Amy Winehouse's friend and first manager opens up

While Montage Of Heck, The Ecstasy Of Wilko Johnson, Everything Is Illmatic, The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead and Keith Richards: Under The Influence all did their subjects proud, it was Amy that broke both box-office records and fans’ hearts with its unvarnished telling of Ms. Winehouse’s story.
Though it didn’t flinch from dealing with her various addictions and mental health issues, it was, as her pal Mark Ronson told Hot Press, “A reminder of the insane talent that put her up there on her pedestal in the first place. What I love about it is that my wife, who never got to meet her, said: “Now, I get it. Now I see the Amy you talked about!’”
That sentiment is shared by Nick Shymansky, the man who met Amy when she was 16 and managed her from 1999 until 2006 when, to the tabloids’ glee, her life really started to unravel.
“Music has always had drugs and excess but the women come out a lot worse because of the physicality of it,” proffers Shymansky who’s now a senior A&R Manager at Island Records. “You spent time with her, so you know that Amy was petite. There’s a difference between an 18-year-old girl and a 30-year-old man going in hard like that.”
Asked whether it was a case of jumping or being pushed from his managerial post, Nick sighs and then says, “I’d had a nightmare fucking year with her. I tried on numerous occasions to get her into rehab. My older brother was a heroin addict. He was a year in front of her in terms of his addiction; my other brother and my mum were able to get him sorted out, so I knew what had to be done. I was taking advice and talking the whole time to her father, Mitch, who was by far and away the biggest influence on Amy. After numerous failed attempts, I took her to a rehab place where she met with the guy and admitted she needed help. She said, ‘I’ll go but only after I’ve looked my dad in the eye and told him that I’m a heroin addict.’ I rang Mitch up and he said, ‘Yes, absolutely, bring her over.’ I should have thought at the time, ‘Hang on, ‘bring her over?’ Why aren’t you coming here?’ Anyway, we drive the whole way across London to get to Mitch’s place. She walks in, sits on his lap and starts sobbing and he says, ‘You haven’t got an addiction. You haven’t got a problem. You’re just a bit heartbroken.’ He starts having a go at me: ‘Haven’t you tried drugs? Haven’t you ever had a bit too much to drink?’ So, basically, everything I was trying to do went out the fucking window. Mitch is the only person that could have stopped it. Why he chose not to is unfortunately an irrelevant question now. I believe she had all the classic hallmarks of a young person testing her father and testing men. Whether it was getting loads of piercings and tattoos, drinking too much or going out with an idiot, it was, ‘Why are you having a go at me?’”
Unhappy with the way Amy portrayed him, Mitch Winehouse fumed in April that, “I am painted as an absent father during her last years. It gave the impression the family weren’t there. I felt sick when I watched it for the first time. Amy would be furious. This is not what she would have wanted.”
There’s heartbreaking footage of Amy, who’d fled to St. Lucia to get away from the paparazzi, going to meet Mitch at the airport there and him arriving with a cameraman in tow. Was her dad in denial or just furthering his self-interests?
“That’s not really for me or you to conclude,” Shymansky reflects. “I don’t think he’s as malicious as he is stupid. Everyone has an element of greed and he’s a failed double-glazing salesman. He’s a cabbie that packed in his job as soon as Back To Black blew up under the guise of needing to be there for his daughter. I think that he got carried away. He loved her, but had always wanted a singing career of his own. She definitely loved him. Mitch lost his daughter and, for that reason in the film, I don’t go into the depths of what I think of him or how he handled stuff. It wasn’t an exercise in adding to his grief.”
As you may already have deduced, the “idiot” going out with Amy that Nick referred to earlier was Blake Fielder-Civil who has his own gripes about the documentary.
“It’s disrespectful to imply I was some Machiavellian puppet master,” he insisted after watching Amy. “I don’t think I ruined her.”
It’s an assertion that Shymansky, while not liking Fielder-Civil, agrees with.
“Look, he was clearly a really bad influence on Amy, but she was looking for a bad influence,” he suggests. “If it wasn’t him she’d have found another idiot from Camden. It was all a big test to her dad. Although to me he 100% introduced her to crack and heroin, I don’t blame him. He was an addict, he was ill.”
It was clear from my two meetings with Amy either side of Christmas 2005 that she was struggling with not only her addictions, but also the insane amount of work she was having to do. It also struck me in the couple of hours we were together that she had underlying mental health issues.
“Absolutely,” Nick agrees. “She got majorly lost in her own depression and her own anxieties and her own issues but, and this to me is key, she wasn’t suicidal. She wanted life and all the brilliant things it should have brought her. It’s also important to understand that this wasn’t a year-and-a-half decline, it was a five-year one played out in public. You hope when that sort of thing happens that you’ve got a solid core around and aren’t thrown onto some sort of circus bandwagon. She played and played and played. She toured and toured and toured. The irony being that she was one of the few artists that didn’t need to. If you look at Adele, you’ll see how little she actually works per million records she sells and per million pounds she makes. And why? Because she’s the best. The same thing as Sade and Kate Bush. It’s not a job, it’s a repercussion of their genius. Unfortunately, Amy was treated like a work horse. She might as well have been Britney Spears.
“My quitting as her manager was actually a bluff. In my naivety, I thought I’d get a call four or five weeks later from Amy saying, ‘Nick, I need you. Come back and I’ll do rehab.’ New managers came in though and, for instance, got rid of the ex-SAS guy who was doing her security and totally had her back.”
Nick was instrumental in persuading Amy’s inner circle, who’d previously refused to talk publicly about their friend, to take part in the documentary.
“Yeah, I got them involved,” he acknowledges. “They are without a doubt the closest people Amy had, they were like sisters. And they were massively misunderstood. Like all best friends do, they got really emotional when Amy became seriously ill and fell out badly with Mitch and (her live agent) Raye because they used to hold the mirror up a hell of a lot and say, ‘You’ve got to fucking stop this; why are you going on TV shows?’ They got banned from the funeral, so I had to smuggle them in. It was really bad vibes. As soon as ‘Rehab’ came out and Back To Black started to fly, anybody who might have jumped in front of the vehicle, so to speak, was flicked out of the way. There was money to be made and nobody was getting in the way. The sad thing is that she absolutely knew who was creaming off her. When I spoke to the Amy director, Asif Kapadia, I said, ‘You have to get people like Juliette and Lauren involved because they know everything that went on in the early days. They had the conversations with her about Mitch.”
Although frozen out of her career, Nick would still receive the occasional call from Amy, often at two or three in the morning when she was clearly out of it.
“Having not heard anything from her for six or seven weeks, Amy would ring up and ask, ‘How’s your Mum’s cat?’ It was an obvious deflection from the serious stuff that she knew I knew was going on, but didn’t want to talk about. She was at the height of her fame and self-destruction and wanted to hear a friendly voice. To be honest, it broke my heart.”
There were, of course, good times too with Nick fondly recalling the Back To Black recording sessions in Miami.
“The producer, Salaam Rami, and the musicians were there too, but when we weren’t in the studio it was just me and Amy,” he smiles. “We had a convertible car and an expense account and were staying in the same hotel, the Raleigh, that Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardener used to go to. The record company expected her to put in 12/13 hour days, but we’d do two or three and then head to the beach. We were eating in these really flash restaurants three times a day. She loved her grub! There were so many funny moments and conversations that I cherish. I know it sounds cheesy, but when you look at ‘Miami’ written down it’s almost ‘My Amy’. I don’t ever want to go back there, I just want it to be this beautiful memory.”

Amy is screened tonight at 9pm on Channel 4