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[Wino]

http://enjoyment.ind...icle2287538.ece

Pop loves a wild child - and few performers have embodied the image quite as enthusiastically as the cabbie's daughter from north London who's just been crowned best British female solo artist at the Brits. But beyond the clothes, the hair and the drinking, what's Amy Winehouse really like? She opens up to Charlotte Cripps.

It's been quite a week for Amy Winehouse. Feted at the Brit Awards, where she was named best British female solo artist, the 23-year-old found herself at the centre of a media storm. Her clothes, her love life, her behaviour, even her music: all have been the focus of frenzied attention, culminating last weekend with the (perhaps inevitable) accusation that Winehouse had taken cocaine at an after- Brits party - a charge dismissed by her father.

But the Winehouse of her public image couldn't be more different from the person who sits down with me in the bar of a hotel in Camden. She'd arrived at the Brits last Wednesday carrying a heart-shaped bag (it was Valentine's Day), and wearing a sunshine-yellow mini-dress, with her hair up in trademark bouffant style and displaying plenty of cleavage and tattoos. Numerous outfit changes followed over the course of the evening. For our meeting, however, her black beehive is in place and her eyes are made up Cleopatra-style with thick black mascara - but the singer is stick thin and wearing an old, shabby black cardigan and jeans.

She admits to wearing the same clothes most of the time. "I don't have many clothes. I lose them, or leave things places," she says. "But I have a lot of dresses from the last album, when I was bigger."

The jeans show off her minuscule waist; the self-confessed depressive and sometime anorexic/bulimic confides that she used to smoke "two ounces of weed" a week before giving it up in favour of visits to the gym and dropping a few dress sizes.

She's up front about what it means to her to have beaten Lily Allen and Corinne Bailey Rae to the Brits crown. "I used to watch the Brits as a kid, so it's amazing to have won an award. It made my night to have my mum and dad there with me to share the moment, and we had a wicked time at the party afterwards to celebrate."

The forthright but fragile-looking Winehouse carries with her the air of someone who gets bored and restless easily. She genuinely doesn't seem to enjoy talking about herself - all she really wants to do, she tells me, is to get to the pub across the road, her local, for a drink with her mates, the fruit-and-veg market boys. We were scheduled to meet in the boozer, but the venue has been changed to a marginally more sober setting and Winehouse is on her best behaviour, claiming to have cleaned up her act a little.

Despite insisting that she is not, in fact, an alcoholic, her complex personal life and bouts of drunken behaviour - including a slurred performance on The Charlotte Church Show last autumn - have become fodder for the gossip columns. "Blackouts happen too often," she confessed last month. "Once I get on it, I don't know when to stop."

Not knowing when to stop means, among other things, that an intoxicated Winehouse has publicly brawled with fans, friends and her boyfriend. Her song "Rehab" was written after a failed attempt by her old management company to book her into a clinic for a "mini break" from her excesses.

And, while last week she admitted that scars on her arm were caused by a drunken fall in New York, she claims: "I don't really have a problem with alcohol. I have a problem with me that probably comes out when I drink. I try to please everybody all the time and then it all builds up. I get frustrated. Oh, I don't know." She shrugs. "What do I know anyway?"

It seems that she suffers more from shame at her bouts of drunken behaviour on behalf of her family rather than herself. "I was sitting on the Tube this morning reading the Mirror. I saw this piece about myself and I got a bit embarrassed, so I closed it quick. I didn't want anybody to notice I was reading about myself," she chuckles.

"It doesn't really bother me. It's all water off a duck's back. People around me might get shit for it. My boyfriend's mum keeps telling him I have a drink problem - she says she read it in the newspaper and tells him that he's got to tell me to stop drinking. It's embarrassing. People at work are saying to her that her 'daughter-in-law' is an alcoholic. It's also tough on my parents because they are protective of me. It must be hard for respectable people.

"When I went to rehab - not one of those posh ones, God no, this one was out in the sticks - this fellow told me I was not an alcoholic, and so I went home," Winehouse says. "I think what helped was that when I went to the rehab interview I did my hair all nice - perfect make-up, high heels, nice jeans, smart jacket - and the man took one look at me and thought, 'You really don't look like you need any help.' I know it's not really all about how you look, but I didn't look weedy and ill. I was drinking a lot - I'd be ill for a couple of days - but I would bounce back because at the time I was training at the gym."

Winehouse lives in a maisonette across the road from where we are sitting, with her boyfriend, Alex, 21, a chef and musician. When they met (in the pub) nine months ago, she had a large bump on her forehead from falling over drunk the night before and waking up in hospital. Now, the couple share one set of keys to their home, which can be problematic when the keyless Winehouse wants to get in to the house and her man isn't around.

Still, it's her version of domestic bliss. "I like nothing better than to cook him breakfast and do a little cleaning before I go out doing promo all day," she says. The house is falling apart because it's so old, and she's getting some repairs done. "No gold-plated banisters - just basic stuff like getting the ceiling plastered. I might get some cool vintage wallpaper though."

Winehouse has kept her three best friends from childhood, a sure sign that she has yet to lose her soul to fame and alcohol. She likes the simple things in life. She enjoys cooking West Indian food, but the last time she had some friends round, she didn't cook because she was "tipsy". "It's not that I can't cook anything special when I'm drunk," she says, "but that I can't be bothered. I'd rather play guitar than chop onions."

Born on 14 September 1983 to East End Jewish parents, Winehouse grew up in Southgate, north London. Her mother, Janis, is a pharmacist and her dad, Mitch, a cab driver; she says proudly that her grandmother dated Ronnie Scott in the 1940s. Her parents are now divorced, but they were both seen enjoying themselves at the Brits. Last weekend, as the post-Brits media frenzy went into overdrive, her father was defending his daughter from allegations in the News of the World that she takes cocaine.

Winehouse won a scholarship to Sylvia Young's stage school at the age of 12, but she lost her place because she wouldn't focus on the academic side of her work. She hated her time afterwards at the all-girls private school, The Mount in Mill Hill, and left at 16 (with five GCSEs) before ending up at the BRIT Performing Arts and Technology School in Croydon. Winehouse dabbled with music journalism at the WENN news network but found news reporting boring, preferring instead to write songs and sing with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra at weekends.

When a friend in the music business, Nick Shymansky, heard her singing, he gave her studio time to record some demos. ("I didn't go knocking on people's doors," she recalls. "I wouldn't bother sending anybody your tape - people get tapes by the sackload and a lot of the time they don't care.")

At 17, she landed a contract with Island Records and when she was just 21, in 2003, her debut album Frank was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. She won an Ivor Novello award the following year for her first single, "Stronger Than Me".

After that, Winehouse found herself unable to write for 18 months until, in March last year, she met the New York-based British producer Mark Ronson. He's the man responsible for helping Winehouse to recreate the 1960s "wall of sound" and marry it to her lyrics about how it feels to be a young woman today. The result was the album Back to Black, which had gone double platinum on 700,000-plus sales even before the fillip of her Brits triumph.

Had it not been for Ronson - whose roster includes Lily Allen, Kanye West, Christina Aguilera and Robbie Williams - the song "Rehab" may never have seen the light of day. "I was telling him about how I'd hit rock bottom, when my ex-boyfriend Blake [whose name is tattooed across her breast] left me broken-hearted and they tried to get me into rehab. He was laughing disbelievingly, saying, 'No, no no!'"

The next step in her career, of course, is to crack America. Her first Stateside single, "You Know I'm No Good", is released next month, and the singer leaves for New York in a few weeks' time to play an already sold-out concert at the Bowery Ballroom. There's also an appearance lined up on David Letterman's late-night chat show.

I ask if she ever worries that all of it - the success, the media attention, the hectic schedule - will engulf her. "I don't want to think about it," she says. "I can't think like that." We say our goodbyes and Amy Winehouse gets up and strolls out into the afternoon, bag over shoulder, and heads across the road to the pub.

[Winehousedrunk]

Looking at the very oldest posts, I came upon this one, and though the posted article is from Feb. 20, 2007, I think it's still a good impression of Amy's personality and character. Don't get too melancholic reading it.

[Alan48]

I try to please everybody all the time and then it all builds up. I get frustrated.

"I don't know what the key to success it, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." — Bill Cosby

[Winehousedrunk]

^ I'm not a big fan of Bill Cosby, but the quote certainly is very appropriate here.

Edited by Winehousedrunk, 18 April 2009 - 12:02 PM.

[ohmr]

She has become a pop icon, imo.