Reg Presley: 'I must learn to swear more' – a classic feature from the vaults

The year is 1970. It is the year the samba skills of Pelé, Jairzinho and Rivelino sweep Brazil to World Cup victory in Mexico City. In the same year, perhaps a little less light on his feet, Mr Heath drones his way to No 10 at the expense of Mr Wilson.

Also that year, the Americans carry the Vietnam War into Cambodia, and with the breakup of the Beatles and the deaths of Jimi and Janis, the curtain falls on rock's golden age. And just by way of a footnote, 1970 is a year that falls a long way after the sell-by date of a certain band from Andover, Hampshire. Yet for the Troggs, their finest hour is only just round the corner.

As they gathered for a recording session in the studio of Dick James Music in London, a once-glittering future lay some distance behind them. Carefully steered by their manager and producer Larry Page (who'd sought to invest them with that same combination of brutishness and camp he had brought out in the Kinks), Hampshire's finest had scored on both sides of the Atlantic with their second single, a cover of Chip Taylor's Wild Thing (currently enjoying a revival extolling the ferocious chocolatiness of Lion bars). The Troggs had followed this immortal slice of rifferama with more hit 45s: I Can't Control Myself (the lines "Your slacks are low and your hips are showing" earned it a ban from the BBC), With A Girl Like You, Give It To Me, Night Of The Long Grass and Love is All Around.

But in summer 1967, following an offer of £100,000 to sign to MGM in America, the Troggs split from Larry Page amid much litigation and bitterness, and their hit career ebbed away within a year.

1970, then, found the band plying their trade on the British cabaret circuit – a living, but hardly the glory game of yore. That year, however, they were persuaded back into the studio by their record company, Dick James Music, to try to recover that hit-making magic. Once again, opportunity knocked for singer/songwriter Reg Presley (as Reginald Ball had been cheekily renamed in 1966), drummer Ronnie Bond (alias one Ronald Bullis), guitarist Chris Britton and newly acquired bassist Tony Murray. Thus the foursome gathered in DJM's London studio – an inconvenient crucible for music-making, seeing as how the actual recording room was separated by a corridor from the control room, with communication only possible by closed-circuit TV and the Tannoy system, unless one preferred the old-fashioned method of going to the door and having a good shout.

In the recording room, then, we find The Troggs' three instrumentalists labouring to "lay down" a backing track, while in the back seat of the control booth, producer Dennis Berger and the inimitable Reg Presley offer advice and encouragement. The song, as fate would have it, is called Tranquility – but it will never see the light of day. Instead, the engineer keeps the tape rolling during the band's discussions, and it's this – the overnight sensation that they call The Troggs Tapes – that secured the legendary status the band had looked so in danger of losing.

THE TRANSCRIPT

Ronnie Bond: "That is a fuckin' No 1! If that baaa-stard don't go, then Oi'll fuckin' retoire. Oi fuckin' do!"

Dennis Berger (producer): "I agree – I think it is a good song."

Ronnie: "But it fuckin' well won't be unless we spend a little bit of fuckin' thought and imagination to fuckin' make it a fuckin' No 1. You've got to put a little bit of fuckin' fairy dust over the baaa-stard!"

Dennis: "Well, we'll put some fairy dust over it – I'll piss over the tape."

Ronnie: "Oi don't know what it needs, Den …"

Dennis: "Aaah! I know that it needs strings – that I do know."
Reg Presley: "You've got to have a fuckin' bloke who says: 'Oi've got a fuckin' sound in here that's fuckin' great.'"

Tony Murray: "We need a producer who says: 'You're not doing that; you're fuckin' doing this.'"

Dennis: "Did you do exactly what Larry Page said?"

Chorus: "Yep!"

Tony: "That's how they had hit records."

Reg: "Because there was just one fuckin' mind on it – not fuckin' seven or eight."

Ronnie: "We didn't even fuckin' get a say in it – it was fuckin', wham, it was in the can regardless. You reckon that was bad? Fuck me! One take, that's it, finish. You never 'ad a fuckin' say – it was out. As weak and fuckin' insipid we used to think."

Reg: "We thought With A Girl Like You was fuckin' terrible and let's go and do it again. And that was the only fuckin' time he let us fuckin' have our way. And could we get anything fuckin' better?"

Ronnie: "No."

Reg: "Fuckin' … the first thing he fuckin' did was it."

Ronnie: "All fuckin' day. We went in there at nine o' clock and we didn't come out till, fuck, about three o'clock the next fuckin' morning, and they had Mick Jagger, you name it, they were fuckin' in there to try and make it better."

Reg: "What about a fuckin' 12-string on it?"

Dennis: "Play the beginning again, Barry."

(The identity of "Barry" is now lost in the mists of time. Vigorously-strummed guitar chords are affirmed as just the ticket by a slightly demented shriek of "Yeah! … No!!" from Reg.)

Reg: "You 'ad it there at the beginning. Ron. It was soundin' good. Ron?

Ronnie? Just listen for a sec …"

Ronnie: "You can say that all fuckin' night, but Oi just cannot feel it any other than what Oi've been fuckin' doing it."

Reg: "You have played it tonight."

Ronnie: "Don't expect fuckin' miracles just like that.

Reg: "It's fuckin' there – better than there. Oi can't fuckin' hear it any other way but that."

Reg: "But you have done it. You did it."

Tony: "Play duh-duh duh-duh duh duh."

Reg: "No, no more beats."

Tony: "Play duh-duh duh-duh duh-chuh on whatever drum you were playing it on originally."

Reg: "You did it. You went duh-duh duh-duh duh chuh."

Ronnie: "You can say that all fuckin' night, but you won't listen."

Tony: "We can keep on trying …"

Ronnie: "You can say that all fuckin' night, but you won't listen."
Tony: "We can keep on trying …"

Ronnie: "Yeah – well just shut your fuckin' mouth for five minutes and give me a fuckin' chance to do it. Don't keep fuckin', right into that fuckin' microphone. Duh duh derh duh duh derh. Fuck me, Reg. Just fuck off, in there, and just keep going, fuckin' do it, don't just …"

Reg: "Well, just fuckin' think, then."

Ronnie: "Don't just keep saying they're not loud enough. Oi know they're fuckin' right. Oi can hear it ain't right. Weeell, fuck me."

Reg: "You can hear it's fuckin' not right, too."

Ronnie: "Oi fuckin' can, and Oi'm the one that's playing it so Oi don't want to hear … fuck … fuck … in me fuckin' head, that's what Oi gotta fuckin' do, then Oi'll do it. Yer big pranny."

(Tum-tum-tum-ti-tum, goes the bass guitar. Tum-tum-tum-ti-tum, tum-tum-tum-ti-tum...)

Reg(quietly): "Fuckin' drummer. Oi shit 'em. Duh duh derh duh duh derh, duh duh derh duh duh derh."

(Enter the guitar)

Reg: "One, two, a one, two, three, four … Yer doing it fuckin' wrong!"

Ronnie: "Oi know Oi am."

Reg: "Dubba dubba dubba chah, dubba dubba dubba chah, dubba dubba dubba chah, dubba dubba … You din i' in the beginning. Bloody hell, Oi can't play to tha'."

Ronnie: "Nor can fuckin' Oi."

Reg: "Well, you're fuckin' doin' it!"

Ronnie: "Well, Oi can't fuckin' play to it either."

Reg: "Hahahaha. Why don't you just do what you fuckin' started out doing – dubba dubba dubba chah. On your top one, dubba dubba dubba chah. Dubba dubba dubba chah."

(On tom tom, Ronnie attempts to follow his singer's sage advice. It sound hopeless.)

Reg: "Nooooo!"

Ronnie: (very heatedly) "Why don't you fuckin' … You're talking out of the back of your fuckin' aaaarse because all you want then is the same fuckin' thing that Oi was playing fuckin' originally in that baaa-stard."

Reg: "But on different fuckin' drums!"

Ronnie: [agitated] "Then all you want, then, is fuckin' tha' one, and the fuckin' bass drum playing the same thing."

Reg: "You're the fuckin' drummer!"

Ronnie: "Yes, you fuckin' do, 'cos that's all you're fuckin' doing. You ain't playing any fuckin' thing else – orl roi', Oi'll play tha'. Oi'm goin' nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-bomp, nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-bomp …" (He thumps in dull accompaniment, sarcastically).

Reg: "You don't fuckin' listen, that's your trouble. Oi'm only asking you to do half of it on one drum, half of it on the other and the bang wherever you want to bang … Ronnie, can you 'ear me? Wha' abou' trying' i' not just on that top skin floor and then your floor tom-tom, but split your hands so's that one beat is doin' it on the top drum, one's doin' it on the floor tom tom, then your bass."
(A tinny tattoo beats out gamely.)

Reg (philosophically): "Fuckin' drummer. Oi shit 'em."

"I wonder," muses Reg Presley, now 47, "how people take this, because in actual fact it was humorous to us at the time. I wonder whether people think it's serious or what …

"We'd been badgered by the record company to go in and record, and at that particular time I had just vague ideas of songs. Normally we'd go into the house of one of the boys, or even use the village hall, and rough them over. That was the procedure. The thing is, that time, we weren't ready to go into the studio. Normally in the Troggs, as they were then, there was miles and miles of arguments until we got what we wanted, but because we hadn't gone through that preliminary stage, the arguments that would probably have happened in the village hall or somebody's room, happened in the studio. It was quite amusing because we were getting nothing down, and I told them before we went in here that it was very doubtful that it would ever happen that way.

"They left the tape running because they were getting nothing and they thought, I suppose, that at least they were going to get a laugh out of this. I first heard it six to nine months after it was done and at first I was annoyed – how on earth did anyone get hold of this? I took it as a joke, really, so I didn't do anything about it."

Reg speculates pleasurably on the Troggs Tapes' possible influence on Peter Cook/Dudley Moore's surreally obscene Derek and Clive series of records in the 70s: "They were just buggering around in the studio before they did anything, so it's the same sort of thing. But the only difference is we didn't do anything, hahahaha!"

He has also seen Spinal Tap: "Hahahaa! I think we may have given them the idea." As for the side-splittingly Wurzel-like encounter with Bob Dylan reported in Q, Reg remembers it rather differently: "He was over here to do his film, Hearts Of Fire, and I had a little bit part, just walk-on, walk-off, I suppose you would call it. I was supposed to be a guitarist who was waiting to be auditioned, and I got introduced to him and, er, that was basically it."

So he didn't just happen to find you idling away at a bass guitar, nor, when he asked how long you'd played the instrument, did you reply, "All fuckin' arternoon, mate!"?

"Hahaha!" laughs the bucolic multi-instrumentalist. "That may have been said, because that's my standard reply to anyone who says, 'Oh, I didn't know you played the bass.'"

Reg hastens to reassure us that, despite the drummer's exit from the Troggs some years ago, "Ronnie and I get on famously, like a house on fire. When you know somebody that well, you can say almost anything – what a pranny, hahaha!" He is vague, however, on the ticklish subject of how much the Troggs Tapes has earned the band: "I don't know if it comes up in the royalties, but it's not a song, is it? Hahahahaha! If I can make money out of it, I must learn to swear more often, hahahaha!"

Twenty-five years after Wild Thing, the Troggs soldier on. Indeed, they've recently interrupted their busy schedule of live engagements to once again enter the recording studio – their real forte, as many will agree. They've just demo'd three songs ("very commercial") for a new album to be recorded in the Seychelles and perhaps produced by none other than Roger Daltrey, whom Reg hasn't seen since the Troggs supported the Who in America in 1968. Chris Britton and Reg remain from 21 years ago; the immortal Ronnie has been replaced by Dave Maggs ("an Aylesbury lad"); playing bass is Peter Lucas from Salisbury.

Reg, however, has another string to his bow: in 1974 he designed and patented for a year an automatic fog-warning device. When the patent expired, the system was adopted for the end of the runway at Heathrow – "and now I think it's being used along the M25. At the time I was brought down by the Road Research Centre. When I phone them, I thought maybe it's not such a good idea, hahaha. I didn't realise at the time how smart the bastards were, hahahaha! I thought they'd be on my side, but you live and learn, hahaha!

"I've got another idea now for reclaiming the desert – but nobody's going to know until it's patented for life."