I Can't Control Myself

Album: The Best of the Troggs (1966)
Charted: 2 43
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Songfacts®:

  • This song's blatantly suggestive lyrics curtailed its airplay enough in the US to affect its chart success. However The Troggs' frontman Reg Presley told Mojo magazine April 2008, that despite the criticism that some of his songs were too suggestive, he'd never sang a 'dirty' lyric in his life. He maintained: "I had a line in I Can't Control Myself that went 'Her slacks were low and hips were showing.' Everybody took that to mean that the girl's slacks were undone - but I was just writing about hipster trousers. And the scream at the end was taken to be an organism!"
  • Reg Presley recalled in the July 2011 edition of Mojo magazine the inspiration for the song: "East Anglia it was. We're going down ridiculous and this girl's stood in front of me and she had pillar-box red jeans cut so low you could see her pubic hair. I'm lookin' at her and I'm a bricklayer, not very world wise at that point, and I'm goin', Wa! In the car home it comes to me, (sings) 'I can't stand still 'cos she got me going/Her slacks are low and her hips are showing… I never met her, but she designed the song."

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