The most talked-about movie at the film festival, Amy hits cinemas this week. Kathryn Bromwich talks to the manager who tried to ‘make her go to rehab’, and others whose lives were touched by the doomed soul singer
Nick Shymansky met Amy Winehouse when she was 16, and worked as her manager between 1999 and 2006. Together they released her debut album, Frank, in 2003. He now works as senior A&R manager at Island Records.
How did you become Amy's manager?
I was 19, working in the music industry but I didn't really know anything. I called her and pretended I was this big manager who could make things happen, and obviously she thought I was a wanker. I realised humour was the back-up plan, and that's how we connected. Then I got this package through the post with a demo, and the jiffy bag was covered in stickers of hearts and kisses, and it had "Amy" scribbled over it about 100 times. It didn't fit with the girl who didn't want to be noticed. I put it on in my car and it blew my mind.
What was your relationship with her like as a manager?
We used to go to a lot of gigs. I'd feel completely inadequate because I thought I knew my music, and I learned very quickly that she knew so much more. It was my job to get her from A to B. If I booked in a session and didn't literally get her out of bed, in the car, drop her off, pick her up, sit in on the session, it just didn't happen.
What was Amy like to hang out with?
At times it would be very difficult, but most of the time she'd be so sweet and funny. There are lots of things, though, which I now look back on and think, "Shit, that was a sign [of things to come]." Looking back years later, I realise that there was depression. That's something I learned from the film: I didn't know she took Seroxat as a teenager. I didn't know about the bulimia either, until towards the end of working with her, when she dropped a massive amount of weight real quick. It's very easy to look back, it's very hard to see things at the time.
I've never experienced such a drastic change in a human being. I'd been on holiday in 2005, and when I got back she told me she'd met this guy and fallen in love. That's when I first met Blake [Fielder-Civil]. It was horrible to see her going from someone so tender and brilliant and warm to being kind of derelict and lost. But, at the same time, there was something vulnerable about Blake: he wasn't a grown-up, he was a lost kid who had his own issues.
Nick Shymansky. Photo / AP
You famously tried to make her go to rehab ...
Yes, we got through a few arguments, the denial, and I got her to a place where she said, "Okay, fine, let's do this." At the time I didn't really know her father, but she made it clear to me she'd do it if he backed her. So I got on the phone and he assured me that he'd back me. I drove her to where he lived and he backtracked. She gave him this look like, "I don't really need to go, do I?", and he was like, "Of course you don't need to go." [This issue is covered in Amy. Her father Mitch has since disputed the film's version of events.]
How did you feel when she made it all into a song?
I knew at some point she'd write a really big hit, and it was ironic that the hit she wrote was, verbatim, that day, and it was mocking me. Not only was I not her manager anymore, but she'd written this huge hit that's undeniably brilliant, that was a complete mockery of our friendship and of what she needed. And the whole world's dancing along to it, and really she was writing about a decision that five years later would result in her being dead. It was really f***ed-up.
The family have distanced themselves from the film. Do you think they were portrayed wrongly?
I don't want to pass judgment on her family. They've lost their daughter. They all loved each other as well. It's just that different people handle things in different ways. But I feel like the film was consistent with how I saw it.
How did you react when you heard of Amy's death?
I was getting married the next day. It was beautiful weather, and Amy was coming. She told me she was really excited. The wedding was a chance for her to see a lot of people from the past and show that she'd got it together. It was about four o'clock, we were in the garden, and then my cousin came running into the garden, shouting, "I've just turned on the news - Amy's dead!" and it felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I just went into shock. I kept thinking, "But she can't be, there's a place on that table for her, she's coming." The happiest weekend in my life turned really dark.
Why do you think Amy's legacy has been so powerful?
In a landscape where artists can be quite safe and average at times, she was special. Many modern artists are very strategic and business-minded about their career, whereas Amy was totally music. She just really didn't give a shit, and I think that's what connected with people. I think this film had to happen, but I think after this she should probably be left alone for a while. Then we'll see where her legacy naturally sits in 10, 15 years.
Her size got me first. She was tiny, a doll under a huge beehive, which threatened to topple her over. Tottering across the stage in a baby-pink, acid-blue and neon-yellow dress, she sang Love Is a Losing Game like none of us imagined she'd be able to sing it. Her voice that night was mature, world-weary, stripped of the ornamentation with which she'd lately been cloaking it. Looking at her then, as I look at her now, I remember thinking, "Bloody hell. How is she only 23?"
Watching Amy, and remembering her performance at the 2007 Mercury music prize ceremony, I was amazed how quickly after that I forgot that she was a human being. It was my first year as a Mercury prize panellist, my first glimpse into that big, shiny world. Back to Black had been released the previous November, and at the Word offices, where I worked as reviews editor, I remember its first run through my headphones, then playing it again, again, again.
By the next September, its fresh, bloody mix of raw lyric-writing, jazz, pop and hip-hop had become a global soundtrack. Its success felt like a victory already. I argued for it to win the Mercury prize, but it didn't. Somehow the tabloid version of her had taken over.
Amy broke my heart in several ways. It showed, very vividly, how this tiny woman wrote these songs: here are touchingly neat handwritten lyrics and scribbled hearts, here's her instinctive guitar-playing. Here is her youthful and gleeful intolerance of media bullshit, before she became immune to it, blank-eyed and hollow, as that fame grew.
And before her name became comedy shorthand, and her struggles ours to plunder, there was Winehouse's wit and her cleverness and her daftness. I remember interviewing her on the phone one Christmas. She was in a cab going back to the house of one of her oldest friends for a bath. Later on, we never thought of Winehouse as a young woman, more a billboard poster, or a cartoon. Maybe that's why the voices and images of her oldest friends in this film, circling around this tiny girl we felt we all knew but never did, got me most of all.
In December 2006, a couple of months after Rehab was released, Amy came to Dingle to play on the Other Voices TV show. My dad, Philip King, created the show and the festival that grew out of it, and I've been working on it since I was 9. I was 14 when Amy came. It was my job to make sure the cameraman's cables didn't get tangled up, so I was right at the very front of the church on a little cushion, probably as close to Amy Winehouse as you could have gotten, and I was totally enthralled.
Before the gig, I carried all her bags up to her hotel room. She was like, "Jesus, how did you carry all of them, they're so heavy?" I remember thinking she was so small, a tiny person with massive beehive hair. She'd been travelling for hours to get to Dingle, and there was no complaining, no drama. All she wanted was a tube of Pringles and then she was ready to go. Her performance was stunning. I was really struck by how happy she was on stage.
The film was devastating. I loved it but I found it very harrowing to watch. I would have liked to have seen more about her relationship with music - she had an innate sense of rhythm, and her knowledge of jazz, R&B and gospel was encyclopaedic. I think it focused a little too much on the negatives, on her downward spiral, and not enough on the music, which was the real love of her life.
Tom Oxley
Photographer
The film was extremely powerful. It seems a long time ago. You forget what exactly went on, and seeing all this footage brings it back. They've pieced it together like a jigsaw and the effect is breathtaking. It reminds you how much of a talent she was - a complete one-off.
I was fortunate to photograph her quite a bit over the years. It always seemed to be in dressing rooms before gigs or award shows, and when it was just her and me in the room we used to have a laugh. Once, before an NME awards show at the Astoria, my older sister rang me and asked if I could talk. I was like, "Not really," and she said, "Okay, I'm going to be very brief: I'm pregnant." I said it out loud and Amy turned around. I told her it was my sister and she ripped the phone out of my hand and started singing, Congratulations. When I got the phone back, my sister was like, "Who's that?" She couldn't believe it when I said it was Amy Winehouse.
I've met a lot of famous people but only a few make you think, "Wow, this is a huge personality, a genuine star." She used to do vocal warm-ups before the show, and hearing someone singing properly, from the diaphragm, is a special thing. But she had a lot of baggage, and what was sad in the film was seeing the pressure she was under from the British paparazzi. The flashbulbs going off every time she leaves the house. What I didn't realise at the time was how constant the attention was - 24 hours a day, from all corners of the globe.
When I saw her in a professional capacity she always seemed on good form. I tried not to impose too much, and I always seemed to get invited back.
I pop up in the film, backstage at the Q awards. She's wearing a black and red dress. I never have problems with my kit but as soon as I took my camera out the flash packed up. It was one of those nightmare moments. I tapped the flash against the wall and put it back on. She did one of those pleasant smiles that said, "hurry up, I'm waiting". Thank goodness the flash worked and I got a few really good shots.
I can't imagine how the film-makers were able to collate all that footage and make it work, but they've done it brilliantly.
Sylvia Young
Founder and principal of Sylvia Young Theatre School, London
I thought the film was beautiful, moving and a worthy tribute. Amy was more than a singer, and the film shows how extraordinary she was. It also shows her vulnerability, and the shots of the paparazzi hounding her were distressing. I was a little concerned about the references to her father, and I can understand him being unhappy. I knew he desperately adored her and she adored him, and I'm sure whatever he said or did would have been in her interests.
She came to our school for just under three years, from the age of 12. She was not the best-behaved student, except in classes that she was really interested in. She had a boredom threshold, and it was very apparent. But she was brilliantly clever. We put her up a year, and our English teacher thought she was going to be a novelist because her writing skills were amazing. I had to keep telling her off, but we did think the world of her. Later on, she always said she would come in and see us but she never made it. We talked on the phone - and she paid for her god-daughter, Dionne Bromfield, to come to the school, so obviously she still thought well of us. Amy was quirky, very different. She was feisty but quite shy, which people find surprising. Anybody who didn't know her will come away from the film thinking, "my goodness, what a talent".
Who: The late Amy Winehouse What:Amy When: Opens in cinemas on Thursday
