The Devil In Ms. Winehouse

August is usually the month when the tabloids write about skateboarding Labradors, but this year the silly season blues were banished by poor little Madeline and almost as poor little Amy.

The same leader writers who’d been screaming for Pete Doherty to be given life without parole – I’d settle for an undertaking not to make another half-arsed album, but that’s a different story – couldn’t wait to register their concern when the Civil-Fielder-Winehouses emerged from London’s Sanderson Hotel looking like Shaun Of The Dead extras. Compared to the facial lesions and bleeding feet that were documented by the waiting paparazzi, the 23-year-old’s previous Rickstasy (three parts vodka, one part Southern Comfort) benders seemed almost quaint in comparison.
That Winehouse has a serious drink problem was evident last December when I met her in the Berkeley Court Hotel three hours before she was due to serenade the nation on Tubridy Tonight. Even tinier in person than she looks on camera, she managed to knock back three vodkas – “no ice or lemon!” – in 20 minutes flat, and upset the blue-rinse brigade in the lounge by loudly telling a joke about Bono that had “Stop doing it, you cunt!” as its punchline.
There are those who can enjoy a pre-gig tipple (Bobby Gillespie, Damien Dempsey, Roisin Murphy etc.) and still deliver, but not Winehouse, whose Tubridy rendition of ‘Rehab’ immediately went up on YouTube for all the wrong reasons.
Had she been a preening diva I might have chuckled at her misfortune, but a nicer, funnier, more open young woman you couldn’t have hoped to meet.
Come our second chinwag in January, Amy also displayed a knack for insightful self-analysis.
“I’ve knocked the drink on the head a bit ‘cause I was starting to feel like a freak show – y’know, ‘Let’s stick the telly on and see how pissed Amy Winehouse is,’” she proffered between sips of Earl Grey. “I asked myself: ‘What do you want to be known for, girl, singing good songs or being pissed all the time?’ I’ve not turned into Sting or anything, but it’s nice to be taken a bit seriously.”
Which she undoubtedly has been on both sides of the Atlantic.
“I’ve never known anyone become so big, so quickly in the States,” her bezzie mate and Back To Black co-producer Mark Ronson tells me on a flying trip to Dublin. “It’s not easy to get the black kids and the white kids and the Latino kids into you at the same time, but Amy’s completely crossed over. Some people think that we sat down and said, ‘How do we tick all the boxes?’ but that’s not how it happened. We just met in New York and spent the day listening to all these ‘60s girl groups and doo-wop stuff like The Cadillacs that she’s into. I played some of the more soulful stuff that I’m into, and that’s how we got inspired. In my experience, anything of value comes from a genuine place.”
So getting Ghostface Killah to give ‘You Know I’m No Good’ a hip-hop makeover was more than just a cynical marketing ploy?
“Fuck, yeah,” he states. “It was the first song on the album we mixed, and it just popped into my head that it’d sound great with a rap. Mos Def and Common were the first names mentioned, but I thought, ‘No, with the horns and everything this is a Wu-Tang track – we have to get Ghostface on it.’ I called up his manager and said, ‘I’ve this English soul singer called Amy Winehouse who’s really fucking great, will you get Ghost to take a listen?’ The next thing I hear is that he’s written three verses, just left Amy on the hooks and wants it for his own album.
“You get one song every year that breaks down doors – Outkast did it with ‘Hey Ya!’, Gnarls Barkley did it with ‘Crazy’ and Amy’s done it with that version of ‘You Know I’m No Good.’”
Does he expect to be pushing buttons on Winehouse’s third album?
“There’ll be a big fucking row if I’m not!” he laughs. “She’s already writing songs and throwing loads of ideas around, so I don’t think she’ll have any difficulty whatsoever following Back To Black up.”
What about the very public disintegration of the past few months?
“She’s a smart girl, she’ll work it out,” Ronson opines. “You’ve got to remember she’s 23 and there’s only one of her. Bands get to split the pressure three or four ways, but everything’s on her shoulders. There are a lot of good people in her life, so I’m confident she’ll come through it.”
That confidence isn’t necessarily shared by her mum, Janis. When asked about the alleged marital fisticuffs and injecting of heroin between toes, the 52-year-old rues that, “It’s not someone I recognise. Amy is playing Russian roulette with her health and musical gift. I knew she was smoking marijuana but not that she was doing Class A drugs until she collapsed. She won’t stop until she sees the point of stopping. I understand the process where the brain shuts out everything except the drugs. Talking to her about it won’t make any difference.”
The Klaxons mightn’t have liked having their limelight hogged, but Winehouse’s Mercury Music Prize appearance last month was a welcome reminder that she’s a singer by trade, not a drug addict. Whether that remains the case in the future is up to her.