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This time last year, Amy Winehouse's life was in a mess. It had been marvellous. A few years previously, aged just 20, she had released a critically acclaimed debut album, Frank. It has sold almost 250,000, and won an Ivor Novello award for songwriting.
Critics compared her voice to those of the great American jazz singers who had inspired her to sing in the first place. Living in London's Camden Town with her boyfriend Blake, whom she loved so much that she had his name tattooed over her heart, she was the happiest she had ever been.
But then she split up with Blake. She says she did "something really silly"; the songs she has written about the relationship suggest that misunderstandings and perhaps infidelity were involved and things began to unravel.
She smoked too much cannabis and drank too much. After a while, she would wake up in the morning and the bottle would be the first thing she thought of. She couldn't start the new album, and told one journalist that this was causing money worries.
Her father, Mitch, a London taxi driver who had played those American jazz records to her when she was a little girl, couldn't stand seeing her in such a state, and called round in the cab to take her to stay with him in Kent. The next day, her then-manager turned up at Mitch's house and told Winehouse he was driving her to a rehab clinic, and - well, here is Winehouse's account, delivered in her broad north London Jewish accent:
"I said all right, I'll do it for you, Dad, but this is bollocks. So I went upstairs and put my face on, and then I got to the clinic, and it's the same old thing. I've been to a couple of rehabilitation centres before, whether it be for not eating properly, or drinking. Everyone there just wants to talk about themselves all the time. The fella in charge said, 'Why are you here?' and I said, 'Well, I think I've come because I'm drinking a lot, but I'm in love, and the drinking is symptomatic of my depression. I'm not an alcoholic.' Although, of course, I now sound like I am, because it sounds as if I'm in denial. Anyway, he says to me, 'I'm a recovering alcoholic ...'. And I thought, 'You're not going to stop (talking) now, are you?' And he didn't! He just kept talking about himself. It was so boring.
"He goes, 'Do you just want to fill out this form and we'll see how you feel?' And I said, 'I don't want to waste your time, to be honest'. In the end, I just stayed at my dad's for a couple of days."
Recounting this story in the sticky-floored back room of a Camden pub in the late afternoon, drinking a double vodka and coke, pulling on a Camel Light, the 23-year-old is like a chatty, gothic version of the noughties LA babe: naturally jet-black hair, short denim shorts, piercings and a black vest top revealing a host of tattoos - her nan, lucky horseshoes, the words "Daddy's Girl" and, of course, Blake's name.
Winehouse is a strange combination of cheery neighbourhood matriarch and out-and-out rock chick. Her favourite smell is petrol, her favourite fictional characters Lady Macbeth, and Harvey Keitel's Charlie Cappa in Mean Streets and her favourite pastimes "playing pool and having sex".
But, when we walk through Camden Town on the way to the pub, she waves and "hiya, darlins" to everyone with the relentless cheeriness of a breakfast cereal ad.
Today, we are discussing her new album, Back to Black. Most of the songs seem to be about the experience and the aftermath of the break-up. The first single, Rehab, opens with the words, "They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no, no no".
When her debut album, Frank, was released in 2003, it made a splash because of a striking combination: Winehouse's smoky vocals and her outre lyrics about her life in contemporary London. There were songs about her former boyfriend (and boss at the World Entertainment News Network agency where she worked as a music reporter) that reportedly drove the poor boy - seven years older than her - scurrying back home to Liverpool in embarrassment. No wonder. On Stronger Than Me, she rebukes his weediness before asking, "Are you gay?"
There was F-Me Pumps, a song about wannabe footballers' wives, and What Is It About Men? about her father's infidelity to her mother.
She famously carried her outspoken approach into real life, criticising other musicians with abandon. She memorably described Dido's album as "background music - the background to death", and informed one interviewer that Rod Stewart's Great American Songbook "disgusts me".
Her nan told her off for this, but she kept saying, "I'm not here to make friends".
But, of course, the more she laid into Madonna ("An old lady") or Victoria Beckham ("She should just give up") the more friends she made.
Her producer, Mark Ronson, with whom she has become friends, says her outspokenness can be misleading. "It isn't that she slags people off. It's that she doesn't have the internal bullshit-filter that the rest of us use. She'll just say what is on her mind."
She seems less vitriolic these days - probably, she says, because of giving up dope. She used to smoke a lot even before the split from Blake, and it made her mouth off and get "defensive - but then I started going to the gym and realised that weed was robbing me of my energy, so I phased it out. That was when I first lost weight".
Ah, yes - the weight. The week before we meet, she had been photographed twice in the tabloids looking very skinny - according to one of them Winehouse has dropped four sizes - and she does look dramatically slimmer than she did a year or so ago. There is no shortage of skinny female pop stars, but Winehouse does make you curious because she had seemed such a cheering antidote to the sort of "stars" whose diets were more interesting than their artistic output. Here was a girl who had a cleavage, who listed her favourite foods as "sausage, mash and peas, anything my nan makes, and McDonald's".
So, to see her come back so slim, you wonder if she has fallen prey to whatever process it is that turns healthy-looking, first-album girls into fake-tanned Twiglets. Did someone pressurise her to diet?
"No. No, I don't listen to anyone except my inner child anyway," she says seriously. "If someone had said to me, 'Amy, lose a stone' - which they wouldn't - I don't think I would have listened anyway."
It was the gym, she says. She is a clinically diagnosed manic depressive (for which she refuses to take medication), and has "an addictive personality", so, when she first started going to the gym while she was going out with Blake, she just thought, "This is great. It just picked up my whole wellbeing, and made me feel really good."
So she would do cardiovascular exercises for an hour and a half or more each day, in "a really posh gym" on the Strand, spurred on by trying to keep up with the boys. After she switched to an all-girls gym in Camden, she stopped going, because there wasn't anyone to compete with.
"I don't really act like a girl; I act like a boy. In the gym, girls are really shit. Round here you've got your Skeletor (a cartoon character) girls or your fat girls who go to the gym because they've been advised to."
It's hard to know what to make of this. When her friend Tom Wright, a long-haired, well-spoken club entertainer known as "Victorian Tom", joins us later, he tells me that a lot of people are making an issue of her weight, that it's nothing more than a mad lifestyle and her forgetting, or not being bothered, to eat.
She cooks for him three times a week, he says, claiming for her a domestic inclination that is confirmed by producer Mark Ronson, who tells me "there is a side of Amy that would always rather be home, just cleaning her apartment and cooking some giant Jewish meatball dish for a bunch of friends".
She doesn't have a lot of good friends in the industry, although she does get on very well with Kelly Osbourne whom she describes, of course, as if she were a neighbour whom she had met at bingo.
"You'd think she'd be a right bastard, but she is really sound. I've got all the time in the world for Kell. You know what she does? She'll tell us stuff that she's done, about her family, and we'll be, like, 'Yeah, Kelly, we know', because it's been on telly."
We meet another day at the recording studio in west London, where she has come to talk to her father and new manager about her not eating enough, ("which will be fun," she says sarcastically). When Winehouse goes off to fetch me a drink I ask her father Mitch, a good-looking, twinkly-eyed charmer, about What Is It About Men?, the song she wrote about him.
He shakes his head affectionately and says, "That's just Amy, isn't it?" Our conversation drifts to one night when Winehouse was performing at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho.
"Amy came on stage and behind me there were some people talking, getting louder," Mitch says. "I had to say something because she has been known to walk off if people are making a noise."
"So," Winehouse says, lining up the balls on the pool table for a game, "he turned around and ..."
"... So I turned round," Mitch continues, "and said, 'Do you mind! Keep your voices down!'."
"But it was ..."
"... only Mick Jagger! Mick Jagger and some other people. Anyway, I still asked him to be quiet."
"My dad sticks up for me, you see."
She fires the white ball into the triangle of reds and yellows with gusto.
Mitchell and Janis, a working-class, East-End Jewish couple, moved to the north London suburb of Southgate after they had Amy, their second child, in September 1983. Mitch owned a double-glazing company, and Janis was a pharmacist, but there was music in the family. Winehouse's paternal grandmother dated Ronnie Scott in the 1940s, and some maternal uncles are professional jazz musicians. Winehouse's elder brother, Alex, taught her how to play guitar, but her earliest music memory is of being three years old and sitting on the bathroom floor as her father sang Beatles songs in the bath.
Sometimes, when Amy is riding in her father's cab nowadays, she says, he sings along to Sinatra or Tony Bennett, "And he'll turn around and say, 'I bet you wish you could sing like me!'."
When Winehouse was nine, her parents divorced, and Janis moved with the children to Whetstone. Was her father's departure the reason that she now feels so close to him? Not really, she says.
"I think I got out of the divorce all right, because I was really young. It wasn't a big deal at all. I probably saw my dad more after the divorce than when they were together."
Her education was unconventional. She went to a state school until her early teens when she won a scholarship to Sylvia Young's stage school. But the headmaster charged with overseeing the pupils' academic education became concerned that Winehouse was not applying herself sufficiently. He advised Janis to move her daughter to an all-girls school so she would be less distracted from her school work - which is how Winehouse ended up at a private all-girls school in Mill Hill called the Mount, which, you will be amazed to discover, she hated.
She left at the age of 16, and then had several unhappy months at the state-funded BRIT Performing Arts and Technology School in Croydon.
She began work at the radio news service, but was also singing with jazz bands in London. It didn't take long before she was spotted singing with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra by someone from Simon Fuller's 19 management company (from which, she is keen to point out, she has now parted company) and from then on she has barely had time to look back.
Winehouse has been accused of being a nice middle-class girl faking a rebellious image. It is true that the Mount school is private, but this is not much of a secret. The only confusion is the exit from the stage school. The school says that Janis took her out, but Winehouse says she was expelled, although she then adds that they repeatedly called her mother to beg her to send her back. She was mildly irritated because "it's not like I was born into f---ing victory, do you know what I mean? (Yes, by this stage: she means wealth and poshness.)
"My family are from the East End. I'm lucky that I've had a good education - half of it's been paid for and half of it had been on scholarships. I dunno ... Yes, I'm a good girl. I haven't smoked crack," she says sardonically. "You can get a lot worse, I'm sure." --
Appetite for destruction
The rise, stagger, and rise of Amy Winehouse
Life after rehab has been one long liquid lunch - with plenty of reporters ready with their tape recorders.
2006
January, Breaks up with boyfriend Blake. Sent to rehab by her manager. Checks out after 10 minutes. "It was my old management's idea to stick me in rehab but I'm not with them any more and there's not much cause for me to go to rehab now," she told Scotland's Daily Record. "When it was suggested to me, I went to see the guy at the centre for 10 minutes just so I could say to the record company that I went. I literally walked in and walked out. I knew it wasn't for me." Sacks her managers. First demo of her song Rehab played on radio shortly afterwards.
April, Meets her new boyfriend, Alex, a chef, while playing pool.
September, Makes headlines by dropping four dress sizes - from 14 to 6. "For the past 18 months she has been going to her local women-only gym, for a two-hour session, every single day," a friend told the Daily Mail. "She is neurotic about it, completely obsessed."
October, Tells the Daily Mail she has had eating disorders. "A little bit of anorexia, a little bit of bulimia. I'm not totally OK now but I don't think any woman is."
Turns up drunk on Charlotte Church's variety show, slurring through three attempts at a cover of Michael Jackson's Beat It.
At one of her own gigs, she gets into a fight with her boyfriend and punches a female fan. "So I punched her right in the face - which she wasn't expecting, because girls don't do that," she tells London's Evening Standard. "When I've been on the booze recently, it's turned me into a really nasty drunk."
November, She heckles Bono at the Q magazine Awards as he accepts "the award of awards" for best band, yelling: "Shut up! I don't give a f---!" Mocked about her drinking problem on satirical panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, the host singing: "Tried to make me go to rehab ... in hindsight, yes!" Tells everyone she's planning to record a duet with Pete Doherty.
December, Carried out of a London restaurant semi-conscious. Sets off the fire alarm at her old high school while posing for a magazine in the corridors. "The whole school was evacuated," she tells WENN Entertainment News. "It was the highlight of my life".
2007
January, Performing at London nightclub GAYE, she runs off mid-song to throw up and doesn't return, citing food poisoning.
February, Arrives at Elle Style Awards in New York with cuts on her arms. "I probably walked around the block trying to get to the hotel and fell," she tells Word magazine. "I have no idea. I hate that. The blackouts. Happens too often." Performs Rehab sober at the Brit Awards, wins Best Female Artist award. Renounces alcohol in most post-award interviews.
Interrupts first US concert, at New York's Joe's Pub, to ask for an amaretto sour. "They keep trying to keep me from drinking, but they forget it's my gig."
