Reg Presley, who has died aged 71, was lead singer with The Troggs, the pop group which notched up seven huge hits in the mid-1960s, notably Wild Thing; in later years, he became an idiosyncratic philosopher and student of intergalactic travel.
His bold and highly original belief system, described in his 2002 book, Wild Things They Don’t Tell Us, concentrated principally on alien abductions, crop circles, and what he saw as the close relationship between UFOs and ancient monuments. Presley also developed a scheme designed to reclaim deserts and even patented a fog-warning system.
The Troggs’ vertiginous climb to fame had spanned 18 months, a relatively brief period during which they achieved all seven of their British chart successes, including Any Way That You Want Me and With a Girl Like You; thereafter the band’s popularity hit a sticky patch which lasted in excess of 40 years.
This slow descent from celebrity was dramatically interrupted in 1994, however, when Presley’s composition Love is all Around, a Top 10 hit for The Troggs 27 years earlier, was covered by the Scottish group Wet Wet Wet and used on the soundtrack of the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. It reached No 1 and remained there for what seemed an eternity – in fact, 15 weeks.
Reginald Maurice Ball – his unenviable pseudonym was given to him in 1965 by the celebrated publicist Keith Altham – was born in Andover, Hampshire, on June 12 1941. After school he joined the building trade, where he began a career as a bricklayer – a job he abandoned only when Wild Thing entered the Top 10 in 1966. The group’s name, an abbreviation of Troglodyte, was intended to communicate rugged sexuality. Unfortunately, as Presley observed, the title served instead as a gateway to derision.
“Paul McCartney,” he complained, “would always refer to me as 'Reg Trogg’.”
The Troggs’ brief but intense flirtation with mainstream success was engineered by Larry Page, who turned to production after mixed reactions to his own short-lived performing career as “Larry Page the Teenage Rage”. It was Page (also the guiding influence behind Chelsea FC’s Blue is the Colour) who had the idea of persuading The Troggs to record Wild Thing. The song, which would become an anthem for Jimi Hendrix, was written by James Wesley Voight, younger brother of the actor Jon, under the name of Chip Taylor.
Presley recalled: “When I heard those lyrics: 'Wild thing. You make my heart sing. You make everything groovy,’ I just thought: 'Oh my God. What has Larry done to us?’”
Page dressed his protégés in loud striped suits and urged them to maintain an impeccable image offstage. Presley, a moderate drinker who smoked, by his own estimation, an average of 80 a day for most of his life, never took illegal drugs. But Page was also particularly insistent that the group refrain from swearing. With time, the musicians found this stricture more difficult to adhere to.
In the late 1960s, a studio engineer secretly kept the tape rolling while The Troggs were airing musical differences between takes. The recording begins on an optimistic note, with one member explaining that: “This is a f------ number one. It f------ is. This is a number f------ one, and if this bastard don’t go, I f------ retire. I f------ do. Bollocks. But it f------ well won’t be unless we spend a little bit of f------ thought and imagination to f------ make it a f------ number one. You’ve got to sprinkle a little bit of f------ fairy dust over the bastard.”
Later in the discussion (ironically the song in question, never released, was entitled Tranquillity) a note of disharmony begins to creep in. Presley offers some advice to Ronnie Bond, the band’s drummer. “You can say that,” Bond responds, “all f------ night. Just shut your f------ mouth for five minutes. Don’t keep f------ ranting down that f------ microphone. F--- me, Reg. Just f--- off and let me keep going f------ through it. I know it ain’t f------ right. I can f------ hear it ain’t right you ----. F--- me. When I f------ hear it in my f------ head, that that’s what I’ve gotta f------ do, then I’ll do it. You big pranny.”
“The Troggs’ Tapes”, as the bootlegged session became known, became one of their most enduringly popular recordings. Parodied in a scene of Rob Reiner’s 1984 comedy This is Spinal Tap, it was eventually issued legally, as a bonus CD in Archaeology, a 1992 boxed set of the group’s collected works. “I was a bit annoyed about the tape at the time,” Reg Presley said, “because it was a while before we knew it even existed. We found out in a pub, in west London. This bloke came up to us and said: 'You’re the Troggs, aren’t you? Have a listen to this.’”
Presley was informed that pirated copies of the 11-minute tape, unpurged of its 114 expletives, had been eagerly purchased by his rivals in the music business, and that black market vendors were reporting a more satisfactory level of customer feedback than was usual with a Troggs recording.
This was unfair. For Wild Thing, With a Girl Like You and Any Way That You Want Me were outstanding singles which inspired a host of performers, including Iggy Pop. The late American writer Lester Bangs even went so far as to publish a 25,000 word eulogy to The Troggs, which hailed them as the godfathers of punk and called their music “holy”. At one point Bangs, whose critical instincts occasionally betrayed his prodigious consumption of narcotics, compared Reg Presley to Marcel Proust.
But the Andover group’s short-lived success betrayed the fact that The Troggs struggled to rival the lyrical invention of the Beatles, The Who or the Rolling Stones. Reg Presley’s lines included: “A boy’s not a girl and a man’s not a man till he’s been with a girl like my Joanne”, and “My lady owns an oil well. Just one look, and you can tell.” Another Presley composition has the chorus: “I’ll buy you an island – out in the sea” and that, as one unforgiving reviewer noted, “is the best kind of island there is”.
In 1987, when his fortunes were hardly at their zenith, Presley was hailed by Bob Dylan on the set of Richard Marquand’s film Hearts of Fire, in which the leader of the Troggs was appearing as an extra. “I had this guitar around my neck,” Presley told a reporter. “Dylan recognised me. He came up and said: 'How long have you been playing the guitar?’ I said, 'All bloody afternoon, mate.’”
“I have always liked Reg,” his friend Keith Altham said, “because he has an innocence about him, in a profession dominated by people who are self-important and unreceptive. Even when he is wrong, he is sincerely wrong. He is very likeable. His interests are harmless. He is not mad.”
This last assertion may have been a reference to Presley’s interest in flying saucers, which increased exponentially with age. But for years his fascination with such subjects had outstripped his ability to fund “research”. Then, in 1992, Love is All Around was covered by REM and in the same year the American band collaborated on an album with The Troggs, entitled Athens Andover. (The project, facilitated by Larry Page, is not broadly seen as either band’s finest hour.) Two years later, after Four Weddings and a Funeral, further substantial royalties from Love is All Around enabled Presley to devote huge amounts of time and resources to personal investigations of what he felt were neglected areas of science — notably alien spacecraft, lost civilisations and alchemy.
It seems his life outside music had been unremarkable until Saturday, June 1 1974. “It was lunchtime,” he recalled. “I saw a news bulletin about a fire in Flixborough. It described how the blaze was melting windows half a mile away. I tell my wife about it. Six o’clock, I turn on the news again, and it says the explosion only happened at eight minutes to five. How did I see a report about a disaster four hours before it happened? Could the broadcast signal have been affected by gravity?”
There was nothing delusional about Reg Presley; his routine life, which he shared with Brenda, his wife of 49 years, was one of utter normality, in a modest house on the outskirts of Andover. Sitting by the fire in his living room, or over a steak pie and a pint in his favourite pub, The Barge, in nearby Pewsey Vale, he would speak with undisguised envy of famous alien abductees: people such as George Adamski, who was said to have been taken by aliens on a day trip to Venus, and PC Alan Godfrey of the West Yorkshire constabulary, who was given a medical on a spaceship.
When discussing space travel, Presley tended to depart from the standard vernacular, referring to interstellar craft as “the bugger” or “the bastard”, and to interplanetary communications systems as “tackle”. In 1994 he claimed to have obtained footage of a metallic disc seen hovering over crops, an object which, he said, was “nosin’ around at corn height”, and “sniffin’ around the field”. This, he argued, was “one of the little fellers – the ones with the big cow eyes, which in UFO circles we call the greys. I’ve got a sneaking feeling that they are engineered by aliens who can see the future; if they know a woman is going to lose a baby they take it and they convert it. They put in a bit of extra brain. Maybe no vocal. But they can mind-read you.”
If an alien craft landed and offered to abduct him, Presley reflected in 2006, “I hope I would have the bottle to go. Because I’d like to ask them a lot of bloody questions. And they’ve probably got all the answers. These beings may be 20 million years in advance of us. What kind of technology must they have? You could come back to earth and not know a soul on the planet. But perhaps you would have seen something that would help save the whole human race. And maybe some people have done that.”
Towards the end of his life he became fascinated by the possible benefits of ingesting powdered gold: a substance which belongs to a family known as ORMEs (orbitally rearranged monatomic elements), and for which extraordinary claims continue to be made on numerous websites devoted to modern alchemy.
Presley believed that white, powdered gold could have been “fed by the Egyptians to the Pharaohs. I tried to manufacture it myself. You need the temperature of the sun to make it. So I went down to the iron foundry in Andover. You zap the gold at the temperature of the sun. Then you look in the crucible and there is only white dust left.”
He never moved away from Andover. In his later years, he could increasingly be found organising nocturnal expeditions, scouring the rural landscape with binoculars in the hope of contacting extraterrestrials, even though other locals considered it unlikely that alien super beings on urgent business would spurn the United Nations, or the White House, and instead make straight for the vocalist from The Troggs.
Presley remained a kindly, highly approachable man. His florid complexion, stocky figure and amiable disposition gave little clue as to his connection with rock and roll or his preoccupation with esoteric science. Before he first fell ill with a serious stroke in September 2010, The Troggs had been entertaining large audiences at festivals in Belgium and Germany, countries where their legacy was especially well-appreciated.
On tour he was never pompous, or dismissive of people who admired him. He did not boast of orchestral abilities he did not possess. Neither, in old age, did he ever take to the stage with the preposterous swagger of an old man striving to replicate the effortless agility of youth.
Reg Presley had great hopes of his powdered white gold, a little of which he used to place under his tongue every day. He did once say that, in time, he believed it might prolong a man’s life indefinitely. “It’s possible,” he remarked. “One day. Only time will tell.”
He is survived by his wife, and a son and daughter.
Reg Presley, born June 12 1941, died February 4 2012
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