Amy Winehouse - Utterly Frank

Is Amy Winehouse the gobbiest girl in showbiz? Maybe, she tells Hattie Collins, but she does know when to stop.

Amy Winehouse’s higgledy-piggledy pied a terre, tucked away in a cosy Camden enclave, is utterly indicative of its singer/ songwriter owner- a contradiction of character, charm, clutter, chaos and calm. Phones ring, a beautiful young man wanders around –“that’s Tyler,” explains Amy, “he’s a musician too,” while India.Arie’s potent poetics provide the laidback soundtrack. Vintage Vogue cover art on the wall; Def Jam DVD’s on the tele. “I don’t have much extravagances in my life, so with my deal an’ that I was able to get meself a nice base,” Amy muses in her choppy Cockney accent. “It’s always gonna be mine.”

Amy Winehouse, the daughter of a taxi driver dad and pharmacist mum, is a slight 20 year old Jewish girl from North London. Amy Winehouse, the singer however, is a 50 year old fat black woman from Brooklyn. “Next time I’ll be black and 32 – no, I will. I’ll have a turban higher than Erykah Badu’s,” she deadpans about her striking, jazz-soaked vocal. She’s not especially interested in discussing how people react to a white woman performing black music. “No one has said ‘Why do you sing black music- hmm?’” she says, snapping her neck Oprah style.

She called her album Frank, and, like its title suggests, Winehouse is somewhat outspoken – Dido, Rachel Stevens and Katie Melua have all felt the whip of her tongue in recent interviews. Winehouse tends to think metaphorically, laterally, literally and out loud. Discussing her love life, Amy admits, “I’m seeing a couple of people. Seeing one person is not important. It’s just like, you get home; you smoke a joint.” She stops and starts again. “When you get home, you smoke a joint. No, I can’t explain it. At the end of your day, call a man, get a man round, bang that’s it.” The hovering presence of her manager may be intended to curtail her more caustic chat, but Winehouse won’t hold back. She can’t.

She’s smacks of confidence, strutting about onstage at Bush Hall in 6” heels, grabbing the mike, scatting her heart out. Yet question her about image and she shrinks. “I’m ugly, I don’t give a shit.” She’s unusual, unconventional – but not ugly.

There’s nothing straightforward about Amy. With an album as richly composed as Frank is, you’d imagine her to be signed to a boutique label like Blue Note – in fact she’s with the major Island, who picked her up after the aforementioned Tyler passed on her demo. Her arresting debut, rightfully lauded by critics, is a beautiful, boldly written collection of 14 spiky songs that acerbically dissect love in a ‘four bottles of red wine, 30 Gitanes’ style. Yet, 19 ‘Simon Fuller’ Management guides her career - although she quickly points out that it’s not Fuller who handles her per se. Lines like ‘The only time we hold hands is to get the angle right,’ fall effortlessly from her pout-tastic lips, yet as a teenager she attended the teeth and eyes training that is the Sylvia Young Drama School. “I’m always happy to blow up any misconceptions that people have about stage school cos everyone thinks it’s really nasty there but it’s not,” she states about the star-maker factory. “I went to the Brits School as well and that was shit. But Sylvia Young set me up to be a strong person,” she decides. So it’s not all boobs out, bums in? “No, it is like that, but…”

Anyway, Amy says changing the subject; it was frustration, not fame that drove her to pick up the guitar. “ I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry,” she scowls, shoving her tumbling black hair aside to light a Marlborough. “ It doesn’t represent me or anyone I know and it doesn’t mean or stand for anything. I can’t even hear it. The new stuff is so painfully shit.” Besides Ms Dynamite and Dizzee Rascal (“He looks like a cat, he’s beautiful”), Winehouse cares not for her contemporaries, not one, she says. “I used to like Kylie – then I grew up,” is one observation. “I categorically couldn’t be like Ashanti, singing ‘Baby, baby,’ twenty times,” another.

Amy’s much more likely to enthuse about American hip hop artists like Missy Elliott and Mos Def. Considering her sound – ‘beat driven jazz’- was created by acclaimed US producer Salaam Remi (The Fugees), will Amy attempt to take her sound Stateside? “It’s important for me that people hear my music but I don’t care about conquering vast areas of the world. I love America, it’s a much more permissive place. Here in England, everyone’s a pop star, innit, whereas in America they believe in the term artist,” she picks up her make up in preparation for the photoshoot. “Here it’s ‘How badly can we get you to fuck up in front of the camera.’ They’re just waiting for things to wrong here.” They may put artistry before fame, but how will PR-super-sensitive America react to her slagging off all and sundry? “Yeah, but I won’t be a mass artist will I,” she says getting all defensive. “So I don’t think I’ll ever have to say ‘I’m sorry for the things I’ve said,’” she mocks.

Judging by today’s demure-ish display though, it seems as though Winehouse is slowly realising there is such a thing as being too, well, frank? Yeah,” she exclaims wide-eyed. “You gotta be a diplomat. If you’ve got an auntie who kisses you, smothers your face, you can’t be like ‘I don’t like you auntie, you smother me!’ Cos then your aunties like ‘What do you mean?’ There’s times when you can’t be like that.” She stops and laughs. “My management tell me off – not tell me off,” she backtracks. “ But say ‘Go and apologise to these heads of the record company.’ I’m like ‘Okay, fuck it, cool, lets go.’ I’ll apologise, I don’t give a shit,” she shrugs with a defiant glint in her eye. “’Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.’ It’s just a word, innit?”

Amy's album Frank is out now on Island Records

A version of this article appeared in the Guardian Guide