Post your comments on Amy Winehouse's performance at the bottom of this review

Even by her normal soap-opera standards, this last fortnight has been unusually turbulent for Amy Winehouse.

As the 24-year-old singer launched her biggest British tour to date in Birmingham last night, her headline-grabbing husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, languished behind bars on charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice in an assault trial.

At the close of a tumultuous year of dramatic arrests, drug confessions, public fights and family strife, has life in the limelight tamed the rehab queen of British pop? No, no, no.

After much tense preshow speculation about whether she would even turn up in Birmingham, Winehouse finally teetered onstage almost an hour late and downed the first of many drinks by the end of the first number.

She was dressed in a skimpy, shiny top and tight black skirt and her magnificent beehive squatted on top of her tiny head like a huge dead octopus.

Even if she didn’t possess one of the most distinctive voices in modern pop, the singer is a fabulously exotic creature, with more than a dash of drag queen. Just a shade away from surreal sketch-show parody, she was more Ronni Ancona than Ronnie Spector.

Comparisons have inevitably been drawn between Winehouse’s wild wobbles and the slow-motion car crash that is Pete Doherty’s career. But the crucial difference is that Winehouse has more than enough intoxicating tunes to justify all manner of diva antics, plus a brilliant voice full of grainy yearning and battered pride – even if, in Birmingham, she sounded a little more sullen and slurred than usual.

Another key distinction is that, unlike Doherty, the North London siren appears to have gained extra career momentum from her backstage troubles, rather than being ravaged and hobbled by them. A few weeks before this sold-out tour began, her Back to Black album was confirmed as the biggest-selling British release of 2007.

Meanwhile, superstar fans including Prince, George Michael and Missy Elliott are queuing up to work with her.

In fact, it could be argued that Winehouse’s bad-girl antics have added an extra dash of Edith Piaf-style authenticity to all those fabulously overcooked 1950s tramp-vamp lyrics about bruised hearts, toxic addictions, men behaving badly and women behaving worse. There was certainly an electric charge when she pointedly added “nothing’s gonna bring my husband back” to the tragic drama-queen stomp of Back to Black. She later dedicated a clutch of heartbroken ballads to Fielder-Civil and, at several points, appeared to be weeping into the microphone.

For all these churning emotions, this was not a classic show. Clearly the troubled chanteuse has other things on her mind, but the size of the venue also appeared to overwhelm her at times. The fetchingly sloppy, intimate delivery that works a treat in smaller clubs does not translate well to arenas, and some of her bouncy retro-soul hits fell a little flat.

Winehouse is a true star and a singular talent. But maybe next time, for everyone’s sake, there should be a little more drama onstage rather than off.

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