mitch-winehouse

Amy Winehouse's Father Mitch Is Full Of Shit

Rich Juzwiak · 06/30/15 04:17PM

For months, Mitch Winehouse has waged a public battle against Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy, which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival and opens Friday in select theaters. In chronicling the ascent to fame and downward trajectory of Amy Winehouse, Kapadia’s film does not paint Mitch in the best light. Through his behavior and other people’s reporting of it, Mitch comes off as an opportunist who enabled his daughter’s self-destruction and who prioritized her fame over her health. The last bit seemed to have been corroborated by Amy herself in the hit single “Rehab”: “I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine,” she sang in a reference to an intervention staged by her then-manager Nick Shymansky. It ended, according to accounts in the film, when Amy sat on Mitch’s lap, acting like a little girl, and he told her that she didn’t have to go to rehab if she didn’t want to. Shymansky says that if she had gone to rehab, her seminal Back to Black album may have never happened.