was no Blake, either. Her manager, Raye Cosbert, says the album “just poured out of her, like a tidal wave”.

The completion and release of Back to Black ought to have been a joyous time for Winehouse. That it didn’t turn out that way was largely due to the death in the summer of 2006 of her grandmother from lung cancer. Amy’s family believe it was the loss of Nan and her restraining influence – and in particular those normalising, chore-laden Friday-night dinners – that has precipitated Amy’s free fall into addiction. Mitch says: “Cynthia was more like a best friend to Amy. She kept her feet on the ground. After she went, there’s nobody who she’ll listen to. She certainly won’t listen to me.”

As Back to Black went supernova, and her nine-month affair with Alex Claire wound down, Winehouse resumed her stormy relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil in February 2007.

) ) ) ) )

Every show-business snapper in the country knows the small house in a cobbled Camden mews where Winehouse currently lives. This is her third home in the past nine months. After police raided the nearby flat she owns following Blake’s arrest last November, she moved to rented accommodation in Bow, east London, where she was filmed in January smoking crack cocaine by “Johnny”, the dealer who sold her the

drug. The subsequent front-page shenanigans prompted her to flee back to Camden, where she holed up in another rented place. Quite what she was hoping to achieve by this move is as unclear as much else in the hazy world of Amy Winehouse. The enterprising Johnny – or “scumbag” as Mitch Winehouse prefers to call him – remains a regular visitor: “You can’t stop these drug people getting to her.”

The truth is, nobody can, or will, chaperone this stroppy 24-year-old. Mitch lives in Kent, her mother still works full time as a pharmacist, and her three oldest girl friends, including Juliette, her partner in Sweet and Sour, have stopped coming around recently as a “tough love” protest against the company she keeps. Aside from the drug buddies, such as Pete Doherty, drug dealers and hangers-on, the only regular visitors to the house these days are close family and members of her management team, regularly checking to make sure she’s okay.

What they have to contend with now is Amy’s pig-headed determination that her shows must go on. On May 30, there was an informal meeting at her house in which her father, manager and various members of her touring team tried to talk her out of playing Lisbon’s Rock in Rio festival that night, in front of a sellout crowd of 90,000. Winehouse’s voice was completely shot: whether this was the result of a cold, as she claimed, or a night on the crack pipe wasn’t clear, but the notion that she would be able to carry off a 90-minute concert in her current croaky state seemed absurd to everybody.

Except Amy. Talking animatedly about her intention to enter a drug-replacement programme, and repeating how much she wanted to have a child as soon as she had kicked her habit, she insisted that the mad itinerary of the day proceed as planned: drive to Pentonville prison at 2pm to spend a couple of hours with her husband, then on to Canary Wharf to pick up a helicopter that would take her to Stansted for a 6.30 flight to Lisbon. On stage at 10.30 then straight back to the airport and home to Camden by 2.30am. This would have been a tall order for anybody, let alone an undernourished drug addict with a lung problem like Amy Winehouse. In the event, she arrived on stage half an hour late and stumbled hoarsely through a shortened set that met with a muted response. A fortnight later she flew to Moscow to perform at the opening of an art gallery owned by Roman Abramovich’s partner.

It was all too much. A week later she was rushed to hospital after a fainting fit at home. The discovery that she had emphysema, combined with an irregular heartbeat, was bad enough; the real worry was the lump in her chest. Mitch says there has been a high incidence of cancer in his family, and that he was terrified his daughter might have developed the disease that killed his chain-smoking mother. Luckily, tests so far suggest that Amy’s growth is benign. While in hospital, Mitch says, she slept and ate better than she has for a long time.

Amy Winehouse is in better shape than she was: her recent performances at Nelson Mandela’s birthday concert and Glastonbury proved that. But a return to full health will probably require a complete change in her lifestyle. The universal view of the concerned contingent is that Winehouse won’t get permanently well until she moves away from her beloved Camden, with its bountiful supply of drugs and drink. “Amy needs a house, with a gate, away from the road where she can have a proper private life,” says Cosbert. Mitch Winehouse agrees, and claims this is what Blake wants too, now that a spell in prison has, he believes, cured his addiction. “Blake totally gets it. He said to me, ‘We can’t carry on living in Camden. We need to move out to the country.’” If they do, Mitch says, “they could have the most fantastic life together, with the full blessing of my family.” If they split up, he adds, the terms of their prenuptial agreement state that Blake gets none of her estimated £10m fortune.

The question, as ever, is what Amy Winehouse wants, and then, if she got it, whether it would: a) make her happy and b) suit her creative temperament? And while we’re back with the old sayings, here’s another to consider in the light of the messy public spectacle she has become recently: people who live in glass houses, shouldn’t. Just shouldn’t.

Under siege at Amy's

It’s Sunday morning and Amy is splashed over the tabloids —again. As the paparazzi clamour on her doorstep, the singer gives Claire Hoffman an inside view of her reckless lifestyle

It’s dawn on a hot Sunday morning, and Amy Winehouse is inside her north London home, staring at her reflection in a dark-tinted mirror, looking the tiny little body in front of her up and down, assessing the emaciated tattooed limbs, the jungle of a black beehive weave, the hallucinatory glow of her transparent green eyes. Winehouse’s home is in disastrous disarray: discarded bags of crisps, crumpled nuggets of tin foil, beer bottles, lingerie boxes and scattered old credit cards tell of a long night that hasn’t ended in weeks, maybe months.

Her Sunday has begun with a shriek. The tabloids have hit the pavement. This time it’s photographs and videos that show Winehouse in various states of dereliction, all shot by her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil. What’s scandalous this time isn’t the pictures but a video of her singing a ditty chock-a-block with racial slurs. “Blacks, Pakis, gooks and nips . . . deaf and dumb and blind and gay,” she and a girlfriend sing goofily. The morning headline reads “Sex, drugs and racist rant”, but there’s no publicist or manager to be seen, no crisis-management squad deployed to save one of the decade’s most successful female vocalists from public shame. It’s just her and a girlfriend. The British singer Remi Nicole pores over the paper, annoyed, telling her friend that all this scandal has to stop.

“You need to get rid of the c***s around you who whisper,” says Nicole, and after a pause, “What’s the point of him taking pictures of you with a crack pipe?” referring to Fielder-Civil.

“It wasn’t like that, babe,” says Winehouse sweetly as she scours the floor in a stupor for a headscarf. “It’s important that you know that. You know a lot of things are more casual to me than they are to you.”

“Yeah, like smoking crack,” Nicole says.

“He’s taking pictures of me because we were on our honeymoon and he thought I looked pretty.” She finds a red scarf with white polka dots, à la Minnie Mouse, and carefully fastens it around her head. Downstairs a pack of paparazzi has gathered in a frenzy, inches from her door. For the past hour, Winehouse has been getting ready to meet them; she’s been carefully drawing the dark, thick Cleopatra swoops around her eyes, foundation covers little scabs that raid her face. “What are you going to say, Amy?” I ask her.

“I could just go out there and say… I don’t know.” Her mouth is slack. “I don’t know, really.” Winehouse gives her hive one last tease and trots gamely down the stairway. She opens the door, and on cue a firestorm of flashbulbs surrounds her, voices crying her name. “Amy! Amy! Amy!”

“I guess I should apologise,” she starts, fluttering her eyes, swaying her hips, flipping and tucking her hair innocently.

“Don’t apologise, Amy, don’t apologise!” the photographers shout as they blast her with their flash fusillade. “We love you, and your friends love you!” “What next, Amy?” they cry. “What are you going to call your new album?” She smiles, then wickedly says: “Black Don’t Crack.”

This past year, Amy Winehouse, 24, has gone from being one of pop music’s most ascendant and celebrated talents to a tragicomic train wreck of epic proportions. This spring brought story after story in the tabloids, parading images of Winehouse wrecked and wretched, usually high and half-naked. Her smacked-out haze of an existence went viral in May, when the Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty posted videos on YouTube of the two of them in a dark room playing with just-born mice, their fingernails encrusted in black resin, using the animals as puppets to beg Winehouse’s husband not to divorce her. Winehouse says all of this is the product of heartbreak from being separated from her true love, whose name appears in a little heart pin she often wears in her hair. “To be honest, my husband’s away, I’m bored, I’m young,” Winehouse tells me. “I felt like there was nothing to live for. It’s just been a low ebb.”

Winehouse is rarely alone. Her home is on a hushed cobblestone lane off the main drag of raucous Camden, but throughout the night, musicians, dealers, masseuses, friends and fans come and go freely.

In the hours I spend with her, her main concession to health is a large upright tanning bed, which she uses every day. She often seems like she is having trouble staying awake, fighting to keep her eyes open. “I just took my night-time medicine,” she says. “I’m so tired.” Winehouse seems lonely, in search of a perpetual slumber party. “Women don’t try to use me,” she tells me groggily. Her trust is remarkable; at one point she even discusses her night’s outfit with two female teenage fans over her door-bell intercom.

Her arms are spotted with cuts and scratches; she itches them furiously as she wanders upstairs. She offers me beer, then realises she doesn’t have any. She sends Nicole to ask a paparazzi to go and buy it for her, and when he returns, she laughs at his request for money.

She floats into the kitchen, a sea of dirty dishes, to wash glasses for our beer. She’s dazed, keeps losing track of what she’s doing, her eyes flicking around. “I’m sorry, I’m a really shit interview,” she says to me. She spends 10 minutes washing the glasses, fondling the edges slowly with the sponge and drying them with a big, filthy bath towel that sits on the counter.

When she returns, she teeters over to the living room, moves the array of bottles and glasses aside, and asks Nicole for a massage: “Press my face, Remi.” She sits in front of Nicole, puts down a pillow, then jogs off to get massage oil and paper towels. “Will you just sit still?” asks Nicole, who seems distinctly sober. In a matter of minutes, Winehouse has moved Nicole again, this time to the couch, and she’s burying her head into her lap as Nicole works diligently on Winehouse’s small, gnarled back.

“I love Amy,” says Nicole.

“Yeah,” says Winehouse in a cute voice, “she loves me.”

“Amy is a very honest type of person,” says Nicole. “She blows my mind. She’s very special.”

From her lap, Winehouse mutters: “Special needs.”

Winehouse wants to show me her wedding pictures, but first she wants food. “I’m on a strict pizza diet,” she says perkily. “I’m on a strict put-weight-on diet. I love food. I’m just stressed out.” She returns from the kitchen with an oozing white-bread-and-banana sandwich, on which she sprinkles crisps. She hands Nicole her laptop, which is caked in fingerprints and smudges, and asks her to show me the photographs of Winehouse and her husband making out, the two of them mugging for the camera like Mickey and Mallory, passing pills to each other with their tongues. Winehouse gets up for more food. Nicole continues the slide show, and suddenly the screen flashes Winehouse’s blurry face, taken from above with a phone in one hand and a gigantic penis in her mouth. Nicole and I both look away. “I’ve never been to rehab, I mean, done it properly,” says Winehouse from the kitchen. “I’m young, and I’m in love, and I get my nuts off sometimes. But it’s never been like, ‘Amy, get your life together…’”

It’s 9am and the last paparazzi leave, shouting up: “Thank you, Amy!” “You’re welcome!” she yells, then mutters: “You f***ing gooks.” And cracks up. She calls me a cab and walks me downstairs, inviting me to join her a few days later for a private concert in Moscow, where she’ll be paid a reported $2m to play for Roman Abramovich. (A day later her manager rescinds the invitation.) After the show it is reported that Winehouse was drunk and Abramovich’s organisers were sent into a mad scramble to search for a replacement. They say she played hours late and without underwear. Her publicist, Tracey Miller, dismisses the rumours, insisting it went well.

©2008 Rolling Stone. First published in Rolling Stone magazine. Distributed by Tribune Media Services

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• Burning Bush with W
• Greatest movie partnerships
• Nicole Kidman returns to Australia