 |
We frequently write about Amy Winehouse's travails, but, truth be told, we don't get to talk to the British popwreck very much. Which is why we should have just walked up to her London flat and knocked on the door at four in the morning, like Rolling Stone did. If we had, we'd have gotten a glimpse at a place littered with potato-chip bags, crumpled bits of tin foil, beer bottles, lingerie boxes and credit cards strewn about. Oh, and we totally would have been offered one of her signature, Elvis-worthy white-bread and banana with potato-chip sandwiches.
According to a story in the new issue of Rolling Stone, one of their reporters hung around outside Winehouse's place in North London earlier this month — before the singer was
hospitalized for fainting and found out that she showing early signs of emphysema — and, shockingly, the musician invited the reporter in and provided a rare glimpse into her cloistered, cluttered and predictably chaotic world.
The reporter visited the day after the then-latest Winehouse scandal — the one about the
racist playground-chant video — and instead of the usual rush of publicists and managers doing damage control, she found only a bedraggled Winehouse and her best friend, singer Remi Nicole, who appears to be a calming presence in an otherwise shambolic home life.
We watch as Winehouse tidies up her blistered face, disheveled hair and smudgy, apparently resin-lined fingernails before stepping out to the inevitable crush of paparazzi huffing outside her door for that day's inevitably unflattering shot of the Grammy winner. (The parade of bad Winehouse pictures has even inspired a comic-strip confrontation with TV's Judge Judy.)
Like Britney Spears, Winehouse plays cat-and-mouse with her pursuers, feeding the paps tea, asking them to go on errands for her and joking with them, but occasionally throwing a slap their way if they get too close. We're told Winehouse makes few concessions to healthy living, using a tanning bed daily and subsisting on a frat-boy-worthy diet of pizza and little or no sleep. The writer makes frequent mentions of Winehouse's "trips upstairs" to her bedroom, which seem like not-so-thinly veiled references to some nefarious activity.
As for the thing that sets her apart from the legion of other bad girls with careers (and health) in jeopardy, Winehouse half-heartedly says her next album will be the "same stuff as my last album but with some ska." Asked if she's started work on it, she says, "It's not so much about recording, it's about whatever." She talks nonchalantly about her split with Mark Ronson, accusing the producer of being "uptight" and not getting her new direction.
The glimpse at Winehouse is about as sad as you might expect, but even more so given that she doesn't appear to care about the thing that brought her to our attention in the first place — her music.
Comments