Is This The Real Life? by Mark Blake

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 thissheepskin 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,