Free Is This The Real Life? by Mark Blake Page B

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. Heused 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