Chasing Amy

And you don’t do any other drugs?

“I don’t have time.”

You don’t have time?

“I’m a really big drinker,” she says in response. “I used to be there before the pub opened, banging on the door.”

She nods off again. Across the room, Naomi looks stricken.

It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Over the past year, Amy Winehouse has emerged as one of the world’s biggest pop stars. Her second album, Back to Black, announced the arrival of a superlatively talented singer-songwriter with a unique retro-futurist musical blend: ’60s girl-group pop, jukebox soul and Billie Holiday–style torch balladry, filtered through the hard-boiled sensibility of a Jewish cab driver’s daughter from the North London suburbs. The music soared, and Winehouse made the big leap overseas, cracking the Billboard Top 10 with Back to Black and its smash single, “Rehab.”

But by the summer of 2007, Winehouse’s ­tabloid-magnet exploits were threatening to eclipse her ­musical success. Amy and Blake had become the latter-day Sid and Nancy: a scary-skinny couple careening around London, supplying a near-constant stream of lurid photo-ops and tales of deathwish-level partying. There were stories of rampant drug use, eating disorders, self-mutilation. There were mass-media interventions by parents and in-laws. As summer turned to autumn, Winehouse was poised for a career apotheosis, likely to garner a slew of Grammy nominations. But her friends and handlers feared that she might be too high, too drunk, too lost — or worse? — to reap the glory. So the singer was put on the shelf for the month of September, to recuperate in time for her big fall coronation. With this in mind, Blender traveled to Europe at the beginning of October to conduct the first interview with a reborn Amy Winehouse. But things aren’t quite working out as planned.

Back in the dressing room, Winehouse snaps awake with a jerk and begins apologizing.

“I’m just really drowsy at the moment,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

Maybe we should continue this later.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Naomi offers.

“I’m so sorry,” Winehouse says.

Amy Winehouse has always had music in her life. She was born on September 14, 1983, in the London suburb of Southgate, to dad Mitch and mom Janis, a pharmacist. But uncles on her mother’s side were jazz musicians and her paternal grandmother was a singer who dated the legendary British saxophonist Ronnie Scot. Mitch Winehouse was himself an amateur crooner and ardent fan of American jazz vocalists — Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington — whose records he played nonstop when Amy was a child.

Amy’s parents separated when she was 9, and she and her older brother Alex went to live with their mom. Amy’s musical taste skewed decidedly mainstream — until she fell in love with hip-hop. “I listened to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection every day until I was about 11,” she has said. “And then I discovered Salt ’n’ Pepa and TLC.” At 12, she enrolled in the Sylvia Young Theatre School, a prestigious performing-arts academy, but was expelled three years later; she enrolled in another London performing-arts school but soon dropped out to spend most of her free time indulging a favorite new hobby: smoking weed.