Up All Night With Amy Winehouse

It's dawn on a hot sunday morning in June, and Amy Winehouse is inside her North London home, staring at her reflection in a dark tinted mirror, looking the tiny little body in front of her up and down, assessing the emaciated tattooed limbs, the jungle of a black beehive weave, the hallucinatory glow of her transparent green eyes. All around her, Winehouse's home is in disastrous disarray: Discarded bags of potato chips, crumpled nuggets of tinfoil, beer bottles, lingerie boxes and scattered old credit cards tell of a long night that hasn't ended in weeks, maybe months.

While Winehouse's Saturday isn't really over, her Sunday has begun with a shriek. The tabloids have hit the pavement and slapped her out of her weekend reverie with yet another high-decibel scandal. This time it's photographs and videos — leaked from a lost digital camera — that show Winehouse in various states of dereliction, all shot by her now-imprisoned husband, Blake Fielder-Civil. What's scandalous this time isn't the pictures of Winehouse surrounded by crack pipes (there have been too many of those this year) but a video of her singing to Fielder-Civil a ditty chockablock with racial slurs: "Blacks, Pakis, gooks and nips . . . deaf and dumb and blind and gay," she and a girlfriend sing goofily.

The morning headline reads "Sex, Drugs and Racist Rant," but at Winehouse's place, there's no publicist or manager to be seen, no crisis-management squad deployed to save one of the decade's most successful female vocalists from public shame. That's not Winehouse's style — it's just her and a girlfriend. British singer Remi Nicole pores over the paper, annoyed, telling her friend that all this scandal has to stop.