Interview with Reg Presley 26 August 2008

Who inspired you to go into music?

I think it was Buddy Holly.  I frequented a café; they had a jukebox downstairs and one upstairs. All the older kids seemed to go upstairs and it was a hot night I remember and I was passing and I heard Buddy Holly singing Peggy Sue and I thought whoa!  But you never at my age went up to the top deck, if you know what I mean, so I went downstairs and tried to find Peggy Sue.  But it wasn’t there.  So I went upstairs and they were all snogging and that, and I was only fifteen or something like that, and walked in and put in on and thought Whoa! 

How did you get started in the music business?

I had a saxophone which I’d had for a week, which drove my mother mad, and swapped that for an acoustic guitar and starting playing.  My mother had always wanted me to go into music. We had a piano and I started having piano lessons at this woman’s house across the road and did that for three weeks but didn’t like it.  But the guitar I did like and stuck at that for quite some time: was in a little band that was on the local stage playing Skiffle. 

Then I gave it up and didn’t start again until whoa I was about 23 or 24 I think.  I worked with a bricklayer - I was a brickie - and he played a mean guitar and he said ‘Why don’t we make a band.’ And I said ‘You’re playing a guitar what am I going to play? Acoustic?’ And he said ‘No play bass’.  So I said no for about three months and then agreed to do it.   We routined and then got something going and we needed equipment.  We went up to London in an old van and on the way up a couple of student teachers were hitchhiking, and we picked them up.  We were sat on the floor, there were no chairs or anything like that, and I asked them if they had any good names for groups because we had been trying to think of a good name.  They suggested a few, and then they looked around and she said ‘why don’t you call yourselves the Grotty Troggs’.  And I thought Troggs was good, but Grotty well we’d only just started you know.  And we drew straws for it and I got the longest straw.  We could have been called The Ten Feet Five or The Croaks, that was the names going about.  But I thought Troggs was good, it was a mythical cave dweller, short for Troglodyte and I thought well they live in caves, and rock, like the Stones were rock you know. 

Where there any British Acts at the time you admired?

Yes, to me the Kinks.  I went to see them after we started the band, although we were not getting very far ahead at the time.  The Kinks were doing a gig in Basildon, and the guy I worked with from the band he had relations in Basildon, and he said why don’t you come over the Kinks are on.   When I saw their act that did it for me.  The way Dave Davis used to rush on stage – they’d all me tinkering with their guitars – and he’d rush straight on and plug in and start playing You Really Got Me.  I also saw the Stones perform but I didn’t hear them because the kids were screaming and I was sat right at the back.  By then we’d had Wild Thing.  And there was just a wall of noise, the same volume they were screaming the band were playing at.  The only number I heard was The Last Time when they slow away down. Those were the only words that I caught.  

When did you first go on stage?

Our first manager owned a café, the Copper Kettle: about two hundred people shoulder to shoulder.  It had a good atmosphere.  But the first time I walked on stage was at the Savoy cinema in Andover: a talent show. That was the first time with music.  When I was eleven I did do a play called The Plumber or something.  Then we did shows in Southampton.  Rod Stewart came up there at that time.  

Then you met the Kinks’ manager Larry Page?

I was kind of lucky, spooky really, because we were going around the publishers up in London saying ‘have you got any songs like these?’  Because I written a couple I think, at that time. We did a Kinks number You Really Got Me. We got have way through and he picked up the phone and evidently he was phoning Larry who we didn’t know at the time, and he said ‘Larry I’ve got some boys in hear who I think you should listen to’.  Larry must have said no I haven’t got time at the moment, and he said ‘I think they do your boys numbers better than they do’.  Within ten minutes we were sat outside his office, and who should be in there with him but the Kinks.  And Dave Davis came to the door and looked round that door and said ‘Pirates!’  And that was the first time I spoke to him and met him you know.  It was a fun time, like landing on the moon for the first time I reckon. 

He then told you to go away and rehearse and come back and see him?

It took us about eighteen months from that point to actually do something you know.  And our old manager who was a builder and he said you’ll never get anywhere unless you start writing yourselves.  That got us started; for one thing I could never remember other people’s lyrics.  I saw Larry on a programme about two nights ago and he said he got Reg Presley to build him a wall.  That was bullshit!  I never built anything for him. 

It was a lovely relationship with him, you know; he had the power to do anything for us he was a bit of an egotistical maniac, he would always claim it was me did this or that, but in fact it was luck at the time. It was like going in and doing something. Wild Thing I didn’t write that was Chip Taylor, but we went in with With A Girl Like You and did them all in about ten, fifteen, twenty minutes and that included getting the gear out because they had the studio booked for an orchestra. We tried to go back in and do With A Girl Like You again with more time and do it better and couldn’t do it. We got it right the first time.  I’ve always believed if it doesn’t happen in ten, fifteen or twenty minutes, its not going to happen, it will probably go unto an album or something like that.  We were always looking for the singles, because it was all singles now you have to do an album and if no one buys it you’ve lost a fortune. 

Larry intended Wild Thing to be a B-Side originally?

That’s right.  With A Girl like You he put out in America on the flip side of Wild Thing.  He didn’t know as much as he thought he did.  He had the ability to get us out there and we were just about ready to do something.  But we had all our hits in England in about eighteen months. While one was going down the other was going up.  It didn’t give you enough time; I wrote I Can’t Control Myself in a car going home one night.  We were recording that weekend.  It was weird. 

You had problems with the raunchy lyrics – I Can’t Control Myself was banned in Australia I belief?

I don’t know about Australia, but it was banned in America.  I was just singing about something I’d seen that night.  There was a girl standing in front of me, and she had the hipsters, and in those days the hipsters were hipsters and they were pillar box red.  She had a pillar box red blouse or something on, which she’d tied underneath her boobs, and she was really, really moving, and on the way home in the car I just went ‘I can't stand still 'cos you've got me goin', Your slacks are low and your hips are showin', I take you girl as you're standing there Your low cut slacks and your long black hair’. Anyone would have done with the right mind!  

You quickly developed as a songwriter, was that always an ambition?

It was something I was told I had to do.  It focused my mind at the time and at the time you were seeing so much that you’d never seen before, coming from the country - I was a country boy you know - and that was a mind opener you know.  I always seemed to write what I was seeing, like if there was a sad story.  I wrote Little Girl at a time when if you weren’t married you shouldn’t have babies, but I wrote about it and it went straight in at 22 and straight out the next week.  And so many people loved that song because they were going through that – I had my first child about two years after I was married - whereas nowadays they think about getting married when the child’s about five. 

You were awarded an Ivor Novella Award for Love Is All Around?

Three – people said I was greedy with Love Is All Around wanting to beat Brian Adams’ record.  Wet Wet Wet didn’t want to do it anymore and the record company whatever they brought out was piped by that record and so they stopped manufacturing it knowing it would come down the chart!  

You were kitted out at that time in your trademark stripy suits?

We were told to go around to Take Six and they would kit us out.  And they said we’ve been told to make this up out of this material.  And we said ‘but they are pajamas aren’t they?’   But is seemed to suit us, now they’re saying we were the first punks.  I can’t see it the way we dressed, but perhaps the music we played you know.  

I’ve heard you described as the first garage band.

See, well I can understand that because we routined in a garage! Or in the local village hall whatever was free. 

 You still have a huge following in America?

Yes, we did a number of tours.  But the music business at that time was run by a lot of mafia types and that got me a bit jittery.  One guy pulled out a gun and nearly frightened us to death – and he was a roady! 

You did a New Years Eve concert in Times Square in 2006?

Yea they three or four stages in Times Square  - I put my travelling bag over by shoulder and walked about a mile through the airport and messed my back up and by the time I got there I could hardly walk – and then had to do the show in Times Square. The guy with Bruce Springsteen,  he got us out there in Times Square. 

I believe that y

Yes. We did any album in the early 90s with members of REM.  Chris and I went out and we were in awe of one another and walking around each other going Whoa.  They had started out apparently playing a lot of our music.  That was a nice meeting.

You’ve also done some acting, would you like to do some more?

Yea, but I like writing and I’ve written a book, called Wild Things They Don’t Tell us which is, weird!  I just wanted to tell the story.  It’s a cross between Close Encounters and the Da Vinci Code.  It’s about my other love what’s going on and we are not being told. I wanted to get that story out.  I don’t want to do the acting, but I did want to tell the story. I don’t know if anyone knows this but the Russians sent two rockets to Mars and the whole idea was to film future landed sights.  Phobos the moon, its only twenty miles across, they always thought that was hollow.  They switch on the TV cameras on the rocket and sure enough  it went down to film it and when they turned the first one it went off, the second one three days later and what comes up a UFO and by the shadow it casts on Mars it’s seventeen miles long!  Then the camera goes off!  There is a story there.  

You Still Perform Regularly Around the World.  Do you still get nervous?

No, when I hear everything is working. In the old days you would nod to the audience and then tune up and sometimes it didn’t work.  I make them play before I go one so that I can see everything is working you know.  

Why did you think sixties music has remained so popular?

I think you had so many groups coming out of the woodwork, you had the Beatles with Mersey Beat and the Stones going off in another direction and they were very commercial songs, and they went in your head and you knew the tune. And then you got the words.  Today you have a hard job to know what the tune is at my age.  Its like, when Rap was going fierce, I couldn’t get into it.  In the sixties if you heard a car come doing the road and it was going bump bump bump you thought the poor bugger’s got a flat tire. Now it’s the bloody music!