‘Teenage Rage’ producer who unleashed Wild Thing and managed The Kinks

In 1964, Page became one of three simultaneous managers of The Kinks, the one with musical direction. Apart from encouraging Ray Davies’ creation of songs, his principal input was to tell the band to come up with strong riffs and use their guitars as phallic symbols to emphasise their “kinkiness”. This approach led to three major hits – You Really Got Me, All Day And All Of The Night and Tired Of Waiting, making them the third-biggest band in the UK at the time. You Really Got Me is now seen as one of the building blocks of hard rock–heavy metal. In time, the unwieldy management structure and the volatile nature of the Davies brothers led to a court case that severed the relationship with Page and ran for three gruelling years.

By then, Page was a mover and shaker in British music. He brought Sonny & Cher to London and toured Bob Lind, a would-be Dylan riding high with Elusive Butterfly. Deciding revenge was called for and seeking “another Kinks”, he came upon a yobbish, neanderthal band called The Troggs from Andover in Hampshire.

This time, he was in the producer’s chair. He took an American song by Chip Taylor (brother of actor Jon Voight) of which Troggs’ lead singer Reg Presley (aka Reginald Ball) said later: “We knew it was either going to go to number one or have us laughed out of the business.”

Fortunately, the former transpired, and Wild Thing stormed the charts in Britain, America, Australia and elsewhere. It and the follow-up, Reg’s With A Girl Like You – another number one – were recorded in literally a few minutes of studio time left over from the recording of one of the 14 Larry Page Orchestra albums that would appear over the years. Any Way That You Want Me, Give It To Me, I Can’t Control Myself and Love Is All Around would follow into the higher reaches of the charts.

Larry Page had beaten The Kinks at their own game, and his satisfaction was evident to all. Although things ended up in the high court, in a similar manner to his parting from the Kinks, he was still by the Troggs’ side in 1991 when they made Athens Andover, a collaboration with R.E.M. recorded in the American band’s hometown of Athens, Georgia. He even penned two songs for the project. As a songwriter Page had co-written, with Ray Davies, the first Kinks recording, Revenge.

Most of his later income was derived from his share of the publishing of Love Is All Around, which enjoyed a 15-week run at number one in Britain by the group Wet Wet Wet from the film Four Weddings & A Funeral. Page had previously entered into an arrangement with Dick James, the Beatles publisher. Though the two had parted company, with Dick forming the label DJM (which struck gold with Elton John) while Larry soldiered on with his Page One imprint, they both remained linked in business with each other. Indeed, that was at the core of the Troggs’ High Court complaint: Larry Page was their manager, producer, agent and part-publisher, a conflict of interest of monumental proportion.

It was an extraordinary comedown. For a time Page and The Troggs had seemed joined at the hip. But it became overbearing, and guitarist Chris Britton recalled: “He wanted our names in the papers as much as possible. If we happened to be in an area where somebody needed a boutique, fête or record shop opened, we were loaded into a car and taken there.” Page even interrupted a Muhammed Ali training session to have him photographed sparring with the group.

The 1970s were not as kind to Larry, though his Page One label kept busy. There was Vanity Fare, who gave him two hits, including Hitching A Ride. The great exception, selling two million singles worldwide, was an uplifting, optimistic song, Beautiful Sunday, by British singer-songwriter that Page had heard in passing and insisted on producing.

Page relocated to Australia in 2000, following his two children with his second wife, Aileen, to whom he had been married for 24 years. Daughter Caroline, who had worked for Sony Music in London, took up a role as business affairs manager at EMI Australia, while her younger sibling Ashley ended up in New Zealand and kept the family tradition alive by running his own Page One Management.

He led a quiet life in Avoca Beach, within relatively easy reach of his local grandchildren Olivia and Flynn. The first of Page’s three marriages – to Ann Ward, a music fan in England – had given him two children, Lorraine and Lynette, five grandchildren, and, it is believed, at least one great-grandchild.

Occasionally, he would make his way, often with Caroline, to music industry trivia nights, where he mingled happily with the likes of Jimmy Barnes, Jenny Morris, Iva Davies and sometimes myself. At times, I found myself introducing him to younger members of the industry as “the man who produced Wild Thing”. When he once gently pointed out to me that he had done other things as well, I replied, “Was there anything more important in the annals of rock history than producing Wild Thing?” “I suppose not”, he conceded.