Another interview with Reg, I thought I'd add it to an existing thread rather than make another one:
Amy Winehouse's tearful boyfriend Reg Traviss on the woman he loved THREE months ago, the woman he loved died – and Reg Traviss is still struggling to come to terms with the tragedy.
The film director has tried to keep a lid on his emotions and carry on as usual, but every now and then his grief rises to the surface.
And tomorrow, as the inquest into Amy Winehouse’s untimely death at the age of 27 reopens, there will be fresh agony – for both Reg and the singer’s heartbroken family.
“It’s been foggy, very foggy... very tough,” says Reg, 35, tears in his eyes as we talk in his film company’s office in London. “I have started getting back to work and keeping busy, but it’s difficult.
“You start thinking about it, you get down – it brings you down. Amy had turned a corner, that is the tragedy.
“I get good days and bad days. It’s like that really. You are realistic, you understand it and accept it, and then on the flip side everything seems surreal. Even talking about it is strange.”
Mystery still surrounds Amy’s sudden death at her home in Camden, North London, on July 23. Despite her infamous past of drug-taking and booze binges, it was revealed in August there were no illegal substances in her system when she died.
But for Reg, the public perception of Amy as a drug-addled, out-of-it star is far removed from the girl he knew and loved.
He says: “She had been involved with drugs long before we were together. That was way in the past, that was not a bit of her life.
“You couldn’t put her in a room with drugs, it just wasn’t her world any more. She had nothing to do with drugs, had no interest in drugs, all that was in the past.
“The drinking as well, it wasn’t any more than a lot of people her age. I know girls of 27 who work in the City and they drink more than she drank. They binge-drink three or four nights a week.
"But she had all that within her control. What happened was a reaction to the abuse she had put her body through a few years ago.
“These things take a strain and if the body gets strained it takes its toll.
“I believe that’s what it was and I think that the seizures she had been having were a consequence of that.”
Just over a month before her death, Amy gave a shambolic performance in Belgrade. She appeared drunk, slurring her words and stumbling around the stage. Her European comeback tour was subsequently cancelled.
To many, it seemed little had changed for her. But Reg insists it was an aberration and that Amy had made considerable progress in conquering her demons.
“How many rock or pop stars have gone onstage after a few too many?” he says.
“All right, it was five weeks earlier, but that was history as well.
“It wasn’t like she was doing that every day right up until July 23.” Amy’s disastrous, booze and drug-fuelled relationship with her jailbird ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil had pushed her body to the brink.
But all that changed when Reg came into her life two years ago.
He says: “I remember Amy as I knew her, which is very different to the general public’s perception.
“We tried to be private and keep away from all of it. She was a very considerate person.
“We met socially, through friends. It was an afternoon at a pub – a coffee pub. And that was it. We have mutual friends that go back 15 years, but then we got to know each other.”
He laughs for the first time when I inquire if he asked Amy out, and replies: “No, no, no. I didn’t ask her out on a date. We just chatted and we were friends for a while and things developed. Initially we were just mates, but it developed from there.”
It helped that they have similar backgrounds – no-nonsense, working-class roots. Reg was raised above his mum’s children’s clothes store in the East End.
From an early age, he was obsessed with films and photography – even lining up his Action Men and snapping them. Those hobbies stopped him going off the rails, like several of his mates did.
Reg explains: “My parents would have stepped in if I’d started down a criminal path.
“But, to be honest, I always had interests in film and photography and writing. I was smoking and doing naughty things, but I juggled doing that and talking about films.”
With the help of the Prince’s Trust, he shot a short film which helped get him into Southampton Art College. His first film, Joy Division, put him on the map and then Screwed, about the harsh realities of prison life, cemented his reputation.
In the last few months of Amy’s life, Reg was away in Yorkshire making Screwed. The demands on his time meant that it was difficult for them to keep in regular close contact.
He sighs: “It was tough leaving Amy for that amount of time…
“As a director you tend not to get much sleep. If it is a tough day you don’t switch your phone on. Even when it’s lunch you are having meetings and you work through and finish at eight at night.
“Then you have rushes to look at, then you eat, then it’s too late to ring.”
Reg was actually on his way to see Amy when he heard the terrible news.
He says: “I was en route to her flat and her bodyguard called me. I’d been trying to get hold of her but there was no answer. Then he rang and I expected it to be her. He said, ‘Come over straight away, something bad’s happened’.”
Since that devastating day, Reg has been busy working with Amy’s dad Mitch in setting up a charity in her memory.
He says: “We’ve been looking at a couple of good charities we could go back to.
“I was with Mitch last week and we went to visit a hospice which is funded by charitable donations. I will do as much as I can, as and when needed.”
Whatever the findings of the reopened inquest, Reg will always remember Amy as both the woman he loved and as an outstanding singer-songwriter.
He says, proudly: “She was a massive talent – what I’d consider as a world-class talent. It’s a phrase sometimes attached to footballers, but you can apply that to Amy, too. She was world-class.”
The millions of her fans would agree.
3Screwed is out now on both DVD and Blu-ray.
Read more: http://www.mirror.co.../#ixzz1bmRsrMID
It is now about three months since news of singer Amy Winehouse's death dominated the news cycle. The 34-year-old film director, Traviss, felt like his relationship with the oft-troubled singer was headed in the right direction and that she was happy.
