If this is what comes from resting up, Amy Winehouse may have been better off remaining on the road.
Just three days after calling off her U.S. tour and vowing to return to a countryside "retreat" to deal with her ongoing "health issues," the "Rehab" chanteuse was photographed in London Thursday with bloody scrapes and cut marks all over her face and body.
The images, splashed across the Daily Mail's Friday edition, show the dinged-up 23-year-old singer alongside her equally bruised and bloodied husband, Blake Fielder-Civil. Winehouse's trademark black-winged eyeliner is smeared across her nose, cheeks and eyes; she's sporting scrapes and gashes on her forehead and legs; her hands are swollen and her ballet flats are soaked with blood.
Fielder-Civil, 23, fared no better, with scrapes covering the left side of his face and neck.
The couple was photographed outside the Sanderson Hotel in Soho just after 3:30 a.m.
The Daily Mail reported that the injuries were inflicted after a violent row in their hotel suite, prompting Winehouse to fire back, denying that theirs is an abusive relationship. London police have confirmed that they were called in to an incident at the duo's hotel by a concerned member of the public, but said no charges resulted from their check-in.
For her part, the Back to Black artist explained the origin of the wounds in a series of text messages to blogger Perez Hilton.
"Blake is the best man in the world," she wrote, adding they "would never harm each other."
The cuts, she wrote, came about when Fielder-Civil returned to their suite to find Winehouse "about to do drugs with a call girl." Winehouse, who grabbed headlines earlier this year for scraping her hubby's name into her arm with a shard of glass at a Spin magazine shoot, claims she then began cutting herself.
Fielder-Civil then "rightly said I wasn't good enough for him. I lost it and he saved my life."
In a subsequent text, she insisted, "I'll be alright." Fielder-Civil, however, she felt was getting the raw end of the deal. "I need to fight my man's corner for him, though," she added.
"For the last time he did not and never has hurt me...He has such a hard time and he [is] so supportive.
"He deserves the truth," she continued. "He is an amazing man who saved my life and got cut badly for his troubles. All he get[s] is horrible stories printed about him and he just keeps quiet, but this is too much."
The incident caps a horrible August for the singer. In the past two weeks she's scuttled more than a month's worth of U.K. and U.S. tour dates, including a planned performance at the MTV Video Music Awards in September, "due to the rigors involved in touring."
The cancellation came the same day British media reported that Winehouse and Fielder-Civil had checked out of their "retreat" of choice, Essex's Causeway rehabilitation center, after just five days.
Last week, the duo helicoptered out of the center, but vowed to return, with Fielder-Civil telling BBC Radio that his wife of three months was "being looked after."
"She's going back to this retreat," he said. "She's determined to get well. It's not as bad as everyone thinks, but she's fine. She's loved and looked after."
Worries about the singer's condition arose earlier this month when she was briefly hospitalized at University College London's hospital for what publicist Tracey Miller deemed "severe exhaustion." Miller cited Winehouse's busy touring schedule, not drugs and alcohol as claimed by several publications—and the singer's own mother-in-law—for the emergency room visit.
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