The Troggs: Greatest Hits

I wanted to do a neat little opposition of the Jonathan Demme side of The Troggs to the Richard Curtis side. Sadly the sequence in Something Wild where Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith put the top down and let it roll to Wild Thing is unavailable on YouTube at the time of writing, thanks to the copyright police, no doubt. So all we're all left with is this sickly sweet concoction (and, yes, I know, it's not even The Troggs).

The point of framing the opposition this way was to echo something I half remember reading in Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. The gist of it was that, while some of The Troggs' hits were pretty standard fayre for what he probably called "the British Invasion", there was something feral and untethered about their best material. Like it was forerunner of The Stooges, The MC5, Black Sabbath and so on. If you look at The Troggs' similar artists on Last.fm, that view seems to have taken hold: The Seeds, The Count Five and The Standells are listed ahead of The Hollies.

According to the sleeve notes, Sid Vicious was once moved to tell an interviewer that he was "Fuckin' ba ba baaing and fuckin' na na naaing in me fuckin' nappy with the bleedin' Troggs." Undeterred by a heavy cold, the Boy emulated this behaviour on With a Girl Like You and I Can't Control Myself this evening, in between swigs of milk.

No doubt such considerations (inspiring The Stooges, not na na naaing in a nappy) played a part in my buying this compilation seven years ago. The other factor would have been that it was £3: good value if only 20% of the 25 tracks were any good.

Why the strange UFO cover? Evidently Major Trogg, Reg Presley, spent all his windfall royalties from Love is All Around on researching and writing a book about crop circles. Here's a feature and interview with him.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Some metadata about this album at Last.fm Listen to this album in full at We7 Listen to this album in full at Spotify