HE was the original Wild Thing, the man whose raw vocals with the Troggs in the 1960s set the dance halls and theatres alight.
Today Reg Presley is a little calmer but still ready to rock - for the last time on tour, he suspects.
It's his age, you see. "They thought I was too old when I came into the business - I was 24 - so they knocked a couple of years off my age." The result is that the reference books now give his age as 58.
"Well, I'm the big Six O and looking at 61 this year," he laughs. "We only tour every four or five years now and I don't know if I'm going to be fit enough in another five years!
"This latest tour travelling-wise is 8,230 miles and that's a long way - it's even longer if we try to get home. At my age, you want a kip in the afternoon, you don't want to be on a motorway."
The current tour starts next Thursday in Stoke-on-Trent with Llandudno's North Wales Theatre providing the second gig on February 15. On March 24 they are at the Liverpool Empire and the tour finally concludes in mid-April.
Reg still lives in Andover where the original group first got together - as the Troglodytes - rehearsing above the Copper Kettle Cafe in the High Street. The cafe is now gone - "It was the Woolwich last time I went past," says Reg - but there is a plaque on the wall marking the birth of the Troggs.
Reg was then Reg Ball - his managements decided to change it to Presley - an apprentice bricklayer who played the bass guitar and was in love with music. He also wrote music, his Lost Girl becoming the group's debut song.
Most Read
But it was an American song, Wild Thing, which brought the group to prominence, Reg getting the name change as the record was released.
The band has never stopped working, with Presley on vocals and guitarist Chris Britton remaining from Andover days. Pete Lucas on bass and drummer Dave Maggs have been part of the line-up for over a decade.
"Dave is actually Reg but we didn't want two Regs in the band so he uses his middle name," Presley explains.
Not unnaturally, there is a new album being released to coincide with the tour, The Troggs Live.
"Yes, it's a live album and there are two new tracks on it from me," says Reg who still writes for the band.
"There's One More Goal which I wrote for the football fans. I'm not a fan myself but you don't have to be a murderer to write murder novels, do you? I will sometimes watch a final but if I were called away it wouldn't hurt me.
ND there's another song, Let's Drink a Toast, which is a Christmas song. No, I don't really drink, either. Just a glass of wine and not very often at that."
Don’t miss
He does have one vice, however. " I smoke like a trooper, 80 a day. Low tar, of course. No, I don't want to give it up - I love it!"
Along with songwriting, however, Presley has also been writing a book due out in September - "I signed the contact yesterday," he declares with delight.
The book's title Wild Things They Don't Tell Us will be Presley's contribution to the literature of the bizarre.
For many years he has been interested in the unexplained, UFOs, crop circles and weird science.
Presley says the book will detail 8,000 years of strange things including some strange things that have happened to him.
As an example, he relates how he was watching a television news broadcast in the 1970s when news came though about the Flixborough fire at a chemical factory.
"I remember it well because when my wife came into the room and I told her about the fire and how it had melted windows half a mile away. She said Oh dear and carried on with what she was doing."
The strange thing was that the fire didn't break out until four hours after that broadcast. "I wasn't the only one who saw the broadcast, lots of other people did as well."
Crop circles is another phenomenon which intrigues, so much so that some of the money Reg earned when his song Love Is All Around was used in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, was invested in investigating these rural curiosities.
When I suggest they have been made by men wandering out of pubs with lawnmowers, ropes and a stake, he doesn't get too excited.
"It is reckoned that about 95 per cent are man-made," he says. "But that's not to say they are hoaxes. Who's pulling the strings, that's what I want to know?"
* The Troggs, The Spencer Davis Group and the Yardbirds are at the North Wales Theatre, Llandudno, on Friday February 15 and Liverpool Empire on March 24.