Chasing Amy

A week after leaving The Causeway, Winehouse was photographed stumbling and bleeding in the streets of London’s West End in the wee hours. Earlier that night, she and Blake had been seen fighting at the posh Sanderson Hotel, where they’d rented a suite. A source close to Winehouse tells Blender that the reason for the fight was Amy’s insistence on returning to rehab: “Amy was determined to do it. She was making a stand against Blake, so they came to blows.” In the end, the Sanderson Hotel reportedly billed the couple for damage totaling more than $18,000.

In the last week of August, the decision was made to temporarily pull the plug on Amy Winehouse’s career while she “addressed her health concerns.” Her upcoming North American tour was canceled. Winehouse and Fielder-Civil decamped to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia for a restorative beach holiday; Winehouse’s reps have denied accounts that the singer vomited blood in her vacation hotel room. By mid-September, Winehouse was declaring her time off a success, telling the NME: “I’m ­sorted out. Nothing’s wrong with me … A lot of fuss has been made about nothing.”

 And yet in early October, when Blender first arrives to meet the new, cleaned-up Winehouse at a London photo studio, little seems to have changed. Winehouse arrives nearly five hours late, eats lunch from a McDonald’s bag then disappears into the bathroom. She emerges a few minutes later looking woozy and passes out while having her makeup done. Winehouse is helped to a waiting car. “Amy’s not feeling well, she’s going to head home,” her label rep announces. “It must have been the McDonald’s.”

The official story from Winehouse’s camp is that there is no story. Raye Cosbert, her manager, will say only that Amy “takes prescription medication, which makes her drowsy.” What medication, exactly? “That’s between Amy and her physician.” Is Blake a bad influence on his wife? “Blake and Amy love each other very deeply. And love is a good thing.”

But Mitch Winehouse, for one, is not so reticent about the state of his daughter’s health. “We know she’s on hard drugs — heroin and cocaine. That’s why we’ve been trying to get her into rehab,” he says. “Janis and I worry that she will seriously harm herself, but mercifully that hasn’t happened yet.”

Beyond that, Mitch allows himself little optimism. “I don’t know what they’ve been doing for the last month or so. We’d like to think that she and Blake have stayed clean since they went to St. Lucia,” he says. “But the thing with drug addicts is that they rarely tell you the truth.”

An hour after our last aborted interview, Winehouse is due back on the La Musicale stage. A few minutes before showtime, she appears in the greenroom, wading through a crowd of gawkers, looking more awake than she has all night. The band takes to the stage and crashes into “You Know I’m No Good.” Winehouse is transfixing: rocking on her heels, gesticulating, shimmying, swaying. Her singing is magnificent. She lingers behind the beat and unspools jazzy syncopations, purrs low, burly blue notes and rears back to deliver rolling melismas that would give Mariah Carey pause.

You cannot help but be struck by the ease of her virtuosity: For Winehouse, living is evidently exceedingly difficult, but singing is as natural as breathing. For the three-plus minutes of “You Know I’m No Good” it is possible to forget the spectacle of the past hours, days and months — to look past the awful toll inflicted by too little food or too much drink or McDonald’s milkshakes or “prescription medication” or whatever else Winehouse is putting into her body. When the song ends, the studio audience erupts into the biggest ovation of the evening, a burst of sheer relief, and Winehouse is whisked backstage. The throng gathered there cheers and reaches out to shake hands, but she doesn’t pause to soak up the adulation. She strides down a hallway, up a flight of stairs and straight into her dressing room, clapping the door shut behind her.

Additional reporting by Martyn Halle and Tom Hendry.