Smash hit

Yet the songs this voice sings are up to the minute. In partnership with Salaam Remi, the former Fugees, Nas and Ms Dynamite collaborator, Winehouse has channelled an adolescence immersed in jazz, soul and hip-hop into a beguiling hybrid that, in the debts it owes, drops all the right musical names of yesteryear, but simultaneously manages to sound thrillingly new. No wonder Island pricked up its ears. But Fuller?

"I don't know him," Winehouse says, and then backtracks: "I've met him twice. But I wouldn't sign for a year because I was convinced they would say something like, 'You can completely make the album you want to make,' and then, as soon as I'd signed, go, 'Right, this is Simon, he's going to style you, he's going to give you a permatan and hair like his.'" She can't stop herself. "He looks," she adds, "like a Ken doll. He's practically shining, that's how plasticated he is. No, not really. Actually, I thought he was Paul Young when I met him."

If she talks like this about her allies and benefactors, then heaven help her enemies. One particular boyfriend is on the receiving end on Take the Box, in which Winehouse visits her former lover to collect her belongings and leave a few bittersweet mementos in a cardboard box.

"When I wrote that," she recalls, "I smashed up everything in my room. There was nail varnish down the walls. I gave him the box, then I came back and wrote the song. And I was fine."

She says this so convincingly, you hesitate to point out that her anger seems still very present in the room. "Being a musician and a singer," she says, "there is always going to be something in me that is completely twisted, f***ed up and sad. But I don't want to be stuck in a room where all I ever do is write: lie there and cry and then write a song. Mind you, I might have to do that for the next album."

It's not all point-scoring. On What Is It About Men?, she twists the statement and observes: "My destructive side has grown a mile wide." And on You Sent Me Flying, she lets rip with a burst of such unbridled optimism and romantic euphoria that you understand why her disappointment with its flipside is so severe.

Frank is about to send Amy Winehouse flying. It is a staggeringly assured, sit-up-and-listen debut, both commercial and eclectic, accessible and uncompromising, the kind of record that people will still be playing far into the future. Its creator is going to be a star. Watch her soar, like, well, a canary.

And watch her tear a strip off anyone fool enough to question her methods: her on-report days are well and truly over.


Frank is out on Island Records

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