Is This The Real Life? (8 page)

In early 1967, while Jimi Hendrix was wowing Freddie Bulsara and Brian May in London, eighteen-year-old Roger Meddows Taylor was planning a sighting of his own. Living in Truro, Cornwall, Taylor drove 160 miles to Bristol, the nearest stop on Jimi’s UK jaunt. Taylor became an instant convert, going on to see Hendrix play live a total of three times. Back in Truro, his own group The Reaction would begin radicalising their sound, stripping out the Motown and pop covers, and striving to ape the thrilling new music that was prompting Brian May to do the same with 1984. But in the summer of 1967, Taylor left Truro to begin a dentistry course at the London School of Medicine. The Reaction would continue, but Roger’s move to the capital would ultimately mark the beginning of the end for a band once billed as ‘The Champion Group of Cornwall’.

Roger Taylor (‘Meddows’ was a family name) was born on 26 June 1949 in West Norfolk and King’s Lynn Hospital to parents Michael and Winifred. Michael was a civil servant at the Ministry of Food (working as an inspector for the potato marketing board), while Winifred may have had the musical gene, playing the accordion as a child. Following the birth of a daughter, Clare, in 1953, the family moved from King’s Lynn to Truro, a beautiful market town and the self-appointed ‘capital’ of Cornwall.

Roger began attending Bosvigo School, where, at the age of eight, he began playing the ukelele. Just months later, he formed a skiffle group, The Bubblingover Boys, playing the ukelele alongside
a couple of wannabe guitarists and another pupil on the inevitable tea-chest bass. They played a school dance but were, in Taylor’s words, ‘terrible, really terrible’. In May 1960, aged eleven, he landed a choral scholarship to Truro Cathedral School; a proviso of which was singing at all functions and in the school choir several times on a Sunday. But just four months later, he moved on after being awarded a place at the prestigious Truro School. Meanwhile, an older cousin with a Dansette record player introduced Roger to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. Before long, a cheap acoustic guitar had replaced the ukelele in his affections. Roger learned the rudiments of playing the guitar, but was soon drawn to another, noisier instrument.

‘I remember banging on my mother’s saucepans with her knitting needles,’ said Roger. ‘Then my father found this ancient snare drum in the storage bin where he worked. I started with that.’ For Christmas 1961, Michael Taylor bought a new snare drum and a cymbal for his son. Before long, he had acquired a set of old Ajax drums: ‘It consisted of one tom-tom, one bass drum, one snare and one minute cymbal.’ It was enough to get him started.

In 1964, after his parents separated, Roger, his sister Clare and their mother left the family home in Falmouth Road to a new house in Hurland Road, where at least one neighbour still recalls the ‘bloody noisy kid who always played drums with the garage doors open’. The thirteen-year-old Roger’s curiosity was piqued again by the 1963 hit ‘Diamonds’ by former Shadows, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, a wildly rhythmic instrumental that struck a chord with the young drummer. Before the year he was out, he was playing drums in a trio with two fellow Truro schoolboys, bassist David Dowding and guitarist Mike Dudley. Calling themselves, variously, The Cousin Jacks, Beat Unlimited and, possibly, The Falcons, the trio rehearsed in a barn on Dowding’s parents’ farm in neighbouring New Mills; working out passable covers of The Shadows hits ‘FBI’ and ‘Apache’ (just as Brian May and Dave Dilloway were doing at the same time) and Taylor’s
pièce de résistance
, a snare-drum heavy cover of Surfaris’ ‘Wipe Out’.

At some point, the trio were joined by a singer and began playing school functions, private parties and a fundraising gig for the Truro
Young Liberals, organised by Roger’s schoolfriend, the late Liberal MP David Penhaligon. ‘I was involved with that gig, and we lost money on it, which might be more of a reflection on the Young Liberals,’ recalled Penhaligon. Others from Taylor’s school days recall a boy that was simply ‘mad about drums’ with, as Penhaligon said, ‘a fetish for wanting to be a pop star’. ‘I always wanted to be in rock ’n’ roll, but not necessarily a rock star,’ claimed Taylor in 1999. ‘But I used to listen to the music and watch the singers and think, “I want a bit of that.”’

Come 1965 and both Taylor and Mike Dudley had outgrown Beat Unlimited. Through Truro’s musical grapevine, running from the town’s nightspots to Ford’s Music Shop via the coffee bar on Old Bridge Street, a connection was made. Roger and Mike were approached by local musician John Grose, aka Johnny Quale, and asked to join his backing band. Described by Mike Dudley as ‘an Elvis-cum-Billy-Fury clone’, Quale had the Presley quiff and tried to sing like his hero.

Billed as Johnny Quale and The Reactions, Taylor and Dudley (now playing keyboards) joined bass guitarist Jim Craven, guitarist Graham Hankins and saxophonist John Snell, nicknamed ‘Acker’ on account of his love of Acker Bilk, trad-jazz’s ‘Grand Master of the Clarinet’. In March, after a few weeks’ rehearsal, they made their debut gig at the annual Rock and Rhythm Championship at Truro City Hall, serving up a mix of Beatles, Roy Orbison and Elvis tunes, and coming fourth (out of fifteen) in the contest.

Fellow Truro School pupil, Geoff ‘Ben’ Daniel, was playing guitar in another local band at the time. ‘There was the West Cornwall bands and the East Cornwall bands, so there were these two cliques,’ he explains. ‘It was highly competitive. I think Roger was pissed off that they didn’t win the championship that day. His favourite saying was “I’m gonna be a pop star”. He said it all the time and it used to drive everyone mad.’ Taylor was already thinking ahead and displaying an ambitious streak. ‘He came to see the group I was in play a gig in Camborne,’ recalls Daniel, ‘and he came up to me at school the next day and said, “If you ever get fed up of being in that band …”’

Daniel would follow up Taylor’s offer, but not until the following year. In the meantime, Johnny Quale and The Reactions saw out the summer with regular gigs around Truro, Penzance and Falmouth. Listening at home, Taylor was inspired by The Yardbirds and The Who, coming to The Beatles only after 1966’s
Revolver
. Onstage, his confident drumming style was an attempt to ape his hero Keith Moon of The Who. ‘Moon had a totally unique style,’ said Taylor. ‘He didn’t owe anyone anything. The Who were outrageous: real energy, real art.’ When his heroes played Camborne Skating Rink that autumn, Taylor took his girlfriend to see them, trying in vain to catch Moon’s drumsticks when he threw them into the audience. Later, Taylor would begin a relationship with a Truro Grammar School girl named Jill Johnson. Jill was part of a female folk-rock trio sometimes known as The Three Jays that also included Mike Dudley’s girlfriend. Somewhere in Truro exists a reel-to-reel tape of Roger backing the three girls on drums and enjoying a rare excursion into folk music. On or offstage, with or without a regular girlfriend, Taylor’s blonde hair and delicate features brought him female attention. Mike Dudley later recalled that, after losing the Rock and Rhythm Championship, Roger seduced the attractive go-go dancer that had accompanied the winning band.

In September, Johnny Quale flounced out of the band after a petty dispute. Quale’s passion for Elvis was such that he insisted the band keep a particular Saturday night free for him to see a Presley film that was being screened at the Truro Plaza. Instead, the band took a booking which Johnny, ever the professional, felt compelled to complete. Furious, he quit straight after. Undeterred, the band found a replacement in part-time village-dance promoter/singer and full-time butcher’s assistant, Roger ‘Sandy’ Brokenshire. ‘Sandy’ was an old-school showman, with a mop of wild hair and flamboyant stage clothes, who’d been performing since childhood. In truth, the 24-year-old was cut from the same cloth as his predecessor, but his sturdy voice was fine for belting out James Brown’s ‘I Go Crazy’ and Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say’. ‘Roger Taylor wasn’t the best drummer I ever played with,’ recalled Brokenshire, years later. ‘But he was good-looking and really knew music. He
used to wait for me outside the butcher’s shop where I worked and we’d go off to do the gig.’

With Brokenshire often, as one band member recalled, ‘still greasy from making sausages’, The Reactions divided their set between high-energy soul (the 1984-approved ‘My Girl’ and ‘Knock On Wood’) and voguish rock numbers including The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, on which Taylor would sing lead vocals while drumming. In March 1966, the new-look The Reaction (another name change) re-entered the Rock and Rhythm Championship at Truro City Hall. By now, guitarist Geoff ‘Ben’ Daniel was in. ‘Everyone at school started calling me Ben after Ben-haddad, the middle-eastern king,’ he says. ‘I was reading his name out loud in religious studies class and I got an attack of the giggles. It stuck after that. I think there was a fall-out between Graham Hankins and the rest of The Reaction, and I slid in at the beginning of sixty-six.’

At City Hall, the group rocked up in black turtle-neck sweaters, Taylor’s bass drum skin painted with a very modish target, and charged into Wilson Pickett’s ‘In the Midnight Hour’ and The Shirelles’ ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’. Even Roger Brokenshire’s multicoloured trousers and pink and blue sheepskin jacket couldn’t blight their performance. The Reaction saw off the competition, outshining rival Truro act The Strangers, Newquay’s The Other Five and Falmouth’s Kontiki Klan. They won the competition and were, according to the
West Briton and Royal Cornwall
Gazette
, ‘mobbed by young girls’.

As contest winners, The Reaction’s bookings increased. With it came the new billing: ‘The Champion Group of Cornwall’. They opened for The Kinks at Torquay Town Hall and Gerry and The Pacemakers at Redruth’s Flamingo Ballroom, and landed a residency at a new club in Truro called PJ’s. Local entrepreneur Rik Evans had first encountered The Reaction playing a wedding reception. The 21-year-old Evans had just bought a marquee company and had hired out a marquee at the same event. He and Taylor became friends. ‘I used to book The Reaction for any wedding events,’ says Rik. ‘They were a great band. You didn’t see many singing drummers apart from in The Dave Clark Five, but Roger had the voice even then.’

When Reaction bassist Jim Craven was unavailable for a weekend slot supporting The Nashville Teens in Torquay, Rick Penrose stepped in. Penrose had first encountered Roger at Truro Cathedral School. As bassist with the Truro band The Strangers, he’d reconnected with Taylor on the gig circuit. At Torquay, Rick witnessed The Reaction drummer’s winning way with the opposite sex. ‘Roger took some girls home in our van after the gig. He went off and he never came back. So we had to unpack his drum kit and then we got thrown out on the street, with all the gear. God knows how long he left us there waiting.’ Rick was similarly amused by Roger’s gung-ho approach to securing his drum kit. ‘We played the technical college in Plymouth, which had this beautiful polished wooden stage. Because Roger’s bass drum work was so strong, the drum kept moving. So before the show, he would nail the spikes on the drum stand to the stage floor with these six-inch nails.’ ‘People used to go ape-shit,’ recalled Mike Dudley.

Undeterred, Penrose joined The Reaction permanently and, in October, accompanied the band and their ex-singer Johnny Quale to a recording session at a studio in Wadebridge. Quale had made contact with EMI producer Norrie Paramour and wanted to send him a demo tape. ‘A friend of Norrie’s was running the studio,’ explains Geoff Daniel. ‘Johnny wanted to do an EP of his sort of music, which meant Elvis. We agreed to be his backing band but, to be honest, he’d had his day.’ After accompanying Quale on four tracks, the studio engineer made an offer. ‘We slipped him a few quid,’ continues Daniel, ‘and he let us record a couple of songs.’ The Reaction played spur-of-the-moment versions of ‘I Feel Good (I Got You)’ and ‘In the Midnight Hour’, with Roger taking the lead vocal, making it the first professional recording of the future Queen drummer.

Listening back to the Johnny Quale EP highlighted some of the group’s shortcomings. ‘We booted John Snell out because he could never get the bloody sax in tune,’ said Mike Dudley, and Roger Brokenshire soon followed. ‘Sandy was an amazing frontperson because he was so full of energy. He absolutely sold the thing,’ laughs Rick Penrose now. ‘I don’t want to stab him in the back, but he did scream and shout a lot, and run around wearing this
sheepskin furry jacket thing, trying to look like Sonny Bono …’ In the era of Dylan’s
Highway 61 Revisited
, three songs from which were now in The Reaction’s setlist, Brokenshire’s cabaret style was seen as incongruous. ‘There was a falling-out between him and Roger and Mike,’ recalls Geoff Daniel, ‘but I stayed well out of it.’ However, others remember Brokenshire’s exit differently: supposedly the rest of the band simply stopped picking him up from the butcher’s shop until he got the message. Unfazed, Brokenshire changed his stage name to Rockin’ Roger Dee and spent the next three decades playing the Cornish club circuit.

Like Brian May and his school group, The Reaction changed during 1967. ‘We all got into Cream and Hendrix,’ says Geoff Daniel, who left the band to attend university that summer. With his kit moved further to the front of centre-stage, singing drummer Taylor (now bestowed a band nickname of ‘Splodge’) was The Reaction’s leader, with the others happy to defer to him. In addition to Keith Moon, Taylor had found another drumming hero, The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Mitch Mitchell. ‘Roger was always very forward-looking,’ explains Rick Penrose. ‘With any band you have a few people that are just there for the fun of it, but Roger had real ambition.’

Since taking over, Taylor had worked hard at securing The Reaction the best gigs possible, signing up with a local booking agency. Realising they could save money by booking shows themselves, he ditched the agency and set about doing just that. Onstage, his desire to make an impact led to him dousing the edge of his cymbals in petrol and torching them during the show’s finale. Meanwhile, the Taylors’ family piano was torn out of its wooden casing, splattered with paint and transported to gigs where, during a frantic reading of Wilson Pickett’s ‘Land of 1000 Dances’, Roger would attack it with a hammer. Taylor’s tireless mantra, ‘I’m gonna be a pop star’, seemed more believable now.