Sozzled incidents: Amy Winehouse in North London last month. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP
Poor Amy Winehouse. Last week, her terrific album, Back to Black, made US chart history. It went in at no 7, the highest-charting debut ever by a British female. Forget Corinne Bailey Rae, forget Joss Stone, for once, pop justice is being done. Character, guts, vim and originality are winning out over glossy mediocrity. Fantastic.
Winehouse's success has a bitter tang to it, however. The good news came in the wake of a spate of gig cancellations and sozzled incidents - on top of the last nine months of tabloid headlines about Winehouse's drinking, her weight loss, her tattoos, her refusal to go into rehab (a few times now, since the song was written), lashing out, being drunk on the Charlotte Church show, and possibly taking cocaine after the Brits. She pulled gigs, and went to the pub instead. It has since emerged she knocked out a tooth in a drunken fall. Why? Breaking up with her boyfriend might just have something to do with Winehouse's epic bender.
Now, in an interview with Q, Winehouse confesses to having tried cutting herself once - giving some weight to the rumours of self-harm that have also dogged her. The scars on her arms are still officially down to another drunken spread-eagle, but you can just hear women's weekly gossip editors cheering into their liquid meal substitutes, as they prepare another rash of articles feigning their concern. Only Britney has had more goggle-eyed, teeth-sucking coverage.
I've rehearsed all Winehouse's juicy misdemeanours above, so I am pretty complicit in the media rubbernecking that passes for reporting on our most talented export. But like I sighed in an Observer arts column last year, this interest in Winehouse's distress is prurient and dishonest.
We ogle and tut like maiden aunts as this most fabulously three-dimensional and candid of pop stars keels over. We forget that any 23-year-old who's lost her man is entitled to dunk their sorrows in a vat of nice, numbing alcohol. And that many do, without a paparazzo's lens to elevate self-medication into scandal.
Clearly, Amy Winehouse has problems. But there are double standards at work here. Winehouse is the first to admit she is an "ugly drunk" - it's part of her winning candour, in interviews and in song. But with her gappy smile and frequent trips to the offie, Winehouse doesn't think she has anything to be too ashamed of.
Unlike the ugly moralisers driving the celebrity gossip business. They would love to see this uncommon talent packed off to rehab, less for her benefit, one suspects, than for her punishment. There she could be pap-shot in sack-cloth and ashes for the sin of being human - fallible, feeling, flesh and bone.
