Up All Night With Amy Winehouse

Her arms are spotted with cuts and scratches, and she itches at them furiously as she wanders upstairs. She offers me beer with ice and lime and then realizes she doesn't have any beer. She sends Nicole to ask a paparazzi to go buy it for her, and when he returns, she laughs at his request for money.

She floats into the kitchen, a sea of dirty dishes, to wash glasses for our beer. She's dazed, keeps losing track of what she's doing, her eyes flicking around. "I'm sorry, I'm a really shit interview," she says politely to me, a totally unexpected reporter in her house at 4:00 in the morning. She spends 10 minutes washing the glasses, fondling the edges slowly with the sponge and drying them with a big, filthy bath towel that sits on the counter. She adds beer and ice, and dumps in a few other splashes of old soda sitting around.

I ask her what her next album will be like. "Same stuff as my last album but with some ska." Have you started recording it yet? "It's not so much about recording, it's about whatever."

I ask her about her fallout with Ronson. She tells me he made a snap judgment about her based on all the negative press. "We are close enough that I thought we could be like, 'Hello, darling, it's me,' " she says. She adds that they went to the studio for a few days in Oxford, but they weren't connecting. "I played him tracks I liked, just getting the vibe, and he was like, 'Amy, come, let's work.' He was really just uptight. . . . " she trails off and then resumes cheerfully: "He left after three days, and I was like, 'Breathe a sigh of relief, I'm in the country and I can write.' "

I ask what the songs are like. "When the songs are done, they'll be all atmospheric and cool like that. . . ." She does this sort of Sixties-ish Space Age Bond-girl dance, standing with a hip thrust to the side, wiggling her fingers, and opening her mouth. "Whaaaaa . . ." is the sound she makes. "They might be like these girls I've been listening to, like the Shangri-Las."

I ask her about Doherty. "We're just good friends," she says. "I asked Pete to do a concept EP, and he made this face, he looked at me like I'd pooed on the floor. He wouldn't do it. We're just really close."

She pulls up the guitar, picks the chords to the Sixties tune "I Will Follow Him," puts down the guitar and disappears upstairs for a while.

When she returns, she teeters over to the living room, moves the array of bottles and glasses aside and asks Nicole for a massage: "Press my face, Remi." She sits in front of Nicole, puts down a pillow and then jogs off to get massage oil and paper towels. "Will you just sit still?" asks Nicole, who seems distinctly sober. In a matter of minutes, Winehouse has moved Nicole again, this time to the couch, and she's burying her head into her lap as Nicole works diligently on Winehouse's small, gnarled back.