Triggar Happy is not playing cowboy. Photo / Dean Purcell
Regan Tucker spent years running farms, making money milking thousands of cows, then lost it all. Mitchell Hageman hears how his musical alter-ego Triggar Happy saved him.
His silver-ringed hands are calloused, his skull-adorned shades and singlet as black as the Ōtorohanga night skies that raised him. He sings in an American accent, but his voice has a distinctly New Zealand twang.
It’s written clearly on his custom shoes and jacket: Regan Tucker is Triggar Happy, and he’s not here to play cowboy.
“I don’t just wear a cowboy hat,” he says. “It keeps the f*****g rain off my head, you know, that’s what it’s for.”
Triggar Happy is the music moniker used by the 50-year-old farmer-turned-country fusion rocker whose songs about life and the struggles he’s faced are clearly striking a chord with Kiwi listeners – his albums skyrocketing up the Kiwi album charts to number one last year.
Most of Tucker’s early life was spent on farms with his two brothers and sister. There, he quickly learned the value of hard work and reaping what you sow.
“We were brought up hungry and poor. We mopped the floor, we chipped the thistles, pulled the ragwort. Dad had a hedge on every fence line, and we had to break the farm in. We’re talking long days on an axe and a shovel,” he says.
“Dad brought us up amazing. And you make life what you got, right? He brought me up with just good morals. Hard work pays off. And I contribute that to Triggar Happy. So hard work [in music] is the same as on the farm.”
After realising school wasn’t for him, Tucker estimates he spent roughly 25 years milking cows, and then another 10 running sheep farms and shearing and crutching. Years of hard yakka on the farms later, he moved to Tasmania to broaden his horizons.
“I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something because I want to own a farm’. I’d saved enough money, and I owned three rentals. I got backed by the bank and I had to sell ice to the Eskimos to get it,” he says.
But he did it. And the first year went okay – until his farm experienced nine droughts in a row. One good year. Nine bad years. Then the bank came calling.
“I lost over a million dollars in equity and ended up with nearly nothing again, so I came back home. That’s when I wrote my best songs,” he says.
Through all his years working the land, he had played the harmonica in his car alone in the dead of night and even sang country classics to his cows (“that was my therapy, you know”). Even as the music soothed him, the dark times that came when he lost the farm tested Tucker.
A marriage split meant the houses were locked-in money, and he had no cash-flow. He says he experienced being homeless and “slept in the rain” and in his car at times during this period.
But this was the start of the birth of Triggar Happy, through “tears and his dusty boots”.
While it wasn’t an ideal job, a lawnmowing business allowed him to “listen to music and stay fit”. For three years, he was mowing 135 lawns a fortnight until he “got totally sick of it”.
He “begged” for his old job back, sharemilking in Hamilton.
”I stayed there for seven years and struggled my butt off,” he says.
This is where he met his current partner, Cherie, and the pair now own a 10-acre block in Ōtorohanga and have two children together.
“It was her dream to settle down and have a family because she’d never been married ... And she said, ‘what do you want to do?’”
He wanted to be the “best country rock singer on the planet”.
“Deep down in my soul, I know I had to become Triggar Happy because I had all that music to give and wanted to sing about the absolute forging that I’ve been through. I’ve been through some hard s***, like homelessness, and all that’s not very nice. But because I have faith in God, I do believe that I was forged. And that, that brought a warrior feeling in me.”
Last year, his albums Love, Loyalty Respect and Talk Is Cheap topped the Aotearoa Music Charts multiple weeks in a row. These albums are infused with a battler spirit – the Triggar persona has been moulded from hard knocks and heartfelt emotions.
“I didn’t even really discover country rock till I was in the heavy grind, in the heavy shed, feeding a family, struggling my butt off and paying the power bill. That’s when I found real music,” he says.
He listened to the classics as a kid.
“I remember Elvis ringing through the stereo. And Neil Sedaka or Creedence Clearwater. They played Garth Brooks and then I fell in love with American country rock music.
“And George Strait is my hero, man. I wear a black hat when I sing, which is identical to his. I’ve listened to all his songs, Troubadour, being one of my favourites."
Now on the cusp of an Auckland headlining show at Big Fan, Tucker says it’s no longer about dwelling on the hard knocks, and instead about laying it all on the table. His persona may be brash, but his heart rings true.
“When I first started off, it was a lot of ‘poor me, struggling, help me’,” he says.
“I’m a man who has evolved from a hard, dark place of struggle, which we all go through, to a positive, never give up, never tap out, man.”
With his guitar strung around his back and trademark shades over his eyes, Tucker, in his thick New Zealand accent, says his dream is to reach the USA, Texas specifically, and work with the greats. He also one day dreams of owning a ranch, one he could return to after touring the world with his music.
That will take hard work, but he’s up for the task.
“I know things get hard, man, and you can sleep in the rain, bro, because I know I did. And you can cry as much as you want in the rain, too. When it all boils down to it, you only lose when you quit.”
Triggar Happy performs at Big Fan in Auckland on May 1. Tickets are available from UnderTheRadar.