An ambulance was called to the 24-year-old singer’s house in Camden, north London and she was taken to the accident and emergency unit at University College Hospital at around 8.40pm.

Police were stationed outside her house as Winehouse was brought out in a wheelchair while wrapped in a blanket and given oxygen. Her father Mitch Winehouse was with her.

Her spokesman Chris Goodman said: “Amy Winehouse suffered a reaction to medication at home this evening and was taken to hospital.

“Doctors have advised that she will be kept under observation overnight and is likely to be released tomorrow.”

A spokeswoman for London Ambulance Service said: “We were called at approximately 8.40pm to an address in NW1 to reports of an adult female taken unwell.

“We sent an ambulance and a fast response car and the patient has been taken to hospital.”

A hospital spokesman said Ms Winehouse was in a stable condition and medics would make a decision whether to discharge her this morning.

The spokesman added they expected her to go home tomorrow if she has a comfortable night.

Mr Winehouse entered the hospital at around 11.50pm and asked reporters and photographers to leave the family alone.

When asked how serious his daughter’s condition was, he held up a bag of KFC and replied: “This is how serious it is.”

Winehouse, who is being treated for an addiction to crack cocaine, is also suffering from emphysema and was admitted to hospital after collapsing at her home last month.

Mr Winehouse said in June: “It’s in its early stages, but had it gone on for another month they painted a very vivid picture of her sitting there with a mask on her face struggling to breathe.

The doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs it won’t just ruin her voice, it will kill her.”

R & B singers and rappers are musical codependents. The former sing the hooks that stick in your head, the latter serve up the urban street cred that’s an essential hip-hop selling point.And Mary J. Blige and Jay-Z have needed each other from the get-go. As far back as 1996, she sang the chorus on “Can’t Knock The Hustle,” the very first song on his now-revered first album, Reasonable Doubt.

So it’s a wonder that the two leaders in their respective fields have taken this long to embark on the collaborative “Heart of the City” tour that brought them to the Wachovia Center on Sunday for a seamless two and a half hour show packed with hits from both sides of the hip-hop soul coin.

here are bands that play the South By Southwest Music Conference - skinny, unwashed four-pieces who soullessly schlep gear from showcase to showcase - and then there are bands that play South By Southwest, starry-eyed dreamers who attack any stage with reckless abandon in hope of landing that big record deal that will make them unspeakably rich. Paramore is not one of those bands. Neither are N.E.R.D. or Britney Spears (she’s not even a band, but we digress), although on one glorious night in Austin, two-thirds of them sort of were.

Confused? Welcome to Friday at South By Southwest, a day that featured a pair of big-name headliners, one-supersized rumor and a whole lot of not making sense. (Don’t worry, we’re here to sort everything out.)

First and foremost, pop-punk heroes Paramore, who sat down with MTV News earlier in the day to let fans know they’re not breaking up, headlined one of the most un-SXSW events of the entire week: a multi-band pileup for the MySpace generation, sponsored by spooky-ooky retailer Hot Topic, packed with local kids who wouldn’t know a SXSW badge from a dial-up Internet connection.

Held on the outskirts of town at hangar-esque rock club La Zona Rosa, this was to be the group’s first performance since they canceled a string of European dates to work out some rather pesky (and nefarious sounding) “internal issues,” and clearly, the band were treating it as a rather huge coming-out party.

“I know there’s been a lot of craziness going on, and you’ve probably all heard about it,” frontwoman/firecracker Hayley Williams told the crowd, pausing to allow appropriate time for the squeals to pass. “We all just wanted you to know that music is the one thing we love, and no matter what you’ve heard, we won’t stop doing it.”

And then they got down to doing just that, ripping through a set full of their hits (”Misery Business,” “Crushcrushcrush”) and older (at least for them) songs, like “Woah” and “Emergency,” from their 2005 debut, All We Know Is Falling. Through it all, Williams - who, according to label reps, has been battling vocal strain for awhile now - belted out as best as she could, and when her voice faltered, she simply thrust the microphone into the crowd, who were more than willing to do the work for her. Guitarist Josh Farro and bassist Jeremy Davis flanked her, busting out chords and pulling out some truly Trohman/Wentz-worthy onstage acrobatics. Oh, and drummer Zac Farro totally barfed up some Mexican food he had eaten for dinner.

Truly, Paramore were giving it their all - and then some more. And at the end of the set, the band joined hands and bowed in unison as their fans held up a countless array of hand-held devices. Paramore left the stage amid a blizzard of cell-phone camera flashes, and their message was clear: We’re a band, we’re united, we’re not going anywhere. It was the kind of context you rarely get from a SXSW show, and though Paramore aren’t your typical SXSW band (they’ve sold more records than 14 Vampire Weekends, 100 Times New Vikings and 2,000 Lightspeed Champions combined) - it’s something we could get used to seeing more often ’round these parts.

Meanwhile, as Paramore were exiting the stage, something potentially huge was bubbling up across town: namely, rumors that Britney Spears would be making an SXSW appearance, performing with Pharrell Williams and N.E.R.D. during their late-night set at Stubb’s. It seemed improbable, but hey, stranger things have happened (though not many) and within hours, it had been texted from handheld to handheld with such veracity that it had seemingly become fact.

Of course, it never happened (Britney at SXSW? Come on!) and, to be quite honest, Pharrell didn’t need her anyway. The line to get into Stubb’s stretched for miles up Red River Street, and when Skateboard P and his N.E.R.D. cohorts finally took the stage, all the struggle was worth it. With a pair of funky drummers, a guitarist, bassist, keyboardist and sampler, N.E.R.D. played a rock-star set that mixed nearly punk thrash with funk keyboards, outer space effects, acid-rock guitar and hip-hop swagger.

Williams commanded the stage, bounding back and forth during hard funk jams on “Brain” and “Rock Star,” which found the stage filled with nearly two dozen posse members, waving red flags, parading their Mohawks and snapping photos of the thousands of fans in the crowd bouncing up and down in unison. Williams has clearly spent time in a mosh pit - as evidenced by his scissor-kicking, arm-swinging dance moves - but as loose as he got at the start of “Lapdance,” the man is a meticulous professional and when the instrumentation got a bit sloppy, he made the band start over.

By the time the set ended with a punk-funk take on “She Wants to Move” (which slipped into Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” for a few bars), Williams had proven to the crowd that while his genius might be in the studio, his heart is on the stage, where he breathes new life into his creations. And you thought Britney had a Jeckyl and Hyde complex …

Make no debate about it, the fruits of Denzel Washington, Tyler Perry and Alicia Keys’ labor dominated the 39th NAACP Image Awards.

Washington’s cinematic pet project The Great Debaters, a heart-tugging drama about the rise of the debate team at an African-American college in Depression-era Texas, scored four awards, including Outstanding Motion Picture and Outstanding Actor for its director-star.

“It’s just a joy and an honor to be here,” Washington said—once the whoops and shouts of “I love you!” had died down—while accepting his acting trophy, for which he beat out, among others, Don Cheadle and Terrence Howard. “I’ll be at that other show next week but my heart is here and I’m just so happy to see these young people get recognized.” (Washington is set to present at the Oscars Feb. 24.)

Jurnee Smollett and 17-year-old Denzel Whitaker, named Outstanding Actress and Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture, helped make the film the most winning production of the night.

Then there was Alicia Keys, who matched The Great Debaters all by herself. She also took home four trophies, earning Outstanding Album honors for the platinum-selling As I Am and top music video and song awards for “Like You’ll Never See Me Again.”

“No One” could top her in the Outstanding Female Artist category, either.

Chris Brown took home the male counterpart of that award, and Jordin Sparks continued to take steps out of that American Idol box, getting named Outstanding New Artist.

The NAACP Image Awards honor achievements in film, television, music and literature, most of which are recognized off-camera, the better to make time for performances and tributes to luminaries such as Stevie Wonder, this year’s Hall of Fame Award winner; Aretha Franklin, receiver of the Vanguard Award; and a resurgent Ruby Dee, who can line her Chairman’s Award up next to that SAG trophy she recently won.

“I was here when the sets were falling down and cue cards were being written in the wings just before the artists walked on stage,” Franklin said, reminiscing about the NAACP’s inaugural ceremony. “This is the icing on the cake for me.”

D.L. Hughley presided over the festivities at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium, where the mood varied from spiritual to humbling to joyous to just plain uplifting.

“This is awesome, thank you so much,” Ugly Betty star America Ferrera, a winner for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy, said onstage. “I love to be a part of this show because it’s fun to be a part of, but also for what it stands for…It feels really good to be in this room with such wonderful, beautiful, colorful faces.”

Ferrera’s win, coupled with costar Vanessa Williams’ repeat win for her comedic supporting turn as the malevolent Wilhelmina, was the only thing standing in the way of a clean sweep for Tyler Perry’s House of Payne in the comedy-TV categories.

The TBS sitcom, recently picked up for a third season, was named Outstanding Comedy Series and provided actors LaVan Davis and Lance Gross with their first wins for their respective lead and supporting roles.

Former Destiny’s Child star Kelly Rowland has labelled her former bandmate Beyonce Knowles a “slob”.

The 26-year-old told music website urbanplanet.co.uk that touring with the hugely successful three-piece became nightmarish because of the slovenly habits of Beyonce and Michelle Williams.

Though Rowland refused to rule out the chance of a Destiny’s Child reunion, her comments suggest she is delighted to be touring solo, ahead of the release of her new album Ms Kelly.

“They’re both slobs,” she explained. “We would get on a tour bus and they’d flick off their shoes. And I’d be like, ‘No! That’s the corner for shoes!’

“I’m a neat freak. I make them crazy,” she added.

Rowland, who sold over 100 million records with Destiny’s Child, admitted to feeling frustration at continual comparisons with her glamorous bandmate, saying: “People should respect me in my own solo right.”

The singer also rubbished recent rumours that she’s been dating Radio 1 DJ Reggie Yates.

Rowland has been linked with Yates while promoting her new single Work but laughed off the claims, saying the former Top of the Pops presenter isn’t her type.

“He’s not tall, dark and handsome! He’s tall, bright, and… I guess cute? Reggie’s more like a friend. We were just hanging out at a party and exchanged information,” she said.

“I’ve been linked to three British men here,” she continued. “And it’s ok because you know it happens, I’m gonna be linked with someone else by the end of the year. Who cares?”

Rowland also admitted that while she loves the Destiny’s Child smash Say My Name, the songs Bootylicious and Bug A Boo became further reasons to look forward to a solo career.