When Hot Press met... Reg Presley of The Troggs

“The Troggs is a life sentence!” Reg Presley told Hot Press back in 1992, and so it proved to be with the singer only coming off the road last year when he was diagnosed as suffering from lung cancer. ‘Wild Thing’, expletive-strewn recording sessions, Spinal Tap-isms and REM were all on the agenda 21-years-ago when Stuart Clark met the great man in a London boozer.

This was not shaping up to be a good day. I had the mother of all hangovers, my flight from Shannon had been delayed for over an hour and now the customs men at Heathrow were examining my dirty washing with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass and understandably looking none too impressed.
Pleas of journalistic immunity had fallen on deaf ears and I was pretty much resigned to the rubber glove and torch treatment when a chance remark that I was on my way to interview The Troggs prompted a speedy change of attidude. Seconds later, I was waved through with a cherry smile and a rather tuneless chorus of ‘Wild Thing’.
Head Trogg Reg Presley chuckles as I recount the episode that afternoon in a Fulham Palace Road hostelry.
“Like ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Satisfaction’ it’s one of those songs from the sixties which even people who hate music seem to remember,” he reflects. “Ironically, we didn’t want to use it at first because the lyrics were so corny and when we changed our minds it took precisely five minutes to record at the tail end of an orchestra session. Our producer Larry Page banished the clarinets and the violins, wheeled us in and said, ‘Right, you’re gonna have to get this in a single take’ and that’s excatly what happened. We did ‘With A Girl Like You’ straight afterwards and it proved to be a handy quarter of an hour’s work.”
For two glorious years, The Troggs sold as many records as The Beatles and the Stones and occasionally eclipsed them in the controversary stakes.
“Oh yeah, we were castigated when ‘I Can’t Control Myself’ was released in 1966,” reminisces Presley. “The BBC reckoned it was about unrepressed sexual urges and branded my lyrics ‘obscene’ and there were letters in the papers from irate mothers of four saying ‘ban this filth’. We were thrilled because it did wonders for our street cred and made us out to be these radical anti-establishment figures which, of course, we weren’t. Getting pissed on a Saturday night was the height of The Troggs’ rebelliousness and that’s why we never socialised much with the Mick Jaggers and George Harrisons of this world. They were into fashion models and exotic chemicals and all we wanted was a pint.”
The beer might have kept flowing but the hits dried up and by the early ‘70s the group was in a serious state of disarray.
“We had a major falling out with (producer) Larry Page and the record company were giving us grief but the biggest problem was our own naivety. We were four working class lads from the country who didn’t know what the hell was going on and we allowed ourselves to be screwed left, right and centre. I shouldn’t complain too much, we still made what by today’s standards are serious amounts of money and my only real regret is that it was Chip Taylor who wrote ‘Wild Thing’ and not me. Think of the royalties!”
Despite fluctuating fortunes and repeated personnel changes, The Troggs refused to throw in the towel and over the past twenty years have scored hits in a mind boggling variety of countries.
And let’s not forget The Troggs Tapes, a bootleg of a thoroughly ill-tempered recording session where Reg and original drummer Ronnie Bond, who was having severe difficulties with his paradiddles, uttered the F-word in broad Hampshire accents no fewer than 139 times.
“I was enjoying a lunchtime tipple when the guy behind the bar said, ‘Oh, I’ve got your latest album here’ and produced a cassette of me and Ron swearing our heads off. I was furious for about 10 seconds and then collapsed on the floor laughing. What happened was that the record company bullied us into the studio, we didn’t have material ready and got extremly frustrated. The engineer decided he’d capture one of the more heated rows for posterity and the damn thing has haunted us ever since. The Spinal Tap boys used bits of the dialogue in their movie and in a curious way I’m quite proud of it now!”
Indeed, early Troggs gig were littered with Tappisms such as the occasion when guitarist Howard “Ginger” Mansfield got his lead wrapped round a water pipe and had to play half the set from the side of the stage obscured by a curtain. Nowadays the operation is somewhat slicker and has switched into overdrive for the release of Athens Andover, an unlikely collaboration with REM, which is equal parts garage grunge and pristine pop.
“This fellow came up to me after a show last year,” explains Presley, “and asked me what I reckoned to REM’s cover of ‘Love Is All Around’. I thought he was talking about a record company. You know – EMI, BMG, RCA, REM… and it wasn’t until I got home and mentioned it to my teenage son, who’s a big fan of their’s, that I realised who they were. I was intrigued, got our manager to make enquires and before we knew it Peter Buck was suggesting we do an album together.
“We did rough demos in the UK and then took the tracks over to Georgia where we finished them off with everyone in the band apart from Michael Stipe who’d gone A.W.O.L. We were worried that us being older would cause problems but there was an immediate rapport and we spent as much time lounging on the porch drinking and talking as we did in the studio.”
The Troggs were always far too good for the chicken-in-the-basket circuit and hopefully “Athens Andover will gain them a new generation of admirers whilst keeping the faithful happy.
“Whatever happens,” concludes Reg, “we will be here in another 20 years, sat in our wheelchairs, plugging away. Being a member of The Troggs is a life sentence!”