Is This The Real Life? by Mark Blake Page A

‘I’m gonna be a pop star’, seemed more believable now.
    But The Reaction’s soul revue-style show would not last much longer. Rick Penrose was a year older than Taylor and Dudley and already holding down a full-time job as well as playing in the band. Rick faced further challenge when the band stripped back to become a three-piece. Inspired by Cream and The Jimi HendrixExperience, this new version of The Reaction came about when Mike Dudley sold the organ and purchased a white Jimi-style Stratocaster. Roger and Mike’s listening habits had changed to include The Who Sell Out , Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? and Cream’s Disraeli Gears , and the setlist changed, too. ‘I found it difficult,’ admits Penrose. ‘When there were five or six of us in the band, it was reassuring. With just three of us we had to work harder. I came to enjoy it, but by then I was under pressure from outside the group to leave.’
    Rick was finding it hard to commit to the band and manage a full-time job. In February 1967 his mind was made up for him after an accident on the way to a gig. Roger was driving the group’s Thames Trader van. In the back were Rick, Mike Dudley, and four other friends, including fellow Truro School pupils-cum-roadies Neil Battersby and Peter Gill-Carey. As the seventeen-year-old Taylor had just passed his driving test, Battersby, the usual driver, handed him the keys.
    Driving through heavy rain and fog near the Cornish village of Indian Queens, Taylor failed to spot an unattended fish lorry parked half on the road with its lights turned off. The lorry and the band’s van were turned upside down by the impact, with Roger himself thrown through the windscreen. Incredibly, he escaped largely unhurt. Meanwhile, Rick Penrose was showered with glass and sustained numerous cuts, and Mike Dudley was left with a broken nose and hand. However, Peter Gill-Carey was more seriously injured, suffering a punctured lung. Although he eventually made a recovery, he spent several months in hospital recuperating. The subsequent insurance claim took several years to settle, with the fish lorry owner refusing to take responsibility for the collision. The incident cast a long shadow over all involved. ‘That dreadful accident made a big difference,’ says Rick Penrose. ‘People wanted me to leave the band and then that happened as well. It all became incorporated.’
    For Roger and the others, there was also the issue of further education. Taylor later claimed that he was ‘a lazy scholar’, but in the summer of 1967 he still managed to leave Truro School with seven O-levels and three A-levels in Physics, Chemistry andBiology, though his A-level grades were, by some accounts, not as high as expected. His old schoolfriend David Penhaligon later joked, ‘It was always alleged that he [Roger] ruined four or five academic careers because he involved others in the group.’ Weakening that claim is Mike Dudley, who took up a place at Oxford University. But as Rick Penrose remembers it, Taylor was now under heavy parental pressure: ‘Roger was all set to go to college and his mum said to him, “You are not to go up there and start playing in a group, Roger.”’
    Leaving his drum kit behind, in October 1967, Taylor began the first year of his dentistry degree at the London School of Medicine in Whitechapel. He found a ground floor flat at 19 Sinclair Gardens, Shepherd’s Bush, sharing with four others, including another Truro lad Les Brown. Fortuitously, Brown was studying at Imperial College. Taylor began his degree course, just as Brian knuckled down to his second year at Imperial and Freddie Bulsara began his second year at Ealing art college. Taylor respected his mother’s wishes in London throughout the following year. Without a drum kit, he satisfied himself with trips to the Marquee, while the Sinclair Gardens flat soon echoed to the heavy ‘progressive’ sounds of Free’s debut album Tons of Sobs and, later,