Up All Night With Amy Winehouse

"I could just go out there and say . . . I don't know." Her mouth is slack. "I don't know, really." Winehouse gives her hive one last tease and trots gamely down the stairway. She opens the door, and on cue a firestorm of flashbulbs surrounds her, voices crying her name. "Amy! Amy! Amy!"

"I guess I should apologize," she starts, fluttering her eyes, swaying her hips, flipping and tucking her hair innocently.

"Don't apologize, Amy, don't apologize!" the photographers shout as they blast her with their flash fusillade. "We love you, and your friends love you!" "What next, Amy?" they cry. "What are you going to call your new album?"

She smiles, making them wonder if she'll answer, and then wickedly says, "Black Don't Crack."

This past year, Amy Winehouse, 24, has gone from being one of pop music's most ascendant and celebrated talents to a tragicomic train wreck of epic proportions. Winehouse has insisted from the beginning of her career that she is a simple girl crazy in love with her man. Her life, her history and talent all seem barely worth talking about when one could talk about Blake, how fit he is, how perfect for each other they are. "We are so in love, we are a team," she rhapsodizes to me. "Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake, Blake." It's as if she's putting herself in a trance.

The daughter of a taxi-driver father and a pharmacist mother, Winehouse grew up in a North London home where jazz voices such as Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra were always on the record player. Sam Shaker, the owner of a longtime club in Soho, Jazz After Dark, remembers the night four years ago when Winehouse asked him if she could sing a few sets with the blues band. "She goes on the stage," says Shaker, "and I didn't know what she was doing: Was she drunk, was she stoned? It didn't make any sense. But then I heard her voice. The band had to stop."

At 17, Winehouse got a record contract with Island, and in 2003 she released her first album, Frank. It was dedicated entirely to an ex-boyfriend, and choice tracks did well, including the saucy "Fuck Me Pumps," which took a critical look at British tarts. The album was nominated for a 2004 Mercury Music Prize. But Winehouse was building a reputation as a wild thing, showing up for concerts trashed. In 2003, she met Blake Fielder-Civil at a local bar. A handsome hanger-on from rural Lincolnshire, Fielder-Civil worked part time on music-video sets. Winehouse fell hard; his name was quickly tattooed on her chest. But the romance was rocky, and during one breakup, when Fielder-Civil left her for another woman, she wrote the bulk of Back to Black, her second album. Following incidents of public intoxication, her management tried to pack Winehouse off to rehab. Famously, she refused. By the time Back to Black hit the U.S. last year, Winehouse was hailed as the future of soul music. The album sold 2 million copies in America and eventually earned her five Grammys.